Not content with his first-place record as our most-failed U.S. president, (full disclosure: I voted for him--twice), Jimmy Carter is working hard to guarantee he's America's biggest failure as ex-president, too.
God has told Jimmy, (or I think it was the other way around--which reminds me of a joke, 'So what's the difference between Christ and Carter? Christ doesn't think He's Carter....')--anyway, one Deity told the Other that Jimmy shall go to Syria and meet with Hamas's leader, Khaled Mashaal, whose group has been designated a terrorist organization by the State Department. That's the American State Department. The country whose taxpayers have been paying Carter's salary for the last 32 years.
Carter kissing the American blood stains on the hand of the Hamas leader makes perfect sense in view of Jimmy's ongoing mission of undermining all U.S. foreign policy goals that didn't originate in his own enlightened administration (e.g., all the ones where our side wins).
It also helps him prove they didn't give him the Nobel Prize just because he was a useful idiot for Euro-snots who wanted a weapon to get at Bush, but because he really deserved to reign in that pantheon of modern peacemakers that includes Yassir Arafat, Al Gore, and the U.N. (And wouldn't you know it, being Carter, he even failed his Nobel mission as a useful idiot!)
If Carter simply must keep drawing attention to himself, I don't see why he can't find ways that are less destructive to the nation, but just as effective.
He can go on The View, say, and do an impersonation of a drunk Danny DeVito doing an impersonation of a five-year-old doing an impersonation of a real President of the United States.
Or he could hire Britney Spears's unemployed mother as his manager, shave off his hair, or get stopped by the LAPD for DUI, or pose nude for Vanity Fair, or start a tabloid relationship with a wigger rap artist.
Or, since he's already supremely confident that when he dies he's going straight to Heaven, maybe he could use what little time he has left to salvage some dignity for himself on Earth.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
The Better Counterterrorism
“In every hour, 667 Muslims convert to Christianity. Everyday, 16,000 Muslims convert to Christianity. Every year, 6 million Muslims convert to Christianity. These numbers are very large indeed.”
Interesting, isn't it?
As Andrew Walden at Pajamas Media writes, “Ex-Muslim Magdi Allam's very public baptism on Easter Sunday made headlines, but he is just one among legions converting from Islam around the world.”
Take a look at these encouraging facts. (“Muslims Leaving Islam in Droves”).
Interesting, isn't it?
As Andrew Walden at Pajamas Media writes, “Ex-Muslim Magdi Allam's very public baptism on Easter Sunday made headlines, but he is just one among legions converting from Islam around the world.”
Take a look at these encouraging facts. (“Muslims Leaving Islam in Droves”).
We Sang and Danced Forever and a Day....
I know one of my favorite Democratic talking points is the one about how an Obama presidency will restore the good opinion of the world towards the USA.
Like so many liberal promises of a return to the Garden, it relies on an utter forgetfulness of the last time that party was in power. Victor Davis Hanson helps us remember how good things were. (“Back to the Good Ole Days Before Dubya? How Obama will restore America's standing in the world.”):
The world between 1992-2000 is the model we are to emulate, it seems. The world was much safer then — before George W. Bush’s indiscriminate wars — and it can be so again. In those golden days, the U.S. rightly contextualized “random” terrorist acts — making the proper distinctions between war and “police matters.” Yes, it’s true that thousands of American soldiers died in those peaceful days — about 7,500 between 1993-2000 — but they did so in noncombatant-related operations. Back then, our experts appreciated the hard lines and firewalls that separated Hezbollah from Iran, Sunni terrorists from Shiite killers, and were always careful not to overreact and turn mere responses into needless wars. In extremis, we can employ tried-and-true tools like no-fly zones, oil-for-food embargoes, U.N. sanctions, and the occasional cruise missile — avoiding the mess of President Karzai’s Afghanistan or President Maliki’s Iraq, and the peripheral blowback involving a jittery Libya, Syria, and Pakistan’s Dr. A. Q. Khan.
Presently the United States does the world’s heavy lifting under a Texan who says “nucular.” But soon it may well be charmed and mesmerized by a smooth-talking icon who raises trade barriers, leaves the Middle East to the Middle East, gets tough on China and India, relaxes relations with Iran, Syria, Cuba, and Venezuela, while redefining existing ones with Pakistan — and says to Europe, “We’re right behind you!” Let’s hope it will be as pleasant to see the results as it has been to listen to the utopian rhetoric.
Like so many liberal promises of a return to the Garden, it relies on an utter forgetfulness of the last time that party was in power. Victor Davis Hanson helps us remember how good things were. (“Back to the Good Ole Days Before Dubya? How Obama will restore America's standing in the world.”):
The world between 1992-2000 is the model we are to emulate, it seems. The world was much safer then — before George W. Bush’s indiscriminate wars — and it can be so again. In those golden days, the U.S. rightly contextualized “random” terrorist acts — making the proper distinctions between war and “police matters.” Yes, it’s true that thousands of American soldiers died in those peaceful days — about 7,500 between 1993-2000 — but they did so in noncombatant-related operations. Back then, our experts appreciated the hard lines and firewalls that separated Hezbollah from Iran, Sunni terrorists from Shiite killers, and were always careful not to overreact and turn mere responses into needless wars. In extremis, we can employ tried-and-true tools like no-fly zones, oil-for-food embargoes, U.N. sanctions, and the occasional cruise missile — avoiding the mess of President Karzai’s Afghanistan or President Maliki’s Iraq, and the peripheral blowback involving a jittery Libya, Syria, and Pakistan’s Dr. A. Q. Khan.
Presently the United States does the world’s heavy lifting under a Texan who says “nucular.” But soon it may well be charmed and mesmerized by a smooth-talking icon who raises trade barriers, leaves the Middle East to the Middle East, gets tough on China and India, relaxes relations with Iran, Syria, Cuba, and Venezuela, while redefining existing ones with Pakistan — and says to Europe, “We’re right behind you!” Let’s hope it will be as pleasant to see the results as it has been to listen to the utopian rhetoric.
Pedaling As Fast as I Can
A new job and some other complications have me falling behind on blogging.
I'll be away from my computer most of next week, but back by the weekend.
I'll be away from my computer most of next week, but back by the weekend.
Pithy Enough
“We have our teeth in their jugular — and we need to keep them there.”
General Petraeus to Senator Lugar in response to questioning before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Noted by Peter Wehner at NRO.
General Petraeus to Senator Lugar in response to questioning before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Noted by Peter Wehner at NRO.
Saturday, April 05, 2008
Al Qaeda/Obama Synchronize 'First Hundred Days'
This from Gateway Pundit:
Al Zawahiri Promises to Take Jerusalem After US Pulls Out of Iraq
For some strange reason this did not make any headlines...Al-Qaeda's second in command Ayman al-Zawahiri released an internet video where he said that after the US leaves Iraq (The Obama Plan) Al-Qaeda will proceed from there and take Jerusalem.Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri in his "A Review of Events" speech promises that al-Qaeda will take Jerusalem just as soon as the US pulls out of Iraq. (SITE Institute)Bloomberg reported:
Al-Qaeda's deputy leader Ayman al- Zawahiri defended insurgent attacks in Iraq, Algeria and Morocco that killed Muslims and blamed the West for using them as human shields, according to a U.S.-based intelligence group. Zawahiri was responding to questions posed to him over the Internet after announcing the online interview in December, according to IntelCenter, based in Alexandria, Virginia...Zawahiri said he expected the jihad, or holy war, to move to Jerusalem when U.S. forces leave Iraq. "There is no doubt that the American collapse has begun," he said.
"The raids on New York and Washington were identifying marks of this collapse, but I point out that the collapse of empires doesn't come in a single moment."
Laura Mansfield has the transcript of the Zawahiri speech.
Here is the segment about Iraq and Jerusalem (page 30):
First: I expect the Jihadi influence to spread after the Americans’ exit from Iraq, and to move towards Jerusalem (with Allah’s permission). As for the militias mentioned, they have failed to eliminate the Jihad with the help of what is called the strongest power in the history of mankind, so will they succeed by themselves or with the help of Iran?
Al Zawahiri Promises to Take Jerusalem After US Pulls Out of Iraq
For some strange reason this did not make any headlines...Al-Qaeda's second in command Ayman al-Zawahiri released an internet video where he said that after the US leaves Iraq (The Obama Plan) Al-Qaeda will proceed from there and take Jerusalem.Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri in his "A Review of Events" speech promises that al-Qaeda will take Jerusalem just as soon as the US pulls out of Iraq. (SITE Institute)Bloomberg reported:
Al-Qaeda's deputy leader Ayman al- Zawahiri defended insurgent attacks in Iraq, Algeria and Morocco that killed Muslims and blamed the West for using them as human shields, according to a U.S.-based intelligence group. Zawahiri was responding to questions posed to him over the Internet after announcing the online interview in December, according to IntelCenter, based in Alexandria, Virginia...Zawahiri said he expected the jihad, or holy war, to move to Jerusalem when U.S. forces leave Iraq. "There is no doubt that the American collapse has begun," he said.
"The raids on New York and Washington were identifying marks of this collapse, but I point out that the collapse of empires doesn't come in a single moment."
Laura Mansfield has the transcript of the Zawahiri speech.
Here is the segment about Iraq and Jerusalem (page 30):
First: I expect the Jihadi influence to spread after the Americans’ exit from Iraq, and to move towards Jerusalem (with Allah’s permission). As for the militias mentioned, they have failed to eliminate the Jihad with the help of what is called the strongest power in the history of mankind, so will they succeed by themselves or with the help of Iran?
What's Next, An Arab-Seeking Missile?
We’re all sick of hearing about Jeremiah Wright. But as long as Barack Obama is so close to winning the Democratic nomination for President, the goings-on at Obama’s Chicago church need to be brought out.
Now it is being reported that the Trinity United Church of Christ newsletter has been used by Rev. Wright to reprint an “Open Letter to Oprah” by a Palestinian activist, accusing Israel of developing an “ethnic bomb that kills blacks and Arabs.”
In another edition, Wright lent his reserved “Pastor’s Page” to reprint a manifesto from Hamas written by Mousa Abu Marzook, believed by intelligence officials to be the brains behind Hamas and attempting, among other terrorist acts, of trying to set up Hamas in the United States.
Obama-church newsletter: Israel making 'ethnic bomb'
Accuses 'apartheid' state of creating weapon 'that kills blacks and Arabs'
Posted: March 25, 20083:06 pm Eastern
By Aaron Klein© 2008 WorldNetDaily
JERUSALEM – Sen. Barack Obama's Chicago church published an open letter from a Palestinian activist that labels Israel an "apartheid" regime and claims the Jewish state worked on an "ethnic bomb" that kills "blacks and Arabs."
The letter, discovered by the blog Sweetness & Light, was published on the "Pastor's Page" of the Trinity United Church of Christ newsletter reserved for Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., whose anti-American, anti-Israel remarks prompted the presidential candidate to deliver a major race speech last week.
"I must tell you that Israel was the closest ally to the white supremacists of South Africa," wrote the letter's author, Ali Baghdadi. "In fact, South Africa allowed Israel to test its nuclear weapons in the ocean off South Africa. The Israelis were given a blank check: they could test whenever they desired and did not even have to ask permission. Both worked on an ethnic bomb that kills Blacks and Arabs."
The June 10, 2007, newsletter, which is still available at Obama's church's website, identifies Baghdadi as an Arab-American activist, writer and columnist who "acted as a Middle East advisor to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, the founder of the Nation of Islam, as well as Minister Louis Farrakhan."
The piece is titled "An open letter to Oprah," referring to talk show giant Oprah Winfrey, who last year accepted an invitation to visit Israel offered to her by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. Winfrey had been a member of Obama's church but reportedly departed in 1986.
Baghdadi's letter originally was printed in the Palestine Times, a pro-Palestinian newspaper published in London.
Obama's church hosted Baghdadi's letter stating Palestinians face "genocide and ethnic cleansing ... every hour of the day."
"For many centuries, Jews escaped the discrimination and death they were subjected to in Europe, and found safety and refuge among us," writes Baghdadi.
But the activist doesn't address the more than 800,000 Jews who were expelled or left Arab countries under threat after Israel was founded in 1948.
Continues Baghdadi: "Muslims believe in Christianity and Judaism. The Quran states there is no distinction between Muhammad, Jesus and Moses."
In contrast to Baghdadi's declarations, Sheik Taysir Tamimi, chief Palestinian Justice and one of the most influential Muslim leaders in Israel, told WND during a recent interview Moses and Jesus were really "prophets for Islam."
"Your Torah was falsified," stated Tamimi during the interview.
Tamimi is considered the second most important Palestinian cleric after Muhammad Hussein, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.
Tamimi said Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses and Jesus were "prophets for the Israelites sent by Allah as to usher in Islam."
Continuing in the church newsletter, Baghdadi writes: "During the Second Intifadah, the uprising against Israeli occupation, Muslim and Christian activists, chased by the Israeli death squads, were given refuge in the Church [of the Nativity in Bethlehem]."
Baghdadi was referring to an episode in 2002 when gunmen from several major Palestinian terror organizations holed up inside the nativity church while fleeing a massive Israeli anti-terror operation. More than 200 nuns and priests were trapped in the church after Israeli hostage negotiators failed to secure their immediate release. Following the ordeal, which lasted 39 days, scores of church clergy thanked Israel for securing their release.
Some clergy told reporters of deplorable conditions inside the church. Four Greek monks told the Washington Times the Palestinian gunmen holed up with them seized church stockpiles of food and "ate like greedy monsters" until the food ran out, while the trapped civilians went hungry. They said Christians were forced to sleep in cold floors while terrorist leaders occupied the priests quarters and slept on beds and mattresses.
Obama church published Hamas terror manifesto
The latest revelation about published material from Obama's church follows the discovery last week by BizzyBlog that Trinity United Church of Christ reprinted a manifesto by Hamas that defended terrorism as legitimate resistance, refused to recognize the right of Israel to exist and compared the terror group's official charter – which calls for the murder of Jews – to America's Declaration of Independence.
The Hamas piece also was published on Wright's "Pastor's Page." It was written by Mousa Abu Marzook, identified in the publication as a "deputy of the political bureau of Hamas."
According to senior Israeli security officials, Marzook, who resides in Syria alongside Hamas chieftain Khaled Meshaal, is considered the "brains" behind Hamas, designing much of the terror group's policies and ideology. Israel possesses what it says is a large volume of specific evidence that Marzook has been directly involved in calling for or planning scores of Hamas terrorist offensives, including deadly suicide bombings. He was also accused of attempting to set up a Hamas network in the U.S.
Obama e-mailed the Jewish Telegraphic Agency a statement regarding the Hamas publication in his church newsletter explaining he "certainly wasn't in church when that outrageously wrong Los Angeles Times piece was re-printed in the bulletin."
There shouldn't be very much room left for the explanations of Obama's defenders that Wright's comments are being taken out of context. This is the very meaning of the word "context."
Now it is being reported that the Trinity United Church of Christ newsletter has been used by Rev. Wright to reprint an “Open Letter to Oprah” by a Palestinian activist, accusing Israel of developing an “ethnic bomb that kills blacks and Arabs.”
In another edition, Wright lent his reserved “Pastor’s Page” to reprint a manifesto from Hamas written by Mousa Abu Marzook, believed by intelligence officials to be the brains behind Hamas and attempting, among other terrorist acts, of trying to set up Hamas in the United States.
Obama-church newsletter: Israel making 'ethnic bomb'
Accuses 'apartheid' state of creating weapon 'that kills blacks and Arabs'
Posted: March 25, 20083:06 pm Eastern
By Aaron Klein© 2008 WorldNetDaily
JERUSALEM – Sen. Barack Obama's Chicago church published an open letter from a Palestinian activist that labels Israel an "apartheid" regime and claims the Jewish state worked on an "ethnic bomb" that kills "blacks and Arabs."
The letter, discovered by the blog Sweetness & Light, was published on the "Pastor's Page" of the Trinity United Church of Christ newsletter reserved for Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., whose anti-American, anti-Israel remarks prompted the presidential candidate to deliver a major race speech last week.
"I must tell you that Israel was the closest ally to the white supremacists of South Africa," wrote the letter's author, Ali Baghdadi. "In fact, South Africa allowed Israel to test its nuclear weapons in the ocean off South Africa. The Israelis were given a blank check: they could test whenever they desired and did not even have to ask permission. Both worked on an ethnic bomb that kills Blacks and Arabs."
The June 10, 2007, newsletter, which is still available at Obama's church's website, identifies Baghdadi as an Arab-American activist, writer and columnist who "acted as a Middle East advisor to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, the founder of the Nation of Islam, as well as Minister Louis Farrakhan."
The piece is titled "An open letter to Oprah," referring to talk show giant Oprah Winfrey, who last year accepted an invitation to visit Israel offered to her by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. Winfrey had been a member of Obama's church but reportedly departed in 1986.
Baghdadi's letter originally was printed in the Palestine Times, a pro-Palestinian newspaper published in London.
Obama's church hosted Baghdadi's letter stating Palestinians face "genocide and ethnic cleansing ... every hour of the day."
"For many centuries, Jews escaped the discrimination and death they were subjected to in Europe, and found safety and refuge among us," writes Baghdadi.
But the activist doesn't address the more than 800,000 Jews who were expelled or left Arab countries under threat after Israel was founded in 1948.
Continues Baghdadi: "Muslims believe in Christianity and Judaism. The Quran states there is no distinction between Muhammad, Jesus and Moses."
In contrast to Baghdadi's declarations, Sheik Taysir Tamimi, chief Palestinian Justice and one of the most influential Muslim leaders in Israel, told WND during a recent interview Moses and Jesus were really "prophets for Islam."
"Your Torah was falsified," stated Tamimi during the interview.
Tamimi is considered the second most important Palestinian cleric after Muhammad Hussein, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.
Tamimi said Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses and Jesus were "prophets for the Israelites sent by Allah as to usher in Islam."
Continuing in the church newsletter, Baghdadi writes: "During the Second Intifadah, the uprising against Israeli occupation, Muslim and Christian activists, chased by the Israeli death squads, were given refuge in the Church [of the Nativity in Bethlehem]."
Baghdadi was referring to an episode in 2002 when gunmen from several major Palestinian terror organizations holed up inside the nativity church while fleeing a massive Israeli anti-terror operation. More than 200 nuns and priests were trapped in the church after Israeli hostage negotiators failed to secure their immediate release. Following the ordeal, which lasted 39 days, scores of church clergy thanked Israel for securing their release.
Some clergy told reporters of deplorable conditions inside the church. Four Greek monks told the Washington Times the Palestinian gunmen holed up with them seized church stockpiles of food and "ate like greedy monsters" until the food ran out, while the trapped civilians went hungry. They said Christians were forced to sleep in cold floors while terrorist leaders occupied the priests quarters and slept on beds and mattresses.
Obama church published Hamas terror manifesto
The latest revelation about published material from Obama's church follows the discovery last week by BizzyBlog that Trinity United Church of Christ reprinted a manifesto by Hamas that defended terrorism as legitimate resistance, refused to recognize the right of Israel to exist and compared the terror group's official charter – which calls for the murder of Jews – to America's Declaration of Independence.
The Hamas piece also was published on Wright's "Pastor's Page." It was written by Mousa Abu Marzook, identified in the publication as a "deputy of the political bureau of Hamas."
According to senior Israeli security officials, Marzook, who resides in Syria alongside Hamas chieftain Khaled Meshaal, is considered the "brains" behind Hamas, designing much of the terror group's policies and ideology. Israel possesses what it says is a large volume of specific evidence that Marzook has been directly involved in calling for or planning scores of Hamas terrorist offensives, including deadly suicide bombings. He was also accused of attempting to set up a Hamas network in the U.S.
Obama e-mailed the Jewish Telegraphic Agency a statement regarding the Hamas publication in his church newsletter explaining he "certainly wasn't in church when that outrageously wrong Los Angeles Times piece was re-printed in the bulletin."
There shouldn't be very much room left for the explanations of Obama's defenders that Wright's comments are being taken out of context. This is the very meaning of the word "context."
Things That Have Been Making Me Go--Hmmm
I was awful at arithmetic in school, and so I'm no stranger to that hopeless feeling of doing the operation only to find that the answer in the back of the book has nothing to do with the one I came up with.
I still get that feeling when things don't add up. Here are a few I've been frustrated by just the past few days:
1. According to 100% of the Democratic Party and 95% of the mainstream media, America's reputation in the world is at an all-time low because of the Hated One (GWB). The community of nations, or those who still allow prayer, are on their collective knees begging for new leadership in November that will allow the rest of the world to bestow on us the love they so desperately want to give us--but which we haven't deserved lo these past 7 years. (Barack Obama: "We all know that these are not the best of times for America’s reputation in the world. "; Hillary Clinton: "I propose a new American strategy to restore our moral authority, end the war in Iraq, and defend and protect our nation."
Now we see that NATO, whose principal European are members are demonstrably more diplomatic, wiser, more just, more peace-loving, greener, and just more fashionable than we are, has unanimously accepted President Bush's proposal of a missile defense shield in eastern Europe. As Charles Krauthammer pointed out on Special Report Thursday:
This is a remarkable success. The Democratic mantra is that the president has destroyed our alliances. Well, what's happened here in the summit is remarkable.
First of all, as you said, NATO has unanimously accepted a missile defense in the face of great Russian pressure against the NATO alliance, against Poland and the Czechs, in particular, and decided it would go ahead with this. And this is an issue that even the American left and a lot of Democrats oppose, so to get unanimity in NATO is remarkable.
Secondly, you have the French announcing that for the first tie since 1966 they will rejoin the structure of the NATO military command, which is, again, a huge step. It has not happened in 40 years. And also, adding additional troops in Afghanistan.
And, you know, another story that is sort of unsaid but is very important is that, for the first time in history, NATO is engaged in combat outside of the theater -- in Afghanistan -- another achievement of this administration.
I think it is remarkable what's happened, and this summit can only be called a success, despite the disagreement on Georgia and Ukraine, which I think is a minor issue. It was an issue that the Europeans would not accept. Ukraine and Georgia are too unstable right now, and you don't want to have a frontier with Russia, which is unstable and in part, almost at wars in Georgia.
So that I would have expected. But everything else is unexpected and extremely good news.
Another example, I suppose, of the Great Moron bamboozling world leaders. Hmmm?
2. Senator Carl Levin, (who received many an honorable mention for treachery in Kenneth Timmerman's "Shadow Warriors" for his efforts to undermine the Iraq operation and other national security measures), is redoubling his attacks on the al-Maliki government. ("Levin attacks Iraqi leadership"). He's unhappy that al-Maliki didn't consult with Congress for military advice first before lauching raids in Basra against the Mahdi Army. He also thinks al-Maliki has "shown himself to be a political leader who is excessively sectarian, who's incompetent and who runs a corrupt administration"--or, in other words, he's no worse than Ray Nagin without the benefit of Baghdad being a chocolate city.
But Levin's real beef is that
"The Iraqi government is awash in revenues from rising oil prices, Levin said, arguing it makes no sense for U.S. taxpayers who have to pay high gas prices to also pay for projects the Iraqi government can afford."
Which is what isn't quite adding up for me. It may be true that oil profits are not being turned into reconstruction costs fast enough, I'm hardly an expert on that. But even if they're not, as I said above, that makes al-Maliki's government no worse than, say, the all-Democratic Detroit School Board people have had to put up with for going on forty years.
What doesn't make sense is that there shouldn't be any Iraq oil profits, considering that Bush, Cheney, and Paul Wolfowitz went into Iraq for the express purpose of stealing all that. Isn't that what Greenspan himself said? ("Alan Greenspan claims Iraq war was really for oil"). Isn't that what all that chanting of "No Blood for Oil" from supporters of Levin's side of the aisle signifies?
Or didn't they mean it after all? Doesn't add up, you see.
3. It doesn't make sense that a Muslim group linked to terrorism, and an unidicted co-conspirator in a federal criminal cterrorism ase, is giving the FBI training in Islam.
There's really not much more to say on that one.
4. Nothing about the national adoration of Barack Obama adds up, and I know we're all sick of Jeremiah Wright, but here's something else that just doesn't make sense: Last June, before he got into all this hot water over Rev. Wright, Obama gave a sermon to the 50th anniversary convention of his denomination, the United Church of Christ("Faith Has Role in Politics, Obama Tells Church"), in which he blasted the religious right for having "'hijacked' faith and divided the country by exploiting issues like abortion, same-sex marriage and school prayer."
Obama admitted that American churches indeed had a
proud history of involvement in the American Revolution and the abolition and civil rights movements [no, really]...
"But somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together,” Mr. Obama said. “Faith started being used to drive us apart. Faith got hijacked.”
So preachers dragging up non-spiritual issues like abortion, same-sex marriage, and school prayer are hijackers, but abolition, the civil rights movement, and, as is preached in Obama's own church, race politics and wild conspiracies about how AIDS was invented by the government has obviously been bringing us all together, are safely within the "proud history" of religious involvement. And as we all know, Jeremiah Wright's edifying religious viewpoints have done nothing if not brought the nation together.
Which makes no sense at all.
5. Then I see where Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick's one-time chief of staff and mistress, Christine Beatty, has just been forced by Chief Magistrate Steve Lockhart to wear an electronic tether on her ankle, and reportedly scolded her for failing to provide proper notice to the court about travel plans. To make it even harsher, Lockhart banned Ms. Beatty from traveling out of state at all. ("Beatty ordered to wear tether"). The fact that Ms. Beatty, who says her small children are in Chicago, wanted or needed to travel out of state was laid out for this same court at her arraignment last Wednesday, so this was no news to the court.
(Meanwhile Kwame and his outspoken supporters are allowed to roam around untethered, in more ways than one).
Ms. Beatty is a black woman, and this punitive decision by the magistrate to force her to wear the electronic version of an ankle chain, especially on the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, is something even a typical white person like me thinks may be going too far.
True enough, Ms. Beatty didn't strike a sympathetic figure for most of us, me included, back when she was high-horsing two traffic cops who stopped her for speeding, demanding, reportedly “Do you know who the (expletive) I am?” (DU is unable to confirm that the police report was inaccurate, and that she actually asked the officers, "Do you know who the (expletive) I am (expletiv)ing?")
Still, her association with the one of the country's worst mayors has already cost her dearly. Now that she's out of office, and while the Kingpin is still in, the power differential is completely transformed, i.e., she hasn't got any. And maybe she really does love the big lug. Which doesn't justify her destroying the careers of policemen, but it tends to cloud one's judgment.
Plus, something else smells about what happened in 36th District Court yesterday. Chief Magistrate Steve Lockhart insisted on closing the courtroom off to the public and the press while he berated Ms. Beatty, which is both unlawful and a sign he knew he was up to something he didn't want the public to witness.
But here's what really smells.
According to the Detroit News account, Ms. Beatty is now wearing a global positioning shackle because "she made plans to travel without giving proper notification." She's not being punished now because she snuck out of state without reporting it, but only that she made plans--after, as I said--putting the court on notice just last week that she was trying to get to Chicago.
According to her attorney, Mayer Morganroth, (whom I wouldn't trust any farther than I could throw his real client, Kwame Kilpatrick),
Beatty had been required under her bond conditions to seek court permission before traveling but had been told permission to travel for business purposes would be granted liberally, Morganroth said. She wanted to travel to Atlanta and to Alabama to look for work, Morganroth said. She gave the court's pretrial services notice of her planned eight-day trip and the names and phone numbers of attorneys in the two states who were going to help her make contacts in her job search, Morganroth said.
If the magistrate did not want her to take the trip, he could have sent Beatty word that he had denied permission, Morganroth said.
Instead, "the next thing we know we get a call to come down there, to get there at one o'clock," Morganroth said of the summons to the courthouse. "When we get there, we get this tirade.
"I would say he was a little harsh."
So would I, actually. Ms. Beatty said she didn't know the process, and may in fact have violated some jot or tittle of the court's notice rules. But that's why people have lawyers, to tell them those kinds of things, which is what else stinks. Her lawyer, Mayer Morganroth, should have been watching out for her interests in this matter. Still, if he chose to be negligent, this could easily have been the result: "Don't worry, Christine. The court's OK with you traveling. Trust me."
As to both the criminal charges, and the Tamara Green case, Beatty is clearly a key potential witness against Kilpatrick and the city. If she decides to make her own deal with Kym Worthy and stop protecting God's man for the city, she probably knows just about everything. It's unimaginable that Morganroth can look out for her and Kilpatrick, considering that Morganroth has such a gigantic conflict of interest. He was already one of Kilpatrick's attorneys, and is also representing Kilpatrick in the wrongful-death lawsuit over the murder of Tamara Green. But it took the court to make Morganroth step down from representing the city.
The tether on her leg is how good a job he's doing for Ms. Beatty, and that she's being shafted by her lawyer is not so far-fetched. Maybe while she's stuck at home with no place to go she'll figure out that sharing Kwame's attorney won't be quite as fun as sharing his hotel bed. (It's also a possibility that Magistrate Lockhart lies somewhere on that continuum of corrupt officials and friends-of-Kwame that compelled Kym Worthy to ask for a recusal of all 36th District judges: I don't know, I'm just asking. But locking his courtroom while he punished Beatty seemed less like how a legitimate court conducts business and an awful like like how Kilpatrick's city hall does business).
In the meantime, it doesn't add up that while Kilpatrick is getting handed around in mosh pits at the Black Madonna, his former chief of staff/comfort worker ends up tethered and banned from going to see her kids as a result of her own very experienced criminal lawyer failing to instruct her exactly what was required vis-a-vis notice to the court if she wanted to travel.
This kind of prank-with-a-message was how former Police Chief Jerry Oliver got notice it was time for him to quit and leave town--when he was "caught" with a loaded handgun in his luggage, resulting in his being publicly busted for it by airport screeners.
Or that's how some of this adds up to me.
I still get that feeling when things don't add up. Here are a few I've been frustrated by just the past few days:
1. According to 100% of the Democratic Party and 95% of the mainstream media, America's reputation in the world is at an all-time low because of the Hated One (GWB). The community of nations, or those who still allow prayer, are on their collective knees begging for new leadership in November that will allow the rest of the world to bestow on us the love they so desperately want to give us--but which we haven't deserved lo these past 7 years. (Barack Obama: "We all know that these are not the best of times for America’s reputation in the world. "; Hillary Clinton: "I propose a new American strategy to restore our moral authority, end the war in Iraq, and defend and protect our nation."
Now we see that NATO, whose principal European are members are demonstrably more diplomatic, wiser, more just, more peace-loving, greener, and just more fashionable than we are, has unanimously accepted President Bush's proposal of a missile defense shield in eastern Europe. As Charles Krauthammer pointed out on Special Report Thursday:
This is a remarkable success. The Democratic mantra is that the president has destroyed our alliances. Well, what's happened here in the summit is remarkable.
First of all, as you said, NATO has unanimously accepted a missile defense in the face of great Russian pressure against the NATO alliance, against Poland and the Czechs, in particular, and decided it would go ahead with this. And this is an issue that even the American left and a lot of Democrats oppose, so to get unanimity in NATO is remarkable.
Secondly, you have the French announcing that for the first tie since 1966 they will rejoin the structure of the NATO military command, which is, again, a huge step. It has not happened in 40 years. And also, adding additional troops in Afghanistan.
And, you know, another story that is sort of unsaid but is very important is that, for the first time in history, NATO is engaged in combat outside of the theater -- in Afghanistan -- another achievement of this administration.
I think it is remarkable what's happened, and this summit can only be called a success, despite the disagreement on Georgia and Ukraine, which I think is a minor issue. It was an issue that the Europeans would not accept. Ukraine and Georgia are too unstable right now, and you don't want to have a frontier with Russia, which is unstable and in part, almost at wars in Georgia.
So that I would have expected. But everything else is unexpected and extremely good news.
Another example, I suppose, of the Great Moron bamboozling world leaders. Hmmm?
2. Senator Carl Levin, (who received many an honorable mention for treachery in Kenneth Timmerman's "Shadow Warriors" for his efforts to undermine the Iraq operation and other national security measures), is redoubling his attacks on the al-Maliki government. ("Levin attacks Iraqi leadership"). He's unhappy that al-Maliki didn't consult with Congress for military advice first before lauching raids in Basra against the Mahdi Army. He also thinks al-Maliki has "shown himself to be a political leader who is excessively sectarian, who's incompetent and who runs a corrupt administration"--or, in other words, he's no worse than Ray Nagin without the benefit of Baghdad being a chocolate city.
But Levin's real beef is that
"The Iraqi government is awash in revenues from rising oil prices, Levin said, arguing it makes no sense for U.S. taxpayers who have to pay high gas prices to also pay for projects the Iraqi government can afford."
Which is what isn't quite adding up for me. It may be true that oil profits are not being turned into reconstruction costs fast enough, I'm hardly an expert on that. But even if they're not, as I said above, that makes al-Maliki's government no worse than, say, the all-Democratic Detroit School Board people have had to put up with for going on forty years.
What doesn't make sense is that there shouldn't be any Iraq oil profits, considering that Bush, Cheney, and Paul Wolfowitz went into Iraq for the express purpose of stealing all that. Isn't that what Greenspan himself said? ("Alan Greenspan claims Iraq war was really for oil"). Isn't that what all that chanting of "No Blood for Oil" from supporters of Levin's side of the aisle signifies?
Or didn't they mean it after all? Doesn't add up, you see.
3. It doesn't make sense that a Muslim group linked to terrorism, and an unidicted co-conspirator in a federal criminal cterrorism ase, is giving the FBI training in Islam.
There's really not much more to say on that one.
4. Nothing about the national adoration of Barack Obama adds up, and I know we're all sick of Jeremiah Wright, but here's something else that just doesn't make sense: Last June, before he got into all this hot water over Rev. Wright, Obama gave a sermon to the 50th anniversary convention of his denomination, the United Church of Christ("Faith Has Role in Politics, Obama Tells Church"), in which he blasted the religious right for having "'hijacked' faith and divided the country by exploiting issues like abortion, same-sex marriage and school prayer."
Obama admitted that American churches indeed had a
proud history of involvement in the American Revolution and the abolition and civil rights movements [no, really]...
"But somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together,” Mr. Obama said. “Faith started being used to drive us apart. Faith got hijacked.”
So preachers dragging up non-spiritual issues like abortion, same-sex marriage, and school prayer are hijackers, but abolition, the civil rights movement, and, as is preached in Obama's own church, race politics and wild conspiracies about how AIDS was invented by the government has obviously been bringing us all together, are safely within the "proud history" of religious involvement. And as we all know, Jeremiah Wright's edifying religious viewpoints have done nothing if not brought the nation together.
Which makes no sense at all.
5. Then I see where Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick's one-time chief of staff and mistress, Christine Beatty, has just been forced by Chief Magistrate Steve Lockhart to wear an electronic tether on her ankle, and reportedly scolded her for failing to provide proper notice to the court about travel plans. To make it even harsher, Lockhart banned Ms. Beatty from traveling out of state at all. ("Beatty ordered to wear tether"). The fact that Ms. Beatty, who says her small children are in Chicago, wanted or needed to travel out of state was laid out for this same court at her arraignment last Wednesday, so this was no news to the court.
(Meanwhile Kwame and his outspoken supporters are allowed to roam around untethered, in more ways than one).
Ms. Beatty is a black woman, and this punitive decision by the magistrate to force her to wear the electronic version of an ankle chain, especially on the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, is something even a typical white person like me thinks may be going too far.
True enough, Ms. Beatty didn't strike a sympathetic figure for most of us, me included, back when she was high-horsing two traffic cops who stopped her for speeding, demanding, reportedly “Do you know who the (expletive) I am?” (DU is unable to confirm that the police report was inaccurate, and that she actually asked the officers, "Do you know who the (expletive) I am (expletiv)ing?")
Still, her association with the one of the country's worst mayors has already cost her dearly. Now that she's out of office, and while the Kingpin is still in, the power differential is completely transformed, i.e., she hasn't got any. And maybe she really does love the big lug. Which doesn't justify her destroying the careers of policemen, but it tends to cloud one's judgment.
Plus, something else smells about what happened in 36th District Court yesterday. Chief Magistrate Steve Lockhart insisted on closing the courtroom off to the public and the press while he berated Ms. Beatty, which is both unlawful and a sign he knew he was up to something he didn't want the public to witness.
But here's what really smells.
According to the Detroit News account, Ms. Beatty is now wearing a global positioning shackle because "she made plans to travel without giving proper notification." She's not being punished now because she snuck out of state without reporting it, but only that she made plans--after, as I said--putting the court on notice just last week that she was trying to get to Chicago.
According to her attorney, Mayer Morganroth, (whom I wouldn't trust any farther than I could throw his real client, Kwame Kilpatrick),
Beatty had been required under her bond conditions to seek court permission before traveling but had been told permission to travel for business purposes would be granted liberally, Morganroth said. She wanted to travel to Atlanta and to Alabama to look for work, Morganroth said. She gave the court's pretrial services notice of her planned eight-day trip and the names and phone numbers of attorneys in the two states who were going to help her make contacts in her job search, Morganroth said.
If the magistrate did not want her to take the trip, he could have sent Beatty word that he had denied permission, Morganroth said.
Instead, "the next thing we know we get a call to come down there, to get there at one o'clock," Morganroth said of the summons to the courthouse. "When we get there, we get this tirade.
"I would say he was a little harsh."
So would I, actually. Ms. Beatty said she didn't know the process, and may in fact have violated some jot or tittle of the court's notice rules. But that's why people have lawyers, to tell them those kinds of things, which is what else stinks. Her lawyer, Mayer Morganroth, should have been watching out for her interests in this matter. Still, if he chose to be negligent, this could easily have been the result: "Don't worry, Christine. The court's OK with you traveling. Trust me."
As to both the criminal charges, and the Tamara Green case, Beatty is clearly a key potential witness against Kilpatrick and the city. If she decides to make her own deal with Kym Worthy and stop protecting God's man for the city, she probably knows just about everything. It's unimaginable that Morganroth can look out for her and Kilpatrick, considering that Morganroth has such a gigantic conflict of interest. He was already one of Kilpatrick's attorneys, and is also representing Kilpatrick in the wrongful-death lawsuit over the murder of Tamara Green. But it took the court to make Morganroth step down from representing the city.
The tether on her leg is how good a job he's doing for Ms. Beatty, and that she's being shafted by her lawyer is not so far-fetched. Maybe while she's stuck at home with no place to go she'll figure out that sharing Kwame's attorney won't be quite as fun as sharing his hotel bed. (It's also a possibility that Magistrate Lockhart lies somewhere on that continuum of corrupt officials and friends-of-Kwame that compelled Kym Worthy to ask for a recusal of all 36th District judges: I don't know, I'm just asking. But locking his courtroom while he punished Beatty seemed less like how a legitimate court conducts business and an awful like like how Kilpatrick's city hall does business).
In the meantime, it doesn't add up that while Kilpatrick is getting handed around in mosh pits at the Black Madonna, his former chief of staff/comfort worker ends up tethered and banned from going to see her kids as a result of her own very experienced criminal lawyer failing to instruct her exactly what was required vis-a-vis notice to the court if she wanted to travel.
This kind of prank-with-a-message was how former Police Chief Jerry Oliver got notice it was time for him to quit and leave town--when he was "caught" with a loaded handgun in his luggage, resulting in his being publicly busted for it by airport screeners.
Or that's how some of this adds up to me.
This Will Be on the Final
The following column from Family Security Matters touches on many things we've discussed here before. But constant reminders about basic things helps. Thanks to Wendy Woodley for sending this link to us.
Jihad Means Offensive War to Spread Islam: Osama Bin Laden’s Warning to Europe
Clare M. Lopez
Just in case Europe didn’t catch his drift with one new message, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden launched two audio taped broadsides on the Internet during the third week of March 2008. In them, he specifically threatened Europe with Jihad, apparently in response to recent stirrings of self-assertion on the Continent. It would seem that the republishing of some of the Danish cartoons, the release of a short film about Islam by Dutch filmmaker, Geert Wilders, and a sterner approach to the expansionist Islamist agenda by a crop of tough new European leaders have sparked a yelp of protest from the al Qaeda leadership.
To the Jihadi vanguard, it must have looked like Europe was well on its way to slipping back into a dhimmitude last seen centuries ago, when Jihadi warriors overran much of southern Europe, white women were prized features on auction blocks across the Caliphate, Christians and Jews knew their places in societies dominated by Islam, and it was ransom and tribute that flowed out of Christendom’s kingdoms, not impertinent caricatures of their Prophet. France already had cordoned off over 700 no-go zones where neither Napoleonic Code nor police were welcome. Belgian bishops had permitted North African illegal immigrants demanding sanctuary from threat of deportation to hold Muslim prayer services in beautiful Brussels cathedrals. A German judge had refused the desperate plea of an abused Moroccan-born woman for an expedited divorce, because, as she intoned from the bench, in the culture of Islam, it is permitted for a husband to beat his wife. The Archbishop of Canterbury had urged Britons to just accept the coming of Sharia in the UK. Theo van Gogh had been shot and stabbed to death because he stood unrepentantly for free speech, and his colleague, Ayan Hirsi Ali, had been hounded from the Netherlands altogether. Taxi drivers in Norway, the UK, and elsewhere were refusing blind passengers with Seeing Eye dogs, because they said dogs are deemed unclean animals in Islam. The newest architectural trend from Oxford to Cologne was the building of mammoth, Saudi-funded mega mosques. Yes, the establishment of Eurabia must have seemed well underway.
But then Europe began to push back and a new Pope mounted the throne of Peter, a “Panzer Pope” he’s been called, and gave a 2006 speech at the University of Regensburg in the sturdy Teutonic heart of this continent. He didn’t actually say anything about a crusade; in fact, Pope Benedict XVI, at Regensburg and since, has sought quite sincerely to present Christianity as a vehicle for discourse and reason among faiths. The 2008 establishment of a permanent council for dialogue between the Vatican and Islam was meant to build bridges, not spark fury and menace.
This is where the well-reasoned temperance of the Enlightenment falls flat, however. For the Islamic Jihad is not about reason, or temperance, or enlightenment. It is about conquest. And right now, al Qaeda and its Jihadi cohorts both home-grown and international, including the Muslim Brotherhood, the Union of Islamic Clerics, the European Council for Fatwa and Research, and their smooth-talking spokesmen such as Dr. Mustafa Ceric, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, and Tariq Ramadan, have set their sights on Europe. Europe is too liberal, too free, too open, too outspoken, too rich, and also nicely softened up by decades of inroads by concepts like multiculturalism, a paralyzing antipathy to discriminating judgment, and an abhorrence of self-defense.
Make no mistake: Osama bin Laden’s threat is real. Al Qaeda and the Jihadis, whose cultural references were formed in the searing sterility of the 7th Century Hijaz, are coming for Europe. In the Arab desert where Islam was born, the code of the tribes demands challenge, honor, and spoils. A society raised on the values of the strong, where nothing is ever produced but only seized from the weak, where concession and compromise are met with contempt, and where revenge and retribution define human interaction – a society such as this cannot abide a civilization of uninhibited intellectuality and tolerance. In such a milieu, Islam developed, inextricably, as both socio-political system and monotheistic faith. Both remain hard, unforgiving, and bent on global domination. The sacred and immutable doctrine of Islam is laid out for all time in the revealed scripture of the Koran, the hadiths (or sayings of Muhammad), and the Sunna (or accounts of Muhammad’s deeds). There is nothing in any of these about turning the other cheek, loving one’s neighbor as oneself, or the inherent equality of all human beings. Neither will you find virtues of non-violence, self-sacrifice, or truthfulness applicable among any people but Muslims themselves. For the infidel, there is only the choice of three: convert, submit, or die.
Europe needs to wake up, and quickly. The obligatory Islamic warning has been given, the Continent put on notice that unless it agrees to compromise on its liberal lifestyle and legal system, al Qaeda will unleash its Jihadi attackers. The Vatican, too, notably accused of inspiring another crusade only after the conciliatory announcement was made about the new council for interfaith dialogue, will need to muster all the stern resolve and brilliant theological command of its current Vicar if nearly-spent Christianity is to help lead Europe’s defense. For in the end, while its population may well exhibit the studied ennui of a post-faith-based society, Europe nevertheless has much to be proud of and plenty to defend. And even though its advanced technology, orderly and educated native citizens, magnificent artistic expression, complex economies, and sophisticated political systems elicit scant acknowledgment from the savage Jihadis sworn to destroy it all, these are accomplishments that represent a pinnacle of human development. Europe is the well-spring as well as the front line of defense for modern concepts of liberal democracy now spreading inexorably the world over (except for the Arab/Muslim part of it).
Unless Europeans at every level, from the small village grocer to the leaders of academia, government, labor, and media, somehow grasp that the world view driving al Qaeda’s warnings shares virtually nothing in common with their own and adapt their defenses accordingly, it is completely conceivable that Bernard Lewis’s dire prediction about the likely Islamization of Europe by century’s end could prove true. Or, as Daniel Pipes put it some time ago, Europe must either somehow assimilate its burgeoning and increasingly hostile Muslim elements, adopt a draconian program of expulsion and immigration control, or acquiesce to Muslim dominance.
Islam does not really mean peace and Jihad is not inner yoga. Islam means submission: submission to Allah, to Islam, and to Sharia. The only peace being offered by Osama bin Laden is under the shade of the Koran and the sword. Whether by da’wa (preaching and persuasion), infiltration and destruction of faith from within, or the outright terror that al Qaeda promises its enemies, it is not just Europe that faces the Jihadi onslaught. It is every society that dares to be free to choose its own way of life, elect its own leaders, and enact its own laws. It is Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, and the United States of America.
Knowing the enemy, naming the enemy, and mastering the enemy’s culture, history, ideology, and tactics are essential to meeting and defeating his challenge. Only by frankly facing the Islamic Jihad and resisting every urge to dismiss it as primitive, already defeated, or somehow unequal to modern civilizations such as our own, will we have any chance of prevailing.
Jihad Means Offensive War to Spread Islam: Osama Bin Laden’s Warning to Europe
Clare M. Lopez
Just in case Europe didn’t catch his drift with one new message, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden launched two audio taped broadsides on the Internet during the third week of March 2008. In them, he specifically threatened Europe with Jihad, apparently in response to recent stirrings of self-assertion on the Continent. It would seem that the republishing of some of the Danish cartoons, the release of a short film about Islam by Dutch filmmaker, Geert Wilders, and a sterner approach to the expansionist Islamist agenda by a crop of tough new European leaders have sparked a yelp of protest from the al Qaeda leadership.
To the Jihadi vanguard, it must have looked like Europe was well on its way to slipping back into a dhimmitude last seen centuries ago, when Jihadi warriors overran much of southern Europe, white women were prized features on auction blocks across the Caliphate, Christians and Jews knew their places in societies dominated by Islam, and it was ransom and tribute that flowed out of Christendom’s kingdoms, not impertinent caricatures of their Prophet. France already had cordoned off over 700 no-go zones where neither Napoleonic Code nor police were welcome. Belgian bishops had permitted North African illegal immigrants demanding sanctuary from threat of deportation to hold Muslim prayer services in beautiful Brussels cathedrals. A German judge had refused the desperate plea of an abused Moroccan-born woman for an expedited divorce, because, as she intoned from the bench, in the culture of Islam, it is permitted for a husband to beat his wife. The Archbishop of Canterbury had urged Britons to just accept the coming of Sharia in the UK. Theo van Gogh had been shot and stabbed to death because he stood unrepentantly for free speech, and his colleague, Ayan Hirsi Ali, had been hounded from the Netherlands altogether. Taxi drivers in Norway, the UK, and elsewhere were refusing blind passengers with Seeing Eye dogs, because they said dogs are deemed unclean animals in Islam. The newest architectural trend from Oxford to Cologne was the building of mammoth, Saudi-funded mega mosques. Yes, the establishment of Eurabia must have seemed well underway.
But then Europe began to push back and a new Pope mounted the throne of Peter, a “Panzer Pope” he’s been called, and gave a 2006 speech at the University of Regensburg in the sturdy Teutonic heart of this continent. He didn’t actually say anything about a crusade; in fact, Pope Benedict XVI, at Regensburg and since, has sought quite sincerely to present Christianity as a vehicle for discourse and reason among faiths. The 2008 establishment of a permanent council for dialogue between the Vatican and Islam was meant to build bridges, not spark fury and menace.
This is where the well-reasoned temperance of the Enlightenment falls flat, however. For the Islamic Jihad is not about reason, or temperance, or enlightenment. It is about conquest. And right now, al Qaeda and its Jihadi cohorts both home-grown and international, including the Muslim Brotherhood, the Union of Islamic Clerics, the European Council for Fatwa and Research, and their smooth-talking spokesmen such as Dr. Mustafa Ceric, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, and Tariq Ramadan, have set their sights on Europe. Europe is too liberal, too free, too open, too outspoken, too rich, and also nicely softened up by decades of inroads by concepts like multiculturalism, a paralyzing antipathy to discriminating judgment, and an abhorrence of self-defense.
Make no mistake: Osama bin Laden’s threat is real. Al Qaeda and the Jihadis, whose cultural references were formed in the searing sterility of the 7th Century Hijaz, are coming for Europe. In the Arab desert where Islam was born, the code of the tribes demands challenge, honor, and spoils. A society raised on the values of the strong, where nothing is ever produced but only seized from the weak, where concession and compromise are met with contempt, and where revenge and retribution define human interaction – a society such as this cannot abide a civilization of uninhibited intellectuality and tolerance. In such a milieu, Islam developed, inextricably, as both socio-political system and monotheistic faith. Both remain hard, unforgiving, and bent on global domination. The sacred and immutable doctrine of Islam is laid out for all time in the revealed scripture of the Koran, the hadiths (or sayings of Muhammad), and the Sunna (or accounts of Muhammad’s deeds). There is nothing in any of these about turning the other cheek, loving one’s neighbor as oneself, or the inherent equality of all human beings. Neither will you find virtues of non-violence, self-sacrifice, or truthfulness applicable among any people but Muslims themselves. For the infidel, there is only the choice of three: convert, submit, or die.
Europe needs to wake up, and quickly. The obligatory Islamic warning has been given, the Continent put on notice that unless it agrees to compromise on its liberal lifestyle and legal system, al Qaeda will unleash its Jihadi attackers. The Vatican, too, notably accused of inspiring another crusade only after the conciliatory announcement was made about the new council for interfaith dialogue, will need to muster all the stern resolve and brilliant theological command of its current Vicar if nearly-spent Christianity is to help lead Europe’s defense. For in the end, while its population may well exhibit the studied ennui of a post-faith-based society, Europe nevertheless has much to be proud of and plenty to defend. And even though its advanced technology, orderly and educated native citizens, magnificent artistic expression, complex economies, and sophisticated political systems elicit scant acknowledgment from the savage Jihadis sworn to destroy it all, these are accomplishments that represent a pinnacle of human development. Europe is the well-spring as well as the front line of defense for modern concepts of liberal democracy now spreading inexorably the world over (except for the Arab/Muslim part of it).
Unless Europeans at every level, from the small village grocer to the leaders of academia, government, labor, and media, somehow grasp that the world view driving al Qaeda’s warnings shares virtually nothing in common with their own and adapt their defenses accordingly, it is completely conceivable that Bernard Lewis’s dire prediction about the likely Islamization of Europe by century’s end could prove true. Or, as Daniel Pipes put it some time ago, Europe must either somehow assimilate its burgeoning and increasingly hostile Muslim elements, adopt a draconian program of expulsion and immigration control, or acquiesce to Muslim dominance.
Islam does not really mean peace and Jihad is not inner yoga. Islam means submission: submission to Allah, to Islam, and to Sharia. The only peace being offered by Osama bin Laden is under the shade of the Koran and the sword. Whether by da’wa (preaching and persuasion), infiltration and destruction of faith from within, or the outright terror that al Qaeda promises its enemies, it is not just Europe that faces the Jihadi onslaught. It is every society that dares to be free to choose its own way of life, elect its own leaders, and enact its own laws. It is Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, and the United States of America.
Knowing the enemy, naming the enemy, and mastering the enemy’s culture, history, ideology, and tactics are essential to meeting and defeating his challenge. Only by frankly facing the Islamic Jihad and resisting every urge to dismiss it as primitive, already defeated, or somehow unequal to modern civilizations such as our own, will we have any chance of prevailing.
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Faith, Reason, and Jihadism
Kathryn Jean Lopez has an interesting interview with George Weigel on the occasion of the conversion and public baptism in Rome of former Muslim, Magdi Allam. (“Allam & Allah/A war of ideas.”). Weigel is the writer of, among other things, a biography of Pope John Paul II. His most recent book is Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism: A Call to Action.
Here are some highlights from Lopez’s interview with Weigel:
Lopez: Who, among Muslims, should be held up as to encourage those who want to fight jihadism?
Weigel: The kind of Muslims who will be our most effective allies in the war against jihadism are those Muslims who want to make an Islamic case for tolerance, civility, and pluralism. The temptation to think that the answer to the problem of jihadism is the conversion of 1.2 billion Muslims to Western liberal secularism ought to be stoutly resisted as the ivy-league fantasy it is. The question is whether, and how, Islam can effect what Christian theology would call a “development of doctrine” on issues like religious freedom and the separation of religious and political authority in a just state. A lot of 21st-century history is riding on the answer to that question….
Lopez: Has Pope Benedict been an important voice in this war? Is he being listened to?
Weigel: I think Benedict’s Regensburg lecture of September 2006 was the most important papal statement on a public question of global consequence since John Paul II’s 1995 U.N. address in defense of the universality of human rights. As I put it in my small book, Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism, the Regensburg Lecture identified the linked problems at the center of a lot of turbulence in world politics today: the detachment of faith from reason (as in jihadism) and the loss of faith in reason (as in much of western Europe and too much of American high culture). The former leads to the notion that God can and does command the irrational, such as the killing of innocents; the latter leaves the West intellectually disarmed in the face of the jihadist challenge. At Regensburg, the pope also gave a pluralistic world a vocabulary with which to deal with these grave problems: the vocabulary of rationality and irrationality. Whether these issues are understand in the world’s chancelleries and foreign ministries in the terms in which the Holy Father understands them is another question altogether….
Lopez: Do we deserve to win if we wind up electing Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama president?
Weigel: Whether we deserve to win or not, we’re much less likely to win with a president who manifestly does not understand the nature of the enemy or the multifront struggle in which we are necessarily engaged. A return to the Nineties — to foreign-policy-as-therapy — is not going to see us, or the Magdi Allams of this world, through to a future safe for the exercise of religious freedom.
Here are some highlights from Lopez’s interview with Weigel:
Lopez: Who, among Muslims, should be held up as to encourage those who want to fight jihadism?
Weigel: The kind of Muslims who will be our most effective allies in the war against jihadism are those Muslims who want to make an Islamic case for tolerance, civility, and pluralism. The temptation to think that the answer to the problem of jihadism is the conversion of 1.2 billion Muslims to Western liberal secularism ought to be stoutly resisted as the ivy-league fantasy it is. The question is whether, and how, Islam can effect what Christian theology would call a “development of doctrine” on issues like religious freedom and the separation of religious and political authority in a just state. A lot of 21st-century history is riding on the answer to that question….
Lopez: Has Pope Benedict been an important voice in this war? Is he being listened to?
Weigel: I think Benedict’s Regensburg lecture of September 2006 was the most important papal statement on a public question of global consequence since John Paul II’s 1995 U.N. address in defense of the universality of human rights. As I put it in my small book, Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism, the Regensburg Lecture identified the linked problems at the center of a lot of turbulence in world politics today: the detachment of faith from reason (as in jihadism) and the loss of faith in reason (as in much of western Europe and too much of American high culture). The former leads to the notion that God can and does command the irrational, such as the killing of innocents; the latter leaves the West intellectually disarmed in the face of the jihadist challenge. At Regensburg, the pope also gave a pluralistic world a vocabulary with which to deal with these grave problems: the vocabulary of rationality and irrationality. Whether these issues are understand in the world’s chancelleries and foreign ministries in the terms in which the Holy Father understands them is another question altogether….
Lopez: Do we deserve to win if we wind up electing Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama president?
Weigel: Whether we deserve to win or not, we’re much less likely to win with a president who manifestly does not understand the nature of the enemy or the multifront struggle in which we are necessarily engaged. A return to the Nineties — to foreign-policy-as-therapy — is not going to see us, or the Magdi Allams of this world, through to a future safe for the exercise of religious freedom.
Detroit's Divine Kwamedy
The shiny black Escalade pulled to the curb in front of Detroit's 36th District Court. Plainclothes police officers began assuming positions as if they were going to protect their very important passenger, Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick.
Someone sitting in the backseat was wearing a stylish fedora, just like the mayor.
But the scene on Madison Avenue on Tuesday afternoon was not what it appeared.
The Escalade was a decoy.
The person in the backseat was a body double.
A body double?
Yes, a body double, just like the one used by U.S. President Henry Ashton in the current film thriller, "Vantage Point."
While the faux Kilpatrick rolled up in front of the courthouse, the real mayor entered from the rear. (“Mayor's security pulls rare ruse/Body double tactic seldom used by U.S. city leaders”).
They say that every comedy ends up relying on a case of mistaken identity. I don’t know if that’s always true, but Detroit’s mayoral comedy was a case in point just the other day, when His Honor was scheduled to show up at 36th District Court to be arraigned on 8 felony counts. The courtroom activity was televised, naturally, and the news crews were waiting out front on Madison for the Kingpin’s arrival. Those of you goldbrickers who were watching it, like I was, know all about the 3-4 minute wait after the Escalade rolled up, only to find--fooled ya!-- Kwame was already standing in the courtroom in front of the judge.
DU has been unable to confirm what we’re told by sources close to the Kipatrick defense team that Kilpatrick’s lead attorney, Dan ("Dream Weaver") Webb, actually had to argue Kwame out of walking into court through the front door. It turns out Kwame had been rehearsing one particularly stylish shoulder-rolling, knee-popping perp walk for weeks, hoping to impress potential jurors with it. It’s the same one he uses when he arrives at church, so he doesn’t get to use it much.
Still, (we're told), Webb insisted on the decoy operation. But not just to spare the Mayor an embarrassing encounter with pushy reporters in front of Steve Wilson’s camera crew. Rather, Webb's already planning now how the decoy operation will play a key role later in the Kilpatrick trial strategy.
We've watched for weeks as Defendant Kilpatrick has flatly denied, (pretty unconvincingly), that he did any of the things that all the evidence shows him doing. Webb's strategy is to have his client just come right out and level with the jury:
“Ladies and gentlemen, the reason I say I never did those things, is because all those things were done by my body double.
“It was my body double who was holding Christine Beatty’s face in his hands while he ‘sang whatever song it was;’ it was my body double snuggling up with the Jamaican chippie in that Russell Woods barbershop; it was my body double lolling in a North Carolina hot tub with ‘Carmen Slowski.’”
In fact, if push comes to shove, the Mayor is prepared to swear under oath that it was his body double partying at the Manoogian Mansion the night the First Lady sent Tamara Greene to the ER, or who told all those lies in court during the whistleblower trial, or who signed the secret agreement. And what possible reason, you may ask, could Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick offer a jury that might explain why he would ever send a pinch hitter in to do his God-given off-hours pinching, or to seize his divinely-ordained opportunities to hit it?
To protect his family, that's why.
It was the only way this desperate, put-upon Mayor could save his family from all the threats made against him by hostile non-Detroit Wayne County residents , and all these other people who “don’t care about us,” as Reverend Horace Sheffield III describes them--the ones who spend every waking hour trying to figure out ways to harm Detroit's very own "God's Guy."
Friday, March 28, 2008
CAIR's Dawud Walid Recognized in Lansing
Our favorite local CAIR executive director, Dawud Walid, was at Thomas Cooley Law School in Lansing last September receiving an award from the mayor Virg Bernero.
“Walid was giving a speech, ironically titled ‘Building Bridges.’ The event was the City of Lansing’s first annual Unity Iftar Program,” writes Joe Kaufman at FrontPage Magazine. (“Hate and Terror Awarded”).
Kaufman's article gives all of us some additional background on Walid, whom we know around here for magically appearing as official spokesman at every single Muslim-related event in Michigan. Kaufman writes:
First and foremost, Walid is involved with CAIR-Michigan, as the organization’s Executive Director. CAIR recently was designated by the United States government as an “unindicted co-conspirator” for a federal trial that ran from July through October of 2007, which dealt with the financing of millions of dollars to Hamas. During the trial, the FBI provided testimony proving CAIR’s involvement with the former head of Hamas, Mousa Abu Marzook, in his American Palestine Committee. The government reiterated CAIR’s “affiliation” with Hamas, in a federal court brief filed in December of 2007.
As well, Walid is an active member of the North American Imams Federation (NAIF). Other members of NAIF include Mazen Mokhtar, an Al-Qaeda web designer who was indicted in April of 2007 for tax evasion and for filing false tax returns, and Siraj Wahhaj, an “unindicted co-conspirator” of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The President of NAIF is Omar Shahin, a former representative of two Hamas-related “charities,” KindHearts and the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), both of which have been shut down by the U.S. government.
Furthermore, Walid is the assistant imam of Masjid Wali Muhammad. Formerly Muhammad’s Temple No. 1, the mosque has very close ties to the Nation of Islam (NOI) and its former Supreme Minister, Elijah Muhammad, whose picture adorns the inside of the mosque.
The mosque’s ties to NOI have not escaped Walid. In February of last year, he joined others, at a press conference to welcome the group and its overtly anti-Semitic leader, Louis Farrakhan, to Detroit. About Farrakhan’s appearance, Walid stated with great anticipation, “We have been told that Minister Farrakhan is going to be making a big announcement at this meeting.”
Speaking of “bridges,” I find Walid an interesting example of a bridge himself, the way he somehow straddles the unbridgeable divide between historical Islam, and the whacked-out science fiction version taught as Nation of Islam doctrine. (“When It Comes to Role Models, Allah Knows Best”);
Walid’s ties with NOI and Farrakhan are all the more interesting right now as we've been commenting lately on the ties between so many black churches, the NOI, traditional Islam, and all of them seem to work so closely with many black political leaders. See ("What’s Kwame Got to Do with Dearborn? Part I"); and (" Detroit Clergy Look Forward to Ecumaniacal Embrace of Nation of Islam").
Read the rest of Kaufman’s very thorough article here.
“Walid was giving a speech, ironically titled ‘Building Bridges.’ The event was the City of Lansing’s first annual Unity Iftar Program,” writes Joe Kaufman at FrontPage Magazine. (“Hate and Terror Awarded”).
Kaufman's article gives all of us some additional background on Walid, whom we know around here for magically appearing as official spokesman at every single Muslim-related event in Michigan. Kaufman writes:
First and foremost, Walid is involved with CAIR-Michigan, as the organization’s Executive Director. CAIR recently was designated by the United States government as an “unindicted co-conspirator” for a federal trial that ran from July through October of 2007, which dealt with the financing of millions of dollars to Hamas. During the trial, the FBI provided testimony proving CAIR’s involvement with the former head of Hamas, Mousa Abu Marzook, in his American Palestine Committee. The government reiterated CAIR’s “affiliation” with Hamas, in a federal court brief filed in December of 2007.
As well, Walid is an active member of the North American Imams Federation (NAIF). Other members of NAIF include Mazen Mokhtar, an Al-Qaeda web designer who was indicted in April of 2007 for tax evasion and for filing false tax returns, and Siraj Wahhaj, an “unindicted co-conspirator” of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The President of NAIF is Omar Shahin, a former representative of two Hamas-related “charities,” KindHearts and the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), both of which have been shut down by the U.S. government.
Furthermore, Walid is the assistant imam of Masjid Wali Muhammad. Formerly Muhammad’s Temple No. 1, the mosque has very close ties to the Nation of Islam (NOI) and its former Supreme Minister, Elijah Muhammad, whose picture adorns the inside of the mosque.
The mosque’s ties to NOI have not escaped Walid. In February of last year, he joined others, at a press conference to welcome the group and its overtly anti-Semitic leader, Louis Farrakhan, to Detroit. About Farrakhan’s appearance, Walid stated with great anticipation, “We have been told that Minister Farrakhan is going to be making a big announcement at this meeting.”
Speaking of “bridges,” I find Walid an interesting example of a bridge himself, the way he somehow straddles the unbridgeable divide between historical Islam, and the whacked-out science fiction version taught as Nation of Islam doctrine. (“When It Comes to Role Models, Allah Knows Best”);
Walid’s ties with NOI and Farrakhan are all the more interesting right now as we've been commenting lately on the ties between so many black churches, the NOI, traditional Islam, and all of them seem to work so closely with many black political leaders. See ("What’s Kwame Got to Do with Dearborn? Part I"); and (" Detroit Clergy Look Forward to Ecumaniacal Embrace of Nation of Islam").
Read the rest of Kaufman’s very thorough article here.
Hillary Searches for the Missing Lincoln
Hillary Clinton, secretly impressed with Obama’s speech on race, (the one he gave to deflect criticism of his close association with Jeremiah Wright, and that earned him comparisons with Abraham Lincoln), has decided, in order to deflect attention from Snipergate, to give her own speech setting forth her views on lying.
DU has been unable to confirm the authenticity of draft excerpts provided us, but we’re posting them anyway, because I'm tired and doing so just proves I'm human:
...This is the reality in which Bill and I and other sixties-style liberals of our generation grew up. We came of age when Richard Nixon was facing impeachment, and opportunity for dishonest statements and political hits on enemies was systematically constricted for all public officials. What's remarkable is not how many failed in the face of increased scrutiny of public statements, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way, like Bill and me, for example.
Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, "The past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past. In fact, the past never even happened.”
But even for those ambitious political animals who did make it, habits of lying, perjury, and trickery continue to define our worldview in fundamental ways. And occasionally that dishonest worldview finds voice at political rallies, in press interviews, or in stump speeches we repeat over and over again. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear the falsehoods in some of my speeches simply reminds us of the old truism that the most gullible moments in American life occur during presidential campaigns. Our tendency to lie is not always productive.
But the dishonesty is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists among the voters.
I can no more tell the truth about things like the Bosnia visit than I can disown Bill Clinton. And I can no more disown him than I can my black grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, the typical black woman who taught me all the old Negro spirituals—(sings) “I aint no ways tard!”—and took me to march with her at Selma when I was only two, where we dodged bullets fired at us by police, which made me cringe.
I have never been so naïve as to think that I can get through eight years as President without ever once leveling with myself, or you, the American people, about anything.
But I have asserted a firm conviction - a conviction rooted in my faith in my own absolute correctness about things, and faith in the gullibility of the American Democratic voter - that working together we can move beyond some of the ridiculous things I say, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path to the more perfect utopian society I have so carefully planned for this nation.
DU has been unable to confirm the authenticity of draft excerpts provided us, but we’re posting them anyway, because I'm tired and doing so just proves I'm human:
...This is the reality in which Bill and I and other sixties-style liberals of our generation grew up. We came of age when Richard Nixon was facing impeachment, and opportunity for dishonest statements and political hits on enemies was systematically constricted for all public officials. What's remarkable is not how many failed in the face of increased scrutiny of public statements, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way, like Bill and me, for example.
Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, "The past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past. In fact, the past never even happened.”
But even for those ambitious political animals who did make it, habits of lying, perjury, and trickery continue to define our worldview in fundamental ways. And occasionally that dishonest worldview finds voice at political rallies, in press interviews, or in stump speeches we repeat over and over again. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear the falsehoods in some of my speeches simply reminds us of the old truism that the most gullible moments in American life occur during presidential campaigns. Our tendency to lie is not always productive.
But the dishonesty is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists among the voters.
I can no more tell the truth about things like the Bosnia visit than I can disown Bill Clinton. And I can no more disown him than I can my black grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, the typical black woman who taught me all the old Negro spirituals—(sings) “I aint no ways tard!”—and took me to march with her at Selma when I was only two, where we dodged bullets fired at us by police, which made me cringe.
I have never been so naïve as to think that I can get through eight years as President without ever once leveling with myself, or you, the American people, about anything.
But I have asserted a firm conviction - a conviction rooted in my faith in my own absolute correctness about things, and faith in the gullibility of the American Democratic voter - that working together we can move beyond some of the ridiculous things I say, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path to the more perfect utopian society I have so carefully planned for this nation.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Saddam Was Always Thinking Outside the Box
Now we find out that the anti-war trip to Iraq made by Reps. Jim McDermott of Washington, David Bonior of Michigan and Mike Thompson of California in 2002 (“The Baghdad Democrats”), was paid for by Saddam’s intelligence agency. (“Charity Official Accused of Spying”):
Muthanna Al-Hanooti, who worked as a top official at Life for Relief and Development a charity in Southfield, Mich. allegedly coordinated U.S. congressional delegations to Iraq at the direction of executed dictator's intelligence service between 1999 and 2002.
In return, investigators say he received payoffs via the United Nation's Oil for Food program.
Al-Hanooti is also a CAIR director, and was named last year as an unidicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case. (“CAIR called 'turnstile' for terrorist suspects”).
Debbie Schlussel suggests that the third party mentioned in the indictment, but not charged, is Shakir Al-Khafaji, a Detroit- and Dearborn-area operator long known to have been a money-man for Saddam.
According to Steve Hayes,
Al-Khafaji first came to public notice after revelations that he gave former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter $400,000 to produce a film that criticized the United States for its role in the inspection process. Al-Khafaji, who is listed as a "senior executive producer" of the film, arranged meetings for Ritter with high-level officials in Saddam's government, a feat New York Times magazine writer Barry Bearak found "impressive." Ritter had previously been an outspoken critic of Saddam Hussein, and issued dire warnings about the status of the Iraqi dictator's weapons of mass destruction. His sudden flip--he is now a leading apologist for Saddam's regime--and revelations about Ritter's 2001 arrest for soliciting sex with minors have fueled speculation about the nature of his relationship with al-Khafaji. (“Saddam's Cash: And the journalists and politicians he bought with it.”).
According to the Detroit News, that unindicted co-conspirator was
a former officer of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, and Al-Hanooti was paid by the Iraqi spy agency, the indictment alleges.
That Iraqi spy asked Al-Hanooti to publicize in the United States the harmful effects of U.S. sanctions against Iraq and to bring to Iraq delegations from the U.S. Congress, the indictment alleges.
Between 1999 and 2002, Al-Hanooti gave the Iraqi Intelligence Service a strategy on how to get the sanctions lifted and in 2002 he helped organize a trip to Iraq by a delegation of members of Congress, the indictment alleges.
(“Feds: Southfield Muslim charity official worked as Iraqi spy”).
The three anti-war Democrats have not been charged with anything. The feds say they were oblivious their trip was being underwritten by Saddam. I can believe it. The three were also oblivious that they were being used by Saddam as useful idiots. Saddam was trying to stave off military intervention while he continued to defy UN resolutions, and he wanted the sanctions regime to end so he could resume his WMD programs.
Bonior, McDermott, and Thompson were selected because Iraqi intelligence had identified them as weak links in American foreign policy. They could be used, (being oblivious the way they were), to sell the Iraqi line back home in the US that the sanctions should be relaxed or jettisonsed for the sake of the suffering Iraqi children.
A brief refresher might be helpful for some of our short-memoried countrymen.
After Operation Desert Storm, an international sanctions regime was put in place against Saddam’s Iraq, meant to choke off funding for his WMD programs, restrain his war-making impulses, and perhaps hasten the end of the Baathist dictatorship. This arrangement was necessary, in part, because the coalition nations had been unwilling to support US forces driving on to Baghdad and finishing off Saddam once and for all after liberating Kuwait. When Saddam realized we weren’t coming to destroy his Revolutionary Guards and arrest him, he promptly characterized himself as the victor of Desert Storm and began to, in modern parlance, "move on."
In addition to sanctions, there were supposed to be international weapons inspections to insure that Saddam got rid of and was no longer developing WMD. Then British and American forces had to set up no-fly zones to protect Shia in the south, and Kurds in the north, from being bombed by Saddam's air force. All of this just to keep Saddam "in his box."
The irony of all this now is that the only component of this arrangement that actually worked was the military one—the no-fly zones really did protect the people we were trying to protect.
But the sanctions weren’t otherwise so effective. Like every dictator could be expected to do, Saddam responded to the reduced oil revenue by simply using more of the remainder of Iraq’s assets for his own military, security, and palace-building projects, while the average Iraqis went without. The result was shortages of food and medicine, sick and starving children, and the international community blaming the USA for the effects of the sanctions instead of Saddam, who was the undeniable First Cause of the whole problem.
As writer Joshua Micah Marshall wrote in November 2002, “if Saddam's in a box, we're in there with him.”
Exposing the flaws in what he called "unworkable deterrence," Marshall said:
Every year the burden of sanctions weighs lighter on Saddam--the regime gets to sell more oil for humanitarian and other non-military purposes. As the flow of revenue rises, more can be skimmed off for military objectives. And every year the diplomatic capital we must expend to keep the sanctions in place grows. The Muslim world blames us for the civilian deaths, the images of dying babies--even if these tragedies are mainly due to Saddam's manipulation of sanctions rather than the sanctions themselves. Similarly, we pay a heavy price for the garrisons that we maintain in the region to keep Iraq contained. One needn't be an Osama bin Laden appeaser to recognize that the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia has been a major rallying cry for al Qaeda recruitment. All told, if Saddam's in a box, we're in there with him. Yes, war against Iraq would be violent, destructive, and destabilizing. What supporters of containment often ignore is that their policy has quite similar results--just spread out over time.
The policies didn't work at all in making Saddam cooperate with the world community. By March 2003 he had flipped off the UN and their feckless resolutions 16 times.
And the liberals of the world hated the sanctions. Or, rather, they hated us and the British for being the only ones trying to enforce the sanctions. Just as the world community hasn't shown much pluck in helping out in Iraq now, they weren’t going to stick with the sanctions for much longer back then, either. (And that was even without knowing then, as we didn’t know in 2003, just how successfully Saddam was using the oil-for-food program to buy influence and corrupt the process: at the UN (Kofi Annan), amongst the weapons inspectors, (Scott Ritter), and to buy off international Western leaders, (Jacques Chirac).
Even those who weren’t being bought off by Saddam couldn’t pass up the chance to blame the effects of the sanctions on America. The truth is that liberals hated the sanctions, but not because they care about starving children: but because they never feel more alive than when accusing the United States of crimes against humanity.
By 2000 it was to the point where a supercilious Amy Goodman got to interrogate then-President Clinton this way:
AMY GOODMAN: President Clinton, UN figures show that up to 5,000 children a month die in Iraq because of the sanctions against Iraq.
President Clinton, to his credit, flatly contradicted this, and explained that,
“If any child is without food or medicine or a roof over his or her head in Iraq, it's because he is claiming the sanctions are doing it and sticking it to his own children. We have worked like crazy to make sure that the embargo only applies to his ability to reconstitute his weapon system and his military statement.”
No matter. Goodman just came back with her next question.
"The UN says our policy is genocidal. How do you respond to that?"
(Oh, I don't know. How about: sanctions are the UN’s policy, too, Amy).
(“Bill Clinton on Sanctions Against IraqAmy Goodman interviews Bill Clinton”).
In 2001, four years before he crowned his career by becoming one of Saddam's defense attorneys, Ramsey Clark referred to the sanctions as “genocide,” and insisted they “must be completely removed immediately. Every day the sanctions continue adds to the death toll of the worst genocide of the last decade of the most violent century in human history.” (End Sanctions, Prohibit Assaults On Iraq).
Always a zealous prosecutor when indicting his own country, Clark charged that even America's efforts to resolve the worst effects of sanctions were stained with a criminal motive:
The U.S., realizing that world opinion will no longer tolerate the sanctions, is seeking to take credit for modifying them while its purpose will be to continue to control their implementation and cause their reinstatement for alleged violations by Iraq.
Then in December 2003 The Nation was crying that:
“The humanitarian disaster resulting from sanctions against Iraq has been frequently cited as a factor that motivated the September 11 terrorist attacks. Osama bin Laden himself mentioned the Iraq sanctions in a recent tirade against the United States. Critics of US policy in Iraq claim that sanctions have killed more than a million people, many of them children. (“A Hard Look at Iraq Sanctions”).
Even the Vatican disapproved of the sanctions regime.
But now, after the Left has had five years to work out the kinks in their No War in Iraq at All Costs Policy, they discover that they love the sanctions. When challenged for their solutions to the ongoing instability Saddam's regime stood for in the wake of 9/11 , his threats to his neighbors, and his internal brutality, we’re told that “containment was working and that Saddam was still in a box”; wrote a repentant Jacob Weisberg at Slate recently, "[S]anctions were working…Saddam had given up his WMD programs.”
(“How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?I believed the groupthink and contributed to it.")
Containment, we're now told, was the obvious solution preferable to this “unnecessary war.” But the harping about the unnecessity of the war is just supposed to show that there was no necessity to do anything about Saddam, in 1992, 2001, 2003, or ever, which obviously wasn’t the case. But, reply the liberals--reply now, that is--military action was unnecessary, --because containment was working!
So are you able to follow this? Our criminal illegal war was unnecessary because our criminal, genocidal sanctions were working.
Which is intellectually unsatisfying, I find, as writer Jeff Weintraub points out:
Sanctions against Iraq are a crucial part of the "policy of containment." If the sanctions are criminal, then how can the policy be "working well"? And if the sanctions are removed, the "policy of containment" will collapse. You can't have it both ways.
(“Iraq sanctions & the moral contradictions of "anti-war" rhetoric”).
Jack Spencer at Heritage wrote,
Some claim we had Saddam "in a box" - that sanctions were working and war was unnecessary. How were sanctions working? Saddam kept a team of scientists on hand to resume WMD programs the minute the West looked the other way. His oppression and mass murder continued unchecked. The United States spent billions on its "no-fly zones" in the north and south, which ensured the Iraqi people would continue to starve even as their leader continued to build palaces and other monuments to himself. (“No Evidence of WMD Required”).
The fact of history, and fairly recent history, too, is that, short of removing Saddam's regime by force in what antiwar critics keep calling a “war without end,” we would have had sanctions without end, containment without end, US bases in Saudi Arabia without end, and, (big surprise), world resentment without end. Short of being made dead somehow by others, Saddam would probably have lived many more years, and Uday and Qusay would have survived, too, young, healthy, and ready to step into their dad’s hobnail boots. To paraphrase John McCain, under the sanctions policiy, we’d be in Iraq for 100 years.
The point is that sanctions hadn’t worked in to truly make Saddam harmless, except to keep him straining on his leash for several years. A leash that was ready to snap. Once the sanctions were gone, (since Saddam had already thrown inspectors out in 1998), he'd be back at it like a shot. (Again, this was what we already knew in 2003--before all the facts came out about the oil-for-food scandal, and the genius Saddam had for buying friends among world leaders to help him get around the sanctions.) As David Kay reported,
Saddam… had not given up his aspirations and intentions to continue to acquire weapons of mass destruction [and] intended to resume these programs whenever the external restrictions were removed. Several of these officials acknowledge receiving inquiries since 2000 from Saddam or his sons about how long it would take to either restart CW production or make available chemical weapons.
And among the things Saddam did to get out from under the sanctions was to manipulate the American left. That’s where McDermott, Bonior, and Thompson came in: they were some of the useful idiots he could use to help get those sanctions lifted. The war intervened, no thanks to McDermott, Bonior, and Thompson.
And because of the war to depose Saddam we don't have to worry about the sanctions regime any more, nor weapons inspectors, nor no-fly zones, nor a re-arming Saddam next door to a nuclear arming Iran, nor, for that matter, Saddam, Uday, or Qsay.
They're staying in their boxes now.
Muthanna Al-Hanooti, who worked as a top official at Life for Relief and Development a charity in Southfield, Mich. allegedly coordinated U.S. congressional delegations to Iraq at the direction of executed dictator's intelligence service between 1999 and 2002.
In return, investigators say he received payoffs via the United Nation's Oil for Food program.
Al-Hanooti is also a CAIR director, and was named last year as an unidicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case. (“CAIR called 'turnstile' for terrorist suspects”).
Debbie Schlussel suggests that the third party mentioned in the indictment, but not charged, is Shakir Al-Khafaji, a Detroit- and Dearborn-area operator long known to have been a money-man for Saddam.
According to Steve Hayes,
Al-Khafaji first came to public notice after revelations that he gave former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter $400,000 to produce a film that criticized the United States for its role in the inspection process. Al-Khafaji, who is listed as a "senior executive producer" of the film, arranged meetings for Ritter with high-level officials in Saddam's government, a feat New York Times magazine writer Barry Bearak found "impressive." Ritter had previously been an outspoken critic of Saddam Hussein, and issued dire warnings about the status of the Iraqi dictator's weapons of mass destruction. His sudden flip--he is now a leading apologist for Saddam's regime--and revelations about Ritter's 2001 arrest for soliciting sex with minors have fueled speculation about the nature of his relationship with al-Khafaji. (“Saddam's Cash: And the journalists and politicians he bought with it.”).
According to the Detroit News, that unindicted co-conspirator was
a former officer of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, and Al-Hanooti was paid by the Iraqi spy agency, the indictment alleges.
That Iraqi spy asked Al-Hanooti to publicize in the United States the harmful effects of U.S. sanctions against Iraq and to bring to Iraq delegations from the U.S. Congress, the indictment alleges.
Between 1999 and 2002, Al-Hanooti gave the Iraqi Intelligence Service a strategy on how to get the sanctions lifted and in 2002 he helped organize a trip to Iraq by a delegation of members of Congress, the indictment alleges.
(“Feds: Southfield Muslim charity official worked as Iraqi spy”).
The three anti-war Democrats have not been charged with anything. The feds say they were oblivious their trip was being underwritten by Saddam. I can believe it. The three were also oblivious that they were being used by Saddam as useful idiots. Saddam was trying to stave off military intervention while he continued to defy UN resolutions, and he wanted the sanctions regime to end so he could resume his WMD programs.
Bonior, McDermott, and Thompson were selected because Iraqi intelligence had identified them as weak links in American foreign policy. They could be used, (being oblivious the way they were), to sell the Iraqi line back home in the US that the sanctions should be relaxed or jettisonsed for the sake of the suffering Iraqi children.
A brief refresher might be helpful for some of our short-memoried countrymen.
After Operation Desert Storm, an international sanctions regime was put in place against Saddam’s Iraq, meant to choke off funding for his WMD programs, restrain his war-making impulses, and perhaps hasten the end of the Baathist dictatorship. This arrangement was necessary, in part, because the coalition nations had been unwilling to support US forces driving on to Baghdad and finishing off Saddam once and for all after liberating Kuwait. When Saddam realized we weren’t coming to destroy his Revolutionary Guards and arrest him, he promptly characterized himself as the victor of Desert Storm and began to, in modern parlance, "move on."
In addition to sanctions, there were supposed to be international weapons inspections to insure that Saddam got rid of and was no longer developing WMD. Then British and American forces had to set up no-fly zones to protect Shia in the south, and Kurds in the north, from being bombed by Saddam's air force. All of this just to keep Saddam "in his box."
The irony of all this now is that the only component of this arrangement that actually worked was the military one—the no-fly zones really did protect the people we were trying to protect.
But the sanctions weren’t otherwise so effective. Like every dictator could be expected to do, Saddam responded to the reduced oil revenue by simply using more of the remainder of Iraq’s assets for his own military, security, and palace-building projects, while the average Iraqis went without. The result was shortages of food and medicine, sick and starving children, and the international community blaming the USA for the effects of the sanctions instead of Saddam, who was the undeniable First Cause of the whole problem.
As writer Joshua Micah Marshall wrote in November 2002, “if Saddam's in a box, we're in there with him.”
Exposing the flaws in what he called "unworkable deterrence," Marshall said:
Every year the burden of sanctions weighs lighter on Saddam--the regime gets to sell more oil for humanitarian and other non-military purposes. As the flow of revenue rises, more can be skimmed off for military objectives. And every year the diplomatic capital we must expend to keep the sanctions in place grows. The Muslim world blames us for the civilian deaths, the images of dying babies--even if these tragedies are mainly due to Saddam's manipulation of sanctions rather than the sanctions themselves. Similarly, we pay a heavy price for the garrisons that we maintain in the region to keep Iraq contained. One needn't be an Osama bin Laden appeaser to recognize that the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia has been a major rallying cry for al Qaeda recruitment. All told, if Saddam's in a box, we're in there with him. Yes, war against Iraq would be violent, destructive, and destabilizing. What supporters of containment often ignore is that their policy has quite similar results--just spread out over time.
The policies didn't work at all in making Saddam cooperate with the world community. By March 2003 he had flipped off the UN and their feckless resolutions 16 times.
And the liberals of the world hated the sanctions. Or, rather, they hated us and the British for being the only ones trying to enforce the sanctions. Just as the world community hasn't shown much pluck in helping out in Iraq now, they weren’t going to stick with the sanctions for much longer back then, either. (And that was even without knowing then, as we didn’t know in 2003, just how successfully Saddam was using the oil-for-food program to buy influence and corrupt the process: at the UN (Kofi Annan), amongst the weapons inspectors, (Scott Ritter), and to buy off international Western leaders, (Jacques Chirac).
Even those who weren’t being bought off by Saddam couldn’t pass up the chance to blame the effects of the sanctions on America. The truth is that liberals hated the sanctions, but not because they care about starving children: but because they never feel more alive than when accusing the United States of crimes against humanity.
By 2000 it was to the point where a supercilious Amy Goodman got to interrogate then-President Clinton this way:
AMY GOODMAN: President Clinton, UN figures show that up to 5,000 children a month die in Iraq because of the sanctions against Iraq.
President Clinton, to his credit, flatly contradicted this, and explained that,
“If any child is without food or medicine or a roof over his or her head in Iraq, it's because he is claiming the sanctions are doing it and sticking it to his own children. We have worked like crazy to make sure that the embargo only applies to his ability to reconstitute his weapon system and his military statement.”
No matter. Goodman just came back with her next question.
"The UN says our policy is genocidal. How do you respond to that?"
(Oh, I don't know. How about: sanctions are the UN’s policy, too, Amy).
(“Bill Clinton on Sanctions Against IraqAmy Goodman interviews Bill Clinton”).
In 2001, four years before he crowned his career by becoming one of Saddam's defense attorneys, Ramsey Clark referred to the sanctions as “genocide,” and insisted they “must be completely removed immediately. Every day the sanctions continue adds to the death toll of the worst genocide of the last decade of the most violent century in human history.” (End Sanctions, Prohibit Assaults On Iraq).
Always a zealous prosecutor when indicting his own country, Clark charged that even America's efforts to resolve the worst effects of sanctions were stained with a criminal motive:
The U.S., realizing that world opinion will no longer tolerate the sanctions, is seeking to take credit for modifying them while its purpose will be to continue to control their implementation and cause their reinstatement for alleged violations by Iraq.
Then in December 2003 The Nation was crying that:
“The humanitarian disaster resulting from sanctions against Iraq has been frequently cited as a factor that motivated the September 11 terrorist attacks. Osama bin Laden himself mentioned the Iraq sanctions in a recent tirade against the United States. Critics of US policy in Iraq claim that sanctions have killed more than a million people, many of them children. (“A Hard Look at Iraq Sanctions”).
Even the Vatican disapproved of the sanctions regime.
But now, after the Left has had five years to work out the kinks in their No War in Iraq at All Costs Policy, they discover that they love the sanctions. When challenged for their solutions to the ongoing instability Saddam's regime stood for in the wake of 9/11 , his threats to his neighbors, and his internal brutality, we’re told that “containment was working and that Saddam was still in a box”; wrote a repentant Jacob Weisberg at Slate recently, "[S]anctions were working…Saddam had given up his WMD programs.”
(“How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?I believed the groupthink and contributed to it.")
Containment, we're now told, was the obvious solution preferable to this “unnecessary war.” But the harping about the unnecessity of the war is just supposed to show that there was no necessity to do anything about Saddam, in 1992, 2001, 2003, or ever, which obviously wasn’t the case. But, reply the liberals--reply now, that is--military action was unnecessary, --because containment was working!
So are you able to follow this? Our criminal illegal war was unnecessary because our criminal, genocidal sanctions were working.
Which is intellectually unsatisfying, I find, as writer Jeff Weintraub points out:
Sanctions against Iraq are a crucial part of the "policy of containment." If the sanctions are criminal, then how can the policy be "working well"? And if the sanctions are removed, the "policy of containment" will collapse. You can't have it both ways.
(“Iraq sanctions & the moral contradictions of "anti-war" rhetoric”).
Jack Spencer at Heritage wrote,
Some claim we had Saddam "in a box" - that sanctions were working and war was unnecessary. How were sanctions working? Saddam kept a team of scientists on hand to resume WMD programs the minute the West looked the other way. His oppression and mass murder continued unchecked. The United States spent billions on its "no-fly zones" in the north and south, which ensured the Iraqi people would continue to starve even as their leader continued to build palaces and other monuments to himself. (“No Evidence of WMD Required”).
The fact of history, and fairly recent history, too, is that, short of removing Saddam's regime by force in what antiwar critics keep calling a “war without end,” we would have had sanctions without end, containment without end, US bases in Saudi Arabia without end, and, (big surprise), world resentment without end. Short of being made dead somehow by others, Saddam would probably have lived many more years, and Uday and Qusay would have survived, too, young, healthy, and ready to step into their dad’s hobnail boots. To paraphrase John McCain, under the sanctions policiy, we’d be in Iraq for 100 years.
The point is that sanctions hadn’t worked in to truly make Saddam harmless, except to keep him straining on his leash for several years. A leash that was ready to snap. Once the sanctions were gone, (since Saddam had already thrown inspectors out in 1998), he'd be back at it like a shot. (Again, this was what we already knew in 2003--before all the facts came out about the oil-for-food scandal, and the genius Saddam had for buying friends among world leaders to help him get around the sanctions.) As David Kay reported,
Saddam… had not given up his aspirations and intentions to continue to acquire weapons of mass destruction [and] intended to resume these programs whenever the external restrictions were removed. Several of these officials acknowledge receiving inquiries since 2000 from Saddam or his sons about how long it would take to either restart CW production or make available chemical weapons.
And among the things Saddam did to get out from under the sanctions was to manipulate the American left. That’s where McDermott, Bonior, and Thompson came in: they were some of the useful idiots he could use to help get those sanctions lifted. The war intervened, no thanks to McDermott, Bonior, and Thompson.
And because of the war to depose Saddam we don't have to worry about the sanctions regime any more, nor weapons inspectors, nor no-fly zones, nor a re-arming Saddam next door to a nuclear arming Iran, nor, for that matter, Saddam, Uday, or Qsay.
They're staying in their boxes now.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Update on Hemlock Park Hezbollah Fighter
There are going to be still more delays before any facts about the Houssein Ali Zorkot case see the light of day.
Zorkot, the third-year medical student who was arrested last September for deploying in Hemlock Park with loaded AK-47, has changed his mind about waiving his preliminary exam, and wants one after all. (“Accused Hemlock Park gunman back in court”).
He waived his preliminary exam in December, letting himself be bound over for trial in circuit court. But now the circuit court has granted Zorkot’s motion to come back to Judge Hultgren’s courtroom Dearborn’s 19th District Court for his preliminary exam. At a preliminary a prosecutor must show the court that there’s sufficient probable cause that a crime has been committed to warrant trial. The new hearing is now scheduled for April 18.
City officials say Zorkot has not been tied to terrorism. But Zorkot was running a pro-Hezbollah website, and posted photographs of himself in Lebanon wearing military garb, and posing in front of heroic photographs of Hezbollah Headman Hassan Nasrallah (known locally in Dearborn as “Our Leader!”). Zorkot was charged with “one count of carrying a dangerous weapon with unlawful intent, one count felony firearm and one count of possession of a loaded firearm.”
When he was stopped by police exiting Hemlock Park he fought back so hard he had to be Tasered twice.
Frankly, this may all turn out to be nothing, or at least, nothing that ever adds up to anything. Zorkot may have become the victim of his own fantasies of himself as a fighter, and got caught playing army in the park with a loaded AK. I am interested, though, in the basis for the dangerous weapon with unlawful intent count.
Zorkot, the third-year medical student who was arrested last September for deploying in Hemlock Park with loaded AK-47, has changed his mind about waiving his preliminary exam, and wants one after all. (“Accused Hemlock Park gunman back in court”).
He waived his preliminary exam in December, letting himself be bound over for trial in circuit court. But now the circuit court has granted Zorkot’s motion to come back to Judge Hultgren’s courtroom Dearborn’s 19th District Court for his preliminary exam. At a preliminary a prosecutor must show the court that there’s sufficient probable cause that a crime has been committed to warrant trial. The new hearing is now scheduled for April 18.
City officials say Zorkot has not been tied to terrorism. But Zorkot was running a pro-Hezbollah website, and posted photographs of himself in Lebanon wearing military garb, and posing in front of heroic photographs of Hezbollah Headman Hassan Nasrallah (known locally in Dearborn as “Our Leader!”). Zorkot was charged with “one count of carrying a dangerous weapon with unlawful intent, one count felony firearm and one count of possession of a loaded firearm.”When he was stopped by police exiting Hemlock Park he fought back so hard he had to be Tasered twice.
Frankly, this may all turn out to be nothing, or at least, nothing that ever adds up to anything. Zorkot may have become the victim of his own fantasies of himself as a fighter, and got caught playing army in the park with a loaded AK. I am interested, though, in the basis for the dangerous weapon with unlawful intent count.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
UM-Dearborn Gets Empowered Over Iraq
In case you hadn’t heard, it was “Iraq Awareness Week” in Dearborn last week. (“Students protest on war anniversary”). Yeah, I didn’t know about it, either. Anyway, the Students United for Peace and Justice (SUPJ) are at it again, holding a protest last Tuesday at UM-Dearborn “to highlight the death and destruction of the Iraq war.”“Five years ago, the United States of America began its war on Iraq without the permission of the United Nations in search for weapons of mass destruction,” said SUPJ President Rashid Baydoun. “Since then, the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians and American soldiers have been lost. $500 billion later, the war is still an on-going issue which the current administration plans to put no stop to.”
It’s obvious Rashid has a bet going on campus as to how many misstatements he can cram into two lines. When a guy at a war protest even gets the cost of the war wrong by drastically underestimating it, I have to think he’s really not showing up for these things very well prepared.
Speaking of Rashid’s concern for “innocent…American soldiers,” he was the one who refused a polite request from Iraq War veteran and UM-D student J. David McHann, to remove offensive posters hung on campus by the SUPJ depicting American soldiers threatening Iraqi women and children with their weapons, and captioned: “Oppression.” How can Rashid’s be concerned for the innocent soldiers when he doesn't think there are any?Considering that the stated goal of the effort is to “educate” the UM-D campus about the war, (as well as, of course, to “empower the campus about this war,” but that goes without saying), you’d think the organizers would trouble themselves to gather a fact or two.
Even guys who are paid to be prepared show up with notes scrawled in crayola. According to The Arab American News, last Wednesday’s lecture by Dr. Hashim Al-Tawil “The liquidation of Iraq: Five years later,” focused on “the impact of the war on the country, the destruction of the social and political structure.”
Maybe it’s just me, but I’d think that once you tipped your hand by speaking of Iraq as a place that had been “liquidated” five years earlier, there wouldn’t be much of an impact left to make? Or maybe it’s a really slow liquidation, like those 3-days-only sales Art Van has been throwing since 1966.
For all it matters, Al-Tawil is an Art History professor at Henry Ford Community College, and his criteria for a good society seems to be limited to whether or not the modern art scene is fluorishing. Apparently a scant few social institutions escaped Saddam's totalitarian bootheel, includng the modern art scene. As Al-Tawil tells it,
“Fine art in pre-occupation Iraq was thrilling since the sixties and seventies,” says Dr. Hashim Al-Tawil, Professor of Art History at Henry Ford College in Michigan and former Iraqi active artist and faculty member of the college of Fine Arts at the University of Baghdad.
Dr. Al-Tawil said that Baghdad was the center of art activities on a national and international scale for over three decades, from the period of 1960-1990. Arab art Biennials, international exhibits and conferences, and national annual exhibits were commonplace in Iraq all year long.
“It [fine art] was hindered temporarily by the Iraq-Iran war (1980-1988), but was not affected substantially,” Dr. Al-Tawil told Fine Art Registry (FAR). “That cultural activity was severely wounded by the US bombing of 1990-91 followed by 13 years of brutal sanctions and isolation ended by the US-British invasion of 2003 which has paralyzed every cultural activity in the country.” ("Iraq’s Forgotten MODERN Art").
Things were great under Saddam, It was those fucking Americans and Brits who ruined everything.
Art activities weren't the only things Baghdad was the center of under Saddam, but Al-Tawil didn't seem to notice the mass killings, the secret police and torture, or the rape rooms, what with all the important artwork on display. Which proves one thing--Muslim, Christian, atheist, or Jew, art assholes speak the same language all across the globe.
I’m too tired to organize yet one more itemized list of how, even with all the violence and setbacks, (and even after the looting of the Iraqi Museum of Modern Art, formerly known as the Saddam Center for the Arts), the social and especially the political life in Iraq has been on a steadily upward curve. Before March 2003 Iraq’s social and political life under Saddam were in a poison-induced, death-like sleep: not that mention of that is ever made up at these events.
At one point, according to The Arab American News, “’From sea to shining sea, we want Iraqis to be free,’ rang through the air.”
I agree completely. So why, I ask, should we abandon the Iraqis to their enemies?
Close Enough for Government Work?
I have a friend who used to tell personal anecdotes that, at the last moment, would turn slightly fantastic. When people realized they were begin kidded and challenged him, he’d always laugh and say, “Well, it coulda happened.”
Hillary Clinton apparently has a similar sense of humor, as she now remembers her trip to Bosnia differently than the way she’s been telling it. Instead of a corkscrew landing and a life-or-death dash for cover under a hail of Serbian sniper fire, Senator Clinton merely meant to say that “she was told they had to land in a certain way and move quickly because of the threat of sniper fire.”
It coulda happened, so why not tell it that way?
Hillary Clinton apparently has a similar sense of humor, as she now remembers her trip to Bosnia differently than the way she’s been telling it. Instead of a corkscrew landing and a life-or-death dash for cover under a hail of Serbian sniper fire, Senator Clinton merely meant to say that “she was told they had to land in a certain way and move quickly because of the threat of sniper fire.”
It coulda happened, so why not tell it that way?
Monday, March 24, 2008
What's Kwame Got To Do with Dearborn?--Part I
Every now and then someone sends us an unhappy comment demanding to know what some subject we’re discussing “has to do with Dearborn.” Maybe there’s some validity to this, especially lately as the scandal enveloping the mayor of our northern suburb, Detroit, is simply too big a target to ignore. We’re also in the middle of a national election that, I’m sure most Dearborn residents would agree, is going to affect life in Dearborn.
Then again, just because we blog about Dearborn, doesn’t mean we’ve taken a vow never to speak of anything else, or anywhere else. Why would it? Especially when those other things are related to the issues of greatest interest to us here--like freedom of speech, Islamism, Israel, the Middle East, international jihadist terrorism, the mau-mauing of the press and government officials by mouthpiece organizations like CAIR. Last but not least, blogging offers no rewards such as money nor fame for the vast majority of us, so we should get to write about whatever we want.
As it happens I do think there are quite clear connections between the corrupt and venal Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and Islam, and also between the callow and shortsighted Senator Barack Obama and Islam, that make their situations relevant to us at DU. That connection subsists in the never-discussed mutual cooperation between clergymen in many of America’s black churches, and the Nation of Islam and other radical Islamist leaders who’ve made common cause with America’s left.
We’re witnessing it right now in the revelations about Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s debased thinking, who rewarded Farrakhan and paid homage to Khadafi, goddamned America and has presided over a cult in Chicago predicated on racism, class envy, urban myths, and whatever leftist bullshit he can make use of.
It was there to be noticed if anyone was inclined, when Farrakhan endorsed Kwame Kilpatrick for re-election in 2005, and when the local New Black Panther/Nation of Islam member Minister Malik “Motown”* Shabazz showed up to pray with the embattled Kilpatrick and some of his patronage partners in the unions. [CORRECTION: Minister Malik Shabazz has pointed out to me that I'm in error identifying him as a Muslim: he states, "I am not Muslim , I am a Christian who respects Islam." I gladly make the correction.]
Is Kingpin Kilpatrick a Muslim? Of course not. Why should he be? He’s already had his 72 houris, and then some, without having to set off a suicide belt to get them, and as Detroit's Highest Ranking Christian, he gets his ass hauled around in a black Escalade. (Not for much longer, though). Is Obama a Muslim? I have no reason to doubt his own statement that he’s a Christian. It doesn’t matter. Muslims aren’t supporting these guys because they’re brother Muslims, but because they’re useful to jihad. Because they’re useful idiots. (Don’t think so? Obama almost had this thing won. Why is he losing now? Because of his own devil’s bargain with the prancing charlatan in the safari surf shirts they can’t stop showing on Fox News.)
Within weeks after 9/11 the first cries of “Islamophobia” were going up. It was evident by then that America’s jihadist spokesmen were already blowing past the speed limit on the Victim Grievance Expressway first excavated and paved by the post-MLK civil rights community, and then taken over and improved upon by the homosexual lobby. The re-education of American editors and news anchors and Hollywood that took the civil rights community thirty years to accomplish, and the gays much less than that, was accomplished by CAIR and a few university Middle East studies professors in just a few weeks. “As early as October 2001, the Society of Professional Journalists provided guidelines to the American free press that jihad was to be defined as ‘to exert oneself for the good of Islam and to better oneself’”.
As noted continually in these pages, and much more thoroughly at Dhimmi Watch and other prominent blogs, Islam, and Muslims in America, are very nearly immune from criticism in the mainstream media, and enjoy a kind of affirmative action on many of their initiatives because folks are terrified of being called a name if they raise any criticisms.
In the 1990s Seinfeld was able to poke fun at the craven fear of giving offense we'd all been reduced to on the subject of homosexuality. The show as able to get away with ridiculing both the sacramental attitudes towards AIDS (“the ribbon Nazis”), and especially the strict prohibition of criticizing homosexuality per se by continually reassuring all listeners whenever the subject came up, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that!”
The American media, and most Americans, now are incapable of mentioning Islam or Muslims without immediately following up with some similar declaration assuring listeners we don’t think there’s any thing wrong with that.
Which isn't news to many of us.
But at the same time all this is happening between Islam in America and the media and public opinion, the black Christian community in America enjoys an almost complete immunity from the kinds of press or social criticisms that are so tiresomely repeated when it comes to white, Republican, or conservative political figures who so much as dare to mention the contents of their faith in relation to any official duty or setting. Google “theocracy” and you’ll see what I mean.
The immunity of the black church protects both the black clergy--and more important, black politicians--from challenges over the mixing of church and state, regardless of how porous the barrier is between religion and politics. Black preachers or quasi-religious figures like Jesse Jackson can go on talk TV and appeal to the lessons of the Sermon on the Mount or the Old Testament to blast political opponents, and you'll never hear a peep from interviewers, either liberal or conservative, that our political system is not based upon the Bible. Even on NPR black Christians can speak freely about the commands of Christ, completely free from the acidic ironies and sarcastic segues any white Christian daring the same thing would have to endure. Black churches regularly open their pulpits up to Democratic candidates, during services, to preach their campaign speeches, without check or balance.
This immunity isn’t a sign of the media’s respect for black Christians.
In the first place, liberals are among the most racist people on earth, and their patronizing view of blacks includes interpreting their "faith tradition" as a sociological component of an ethnically rich heritage, a colorful holdover from their slave heritage, like gospel music, collard greens, and the practice of matriarchy.
Public liberals are demonically intolerant of any overtly Christian speech that issues from any white man or non-minority, unless it's that sissy watered-down pap about a Christ who came to Earth to establish food banks and nuclear-free zones. But at the same time, these same liberals don’t find the preachments of black religion threatening at all, even if the message is theologically more conservative. That's because they know any religious strictures can be easily overcome, when needed, by the absolutes of leftist political theory. Tens of thousands of black clergy have proved them right.
If it weren’t for the manipulation of the black church by the Left, I wouldn’t think this immunity was all bad. For one thing, it's natural I don’t have the antipathy for Christianity that I admit having for Islam, as I’m a Christian myself, more or less. Nor does Christianity harbor at its heart a violent, triumphalist vision that historically manifests itself in subjecting nations, sexes, and unbelievers to slavery and humiliation by war and forced religious obedience. Christianity played a central role in the founding of the nation, and in spite of the irrational reactions against it prevalent at the moment, has never posed a threat to the survival of the Republic. If black Christians can get into the media and say things about Jesus without being censored when white folks can't, I see that as a good thing.
I also think that the immunity of black Christians might one day become the source of unbounded moral power--power to demand the right kind of change--the way that moral power was displayed briefly during the middle of the last century for a few short years of the civil rights movement. But that kind of moral power could only return at such time as the black clergy breaks their unholy bond with the political left and the Democratic Party. You simply can’t have moral power when you’re telling your congregation they must vote for candidates falling over themselves to legalize gay marriage and abort your babies to reduce crime.
This is a bigger subject than I thought it would get to be. I’ll try to say more about it later.
*We have recently figured out that America has been blessed with two "Minister Malik Shabazzes," both claiming to be leaders of the New Black Panther Party, both claiming to be proteges of Louis Farrakhan and Khalid Muhammaed of the Nation of Islam, and neither one apparently willing to admit the existence of the other. One is local to Detroit, the other has more national exposure, and is often seen baiting Bill O'Reilly on The O'Reilly Factor. For convenience sake, I'm referring to our local Shabazz as Malik "Motown" Shabazz, and the latter as Malik "Zulu" Shabazz, which is the middle name he chose for himself. [Minister Malik Shabazz has contacted me to protest that he and Zulu "get along fine." ]
Then again, just because we blog about Dearborn, doesn’t mean we’ve taken a vow never to speak of anything else, or anywhere else. Why would it? Especially when those other things are related to the issues of greatest interest to us here--like freedom of speech, Islamism, Israel, the Middle East, international jihadist terrorism, the mau-mauing of the press and government officials by mouthpiece organizations like CAIR. Last but not least, blogging offers no rewards such as money nor fame for the vast majority of us, so we should get to write about whatever we want.
As it happens I do think there are quite clear connections between the corrupt and venal Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and Islam, and also between the callow and shortsighted Senator Barack Obama and Islam, that make their situations relevant to us at DU. That connection subsists in the never-discussed mutual cooperation between clergymen in many of America’s black churches, and the Nation of Islam and other radical Islamist leaders who’ve made common cause with America’s left.
We’re witnessing it right now in the revelations about Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s debased thinking, who rewarded Farrakhan and paid homage to Khadafi, goddamned America and has presided over a cult in Chicago predicated on racism, class envy, urban myths, and whatever leftist bullshit he can make use of.
It was there to be noticed if anyone was inclined, when Farrakhan endorsed Kwame Kilpatrick for re-election in 2005, and when the local New Black Panther/Nation of Islam member Minister Malik “Motown”* Shabazz showed up to pray with the embattled Kilpatrick and some of his patronage partners in the unions. [CORRECTION: Minister Malik Shabazz has pointed out to me that I'm in error identifying him as a Muslim: he states, "I am not Muslim , I am a Christian who respects Islam." I gladly make the correction.]
Is Kingpin Kilpatrick a Muslim? Of course not. Why should he be? He’s already had his 72 houris, and then some, without having to set off a suicide belt to get them, and as Detroit's Highest Ranking Christian, he gets his ass hauled around in a black Escalade. (Not for much longer, though). Is Obama a Muslim? I have no reason to doubt his own statement that he’s a Christian. It doesn’t matter. Muslims aren’t supporting these guys because they’re brother Muslims, but because they’re useful to jihad. Because they’re useful idiots. (Don’t think so? Obama almost had this thing won. Why is he losing now? Because of his own devil’s bargain with the prancing charlatan in the safari surf shirts they can’t stop showing on Fox News.)
Within weeks after 9/11 the first cries of “Islamophobia” were going up. It was evident by then that America’s jihadist spokesmen were already blowing past the speed limit on the Victim Grievance Expressway first excavated and paved by the post-MLK civil rights community, and then taken over and improved upon by the homosexual lobby. The re-education of American editors and news anchors and Hollywood that took the civil rights community thirty years to accomplish, and the gays much less than that, was accomplished by CAIR and a few university Middle East studies professors in just a few weeks. “As early as October 2001, the Society of Professional Journalists provided guidelines to the American free press that jihad was to be defined as ‘to exert oneself for the good of Islam and to better oneself’”.
As noted continually in these pages, and much more thoroughly at Dhimmi Watch and other prominent blogs, Islam, and Muslims in America, are very nearly immune from criticism in the mainstream media, and enjoy a kind of affirmative action on many of their initiatives because folks are terrified of being called a name if they raise any criticisms.
In the 1990s Seinfeld was able to poke fun at the craven fear of giving offense we'd all been reduced to on the subject of homosexuality. The show as able to get away with ridiculing both the sacramental attitudes towards AIDS (“the ribbon Nazis”), and especially the strict prohibition of criticizing homosexuality per se by continually reassuring all listeners whenever the subject came up, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that!”
The American media, and most Americans, now are incapable of mentioning Islam or Muslims without immediately following up with some similar declaration assuring listeners we don’t think there’s any thing wrong with that.
Which isn't news to many of us.
But at the same time all this is happening between Islam in America and the media and public opinion, the black Christian community in America enjoys an almost complete immunity from the kinds of press or social criticisms that are so tiresomely repeated when it comes to white, Republican, or conservative political figures who so much as dare to mention the contents of their faith in relation to any official duty or setting. Google “theocracy” and you’ll see what I mean.
The immunity of the black church protects both the black clergy--and more important, black politicians--from challenges over the mixing of church and state, regardless of how porous the barrier is between religion and politics. Black preachers or quasi-religious figures like Jesse Jackson can go on talk TV and appeal to the lessons of the Sermon on the Mount or the Old Testament to blast political opponents, and you'll never hear a peep from interviewers, either liberal or conservative, that our political system is not based upon the Bible. Even on NPR black Christians can speak freely about the commands of Christ, completely free from the acidic ironies and sarcastic segues any white Christian daring the same thing would have to endure. Black churches regularly open their pulpits up to Democratic candidates, during services, to preach their campaign speeches, without check or balance.
This immunity isn’t a sign of the media’s respect for black Christians.
In the first place, liberals are among the most racist people on earth, and their patronizing view of blacks includes interpreting their "faith tradition" as a sociological component of an ethnically rich heritage, a colorful holdover from their slave heritage, like gospel music, collard greens, and the practice of matriarchy.
Public liberals are demonically intolerant of any overtly Christian speech that issues from any white man or non-minority, unless it's that sissy watered-down pap about a Christ who came to Earth to establish food banks and nuclear-free zones. But at the same time, these same liberals don’t find the preachments of black religion threatening at all, even if the message is theologically more conservative. That's because they know any religious strictures can be easily overcome, when needed, by the absolutes of leftist political theory. Tens of thousands of black clergy have proved them right.
If it weren’t for the manipulation of the black church by the Left, I wouldn’t think this immunity was all bad. For one thing, it's natural I don’t have the antipathy for Christianity that I admit having for Islam, as I’m a Christian myself, more or less. Nor does Christianity harbor at its heart a violent, triumphalist vision that historically manifests itself in subjecting nations, sexes, and unbelievers to slavery and humiliation by war and forced religious obedience. Christianity played a central role in the founding of the nation, and in spite of the irrational reactions against it prevalent at the moment, has never posed a threat to the survival of the Republic. If black Christians can get into the media and say things about Jesus without being censored when white folks can't, I see that as a good thing.
I also think that the immunity of black Christians might one day become the source of unbounded moral power--power to demand the right kind of change--the way that moral power was displayed briefly during the middle of the last century for a few short years of the civil rights movement. But that kind of moral power could only return at such time as the black clergy breaks their unholy bond with the political left and the Democratic Party. You simply can’t have moral power when you’re telling your congregation they must vote for candidates falling over themselves to legalize gay marriage and abort your babies to reduce crime.
This is a bigger subject than I thought it would get to be. I’ll try to say more about it later.
*We have recently figured out that America has been blessed with two "Minister Malik Shabazzes," both claiming to be leaders of the New Black Panther Party, both claiming to be proteges of Louis Farrakhan and Khalid Muhammaed of the Nation of Islam, and neither one apparently willing to admit the existence of the other. One is local to Detroit, the other has more national exposure, and is often seen baiting Bill O'Reilly on The O'Reilly Factor. For convenience sake, I'm referring to our local Shabazz as Malik "Motown" Shabazz, and the latter as Malik "Zulu" Shabazz, which is the middle name he chose for himself. [Minister Malik Shabazz has contacted me to protest that he and Zulu "get along fine." ]
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Media Still Confused About Who the Enemy Is
Jeffrey Imm at Counterterrorism Blog has written about how the refusal of America's free press, like the Washington Post and the New York Times, have failed to define the jihadist enemy in a clear, consistent way, with the result that much of the the public is still confused, six years after 9/11, with whom we're fighting. ("Jihad, Islamism, and the American Free Press").
Without a precise definition of the enemy by American political leadership, major segments of the American free press have made their own foreign policy decisions as to who is and is not an enemy, made their own decisions on what terms like "Islamism" and "Jihad" mean (if they use such terms at all), and provided mostly "isolated incident"-style reporting on such subjects, with the exception of the largely anti-war colored reporting on Iraq.
The result, he writes, is that
instead of much of the American free press being used to largely address and confront enemy anti-freedom ideologies and their adherents, such media has been manipulated by editorial managers, publishers, and Islamist groups to focus their investigative reporting on the American government's reaction to Islamist terrorism. As much of American government actions are based on a reaction without a defined enemy, there has been plenty of source material for press critiques and for press managers to gain political points against an unpopular administration.
But as made clear last week in speeches by leaders of the Washington Post and the Associated Press, the larger issue of "Islamism" itself, its role as the root of "Islamist terrorism" (as defined in the 9/11 Commission Report), and coherent news reporting on the continuing global links between political Islamism and such Islamist terrorism is not even an objective of much of the American free press. The reactive political sniping agenda by much of the American press' reporting not only misses the larger issue, but also fails to understand that anti-freedom ideologies like Islamism are a threat to a free press itself.
Imm explains how basic and definable terms such as "Islamism" and "jihad," terms even Al Jazeerah uses, are unacceptable terms to the media now:
On March 3, Philip Bennett, the Washington Post's managing editor, gave a speech at the University of California Irvine (UCI) on Journalism and Islam, where it was reported that he believes the media is responsible for confusion about Islam, which is due to the lack of Muslims in American newsrooms (in his opinion). The Daily Pilot, a local newspaper, also reported that Washington Post's Philip Bennett stated that the term "Islamist" is something that the Washington Post editors still have not decided whether to add it to their style book. In Mr. Bennett's speech, he didn't even consider to qualify the need to have greater numbers of anti-Islamist Muslims represented in American newsrooms, because he and his Washington Post editors have not even decided whether to recognize political Islamism as a term they can use, let alone an anti-freedom ideology to be confronted.
Apparently, the Washington Post editors have not yet read the 2004-released 9/11 Commission Report where "Islamist Terrorism" is defined as a component of "Islamism". In 2008, nearly four years later, the Washington Post is still considering whether the very term "Islamist" is acceptable. Even Al Jazeera uses the term "Islamism", but over six years after the 9/11 attacks, the Washington Post is still thinking about it. Rather than being embarrassed by such mental paralysis in news reporting, the Washington Post's managing editor is proud of this failure and discusses this failure in speeches to universities. Moreover, when real investigative groups such as The Investigative Project challenge Islamist individuals and groups, the Washington Post's response is exemplified by its reporting on Esam Omeish, reporting the accusations of known Stalinists accusing IPT reports on Omeish as those of "right-wing anti-Muslim bigots".
Such deliberate unwillingness among American media to address the ideology of Islamism and its links to Islamist terrorism or Jihad is not limited to the Washington Post. As early as October 2001, the Society of Professional Journalists provided guidelines to the American free press that jihad was to be defined as "to exert oneself for the good of Islam and to better oneself".
This desire by "mainstream media" managers to "filter" and "shape" the news by deliberate ignorance of ideologies, language, and connections between events continues to be an ongoing threat to our free press - one that has largely necessitated the explosion of Internet blogs to simply provide a vehicle to report the news.
Read the rest of this well-researched and excellent analysis here.
Without a precise definition of the enemy by American political leadership, major segments of the American free press have made their own foreign policy decisions as to who is and is not an enemy, made their own decisions on what terms like "Islamism" and "Jihad" mean (if they use such terms at all), and provided mostly "isolated incident"-style reporting on such subjects, with the exception of the largely anti-war colored reporting on Iraq.
The result, he writes, is that
instead of much of the American free press being used to largely address and confront enemy anti-freedom ideologies and their adherents, such media has been manipulated by editorial managers, publishers, and Islamist groups to focus their investigative reporting on the American government's reaction to Islamist terrorism. As much of American government actions are based on a reaction without a defined enemy, there has been plenty of source material for press critiques and for press managers to gain political points against an unpopular administration.
But as made clear last week in speeches by leaders of the Washington Post and the Associated Press, the larger issue of "Islamism" itself, its role as the root of "Islamist terrorism" (as defined in the 9/11 Commission Report), and coherent news reporting on the continuing global links between political Islamism and such Islamist terrorism is not even an objective of much of the American free press. The reactive political sniping agenda by much of the American press' reporting not only misses the larger issue, but also fails to understand that anti-freedom ideologies like Islamism are a threat to a free press itself.
Imm explains how basic and definable terms such as "Islamism" and "jihad," terms even Al Jazeerah uses, are unacceptable terms to the media now:
On March 3, Philip Bennett, the Washington Post's managing editor, gave a speech at the University of California Irvine (UCI) on Journalism and Islam, where it was reported that he believes the media is responsible for confusion about Islam, which is due to the lack of Muslims in American newsrooms (in his opinion). The Daily Pilot, a local newspaper, also reported that Washington Post's Philip Bennett stated that the term "Islamist" is something that the Washington Post editors still have not decided whether to add it to their style book. In Mr. Bennett's speech, he didn't even consider to qualify the need to have greater numbers of anti-Islamist Muslims represented in American newsrooms, because he and his Washington Post editors have not even decided whether to recognize political Islamism as a term they can use, let alone an anti-freedom ideology to be confronted.
Apparently, the Washington Post editors have not yet read the 2004-released 9/11 Commission Report where "Islamist Terrorism" is defined as a component of "Islamism". In 2008, nearly four years later, the Washington Post is still considering whether the very term "Islamist" is acceptable. Even Al Jazeera uses the term "Islamism", but over six years after the 9/11 attacks, the Washington Post is still thinking about it. Rather than being embarrassed by such mental paralysis in news reporting, the Washington Post's managing editor is proud of this failure and discusses this failure in speeches to universities. Moreover, when real investigative groups such as The Investigative Project challenge Islamist individuals and groups, the Washington Post's response is exemplified by its reporting on Esam Omeish, reporting the accusations of known Stalinists accusing IPT reports on Omeish as those of "right-wing anti-Muslim bigots".
Such deliberate unwillingness among American media to address the ideology of Islamism and its links to Islamist terrorism or Jihad is not limited to the Washington Post. As early as October 2001, the Society of Professional Journalists provided guidelines to the American free press that jihad was to be defined as "to exert oneself for the good of Islam and to better oneself".
This desire by "mainstream media" managers to "filter" and "shape" the news by deliberate ignorance of ideologies, language, and connections between events continues to be an ongoing threat to our free press - one that has largely necessitated the explosion of Internet blogs to simply provide a vehicle to report the news.
Read the rest of this well-researched and excellent analysis here.
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