You have to read Andrew McCarthy’s book, The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, to get the whole story, but this is a good (and worrisome) introduction:

Liam Neeson’s flirting with converting to Islam, a religious quest made possible by the fact that the religion has great calls to prayer and everyone does it (at least in Muslim countries) — and, no, I’m not exaggerating when I belittle his expressed motive when he contemplates abandoning the Catholicism of his childhood in exchange for the religion of perpetual outrage:

On filming in Istanbul, Neeson told British rag The Sun: “The call to prayer happens five times a day, and for the first week, it drives you crazy, and then it just gets into your spirit, and it’s the most beautiful, beautiful thing… There are 4,000 mosques in the city. Some are just stunning, and it really makes me think about becoming a Muslim.”

Just to be clear, Neeson makes no mention of spiritual or doctrinal failings in his childhood faith, nor does he speak in any way of the profound procedural and moral changes he’d have to make to his life if he did indeed convert.

Thinking about it, Neeson may be on to something here, with his shallow belief that he can go on as before, just singing a slightly different song along with the muezzin.  As my cousin, who spent years ministering as a prison chaplain, wrote me in connection with prison conversions to Islam:

It is not a contradiction to be a Muslim and a murderer, even a mass murderer. That is one reason why criminals “convert” to Islam in prison. They don’t convert at all; they similarly remain the angry judgmental vicious beings they always have been. They simply add “religious” diatribes to their personal invective. Islam does not inspire a crisis of conscience, just inspirations to outrage.

Prisoners use conversion to justify their rage. Neeson’s admiring little speech indicates that at least one movie star type seems to being using it to justify just how shallow he really, truly is.

The only thing I find disheartening about this piece of idiocy is that it might affect my viewing habits.  For example, I never listen to Cat Stevens’ music.  It’s not conscious censorship on my part, as in “Everyone should boycott that man because he converted to Islam.”  It’s a more informal, visceral response.  Every time I hear one of his songs lovey-dovey 1970s pop songs, I get hacked off at the fact that he is now a vocal, proselytzing enthusiast for the whole Muslim package:  death to the Jews, death to America, women wrapped in tents, dead gays, etc.  My blood pressure shoots up, and then I turn the music off.  Fortunately, Snoop Doggs’ conversion doesn’t affect me because I wouldn’t have listened to his songs before conversion, and I’m certainly not going to listen to them now.

But Neeson . . . ummm.  You see, I like the Narnia movies.  I love the first, like the second, and am looking forward to watching the third (the delay is a Netflix thing, meaning that I put it on the list and Mr. Bookworm takes it off).  It was bad enough when Neeson foolishly denied that Aslan was an allegorical Christ.  It’s high blood pressure time, though, if the actor who voices the allegorical Christ has converted to a faith antithetical to everything C.S. Lewis intended to convey through those wonderful books.

This one ran yesterday at the PJ Tatler, and I forgot to republish it here.  Since it’s a day late, I figure I can just block and copy the whole thing:

I’m not a fan of extremely revealing or tight clothing. Even in my younger days, when I could get away with it, it wasn’t my style. There’s something to be said for a little mystery and a lot of class. Nevertheless, an ad for “modest swimwear” managed to make my eyeballs pop a little:

The first funny thing to strike me is the fact that, thanks to the way computer algorithms process words, an ad for full coverage swimwear — something aimed primarily at the Muslim market — ended up on a Commentary Magazine blog post that talks about the repression that too often goes with mandatory hijabs in Muslim countries.

The second funny thing is that the models used are remarkably non-Muslim looking. And yes, I know that “Muslim” is not a racial classification, but demographically it trends towards non-blondes.  These models, however, look as if they come from the little known Northern European Muslim demographic.

And the third funny thing is that the ad company went overboard with Photoshopping to make the models skinny. The women in the black suit has a right arm so skeletal she looks mortally ill, while the woman in the maroon suit has stick thighs and a bizarrely large head. We know that this type of digitized airbrushing is routinely done with models stripped down to their skivvies, but there’s something ludicrous about seeing the same tactic applied to models wearing clothes that could comfortably have appeared in a Victorian fashion magazine:

Here’s a Robert Samuelson article, “bye bye Keynes” that should give us all pause: the arguments he uses to write Keynes’ obituary are arguments that we all posited in our own excoriation of Keynes in years past, in response to a string of commentators, ranging from A to Z.

I’ve been reviewing our last few years at Bookworm Room and I think that we all deserve a round of huzzas and raised beer mugs or wine glasses, whatever is at hand. We’ve been so right about so many issues, be it “Keynesian”economics; anthropogenic global warming; the Islamist threat; U.S. fossil fuel reserves; “green” energy; Iraq; Obama; the EU’s collapse…and on and on und so weiter.  Sometimes, our prescience has preceded events on the ground by years.

To all of you Bookworm guests and, especially, to Bookworm, our hostess: I’m so d*** proud to know you! I am so much smarter for having enjoyed the many experiences of your insights and commentary.

Was it a surprise to you that Egypt went Islamist?  It wasn’t to me.

Was it a surprise to you that Libya went Islamist?  It wasn’t to me.

Was it a surprise to you that Tunisia went Islamist?  It wasn’t to me.

Has it been a surprise to you over the last decade that Iraq hasn’t bloomed into the Middle Eastern equivalent of small town America?  It hasn’t been for me.

If any of the above surprised you, my guess is that you worked for the Bush administration or are working for the Obama administration.  The first group naively believed that, if you gave people the vote, they would vote for freedom, not repression.  As for the second group, I don’t know if they shared that same naiveté, or if they’re truly bad people.

Anyone who has been paying attention to the Middle East has understood that, for many citizens in those benighted nations, Islamist government promises purity in lieu of deep, violent corruption.  The people there don’t understand the notion of freedom, but they’re very much alive to hypocrisy — and their Imams have been promising that this is the one thing they won’t get under an Islamist government.  Islam will bring them the peace of total submission to God’s rules, rather than the instability and terror of individual tyranny.

For people who have spent decades on the receiving end of arbitrary and capricious pseudo-Western governments, all the while hearing that their faith will provide honesty and peace, the outcome of elections was a no-brainer.  Lacking the one and a half centuries of self-governance that America had before she even embarked upon her Constitutional experiment, the notion of freedom and individual rights has no resonance.  Sure, some understand it, but for most freedom simply means not being bossed around by a Mubarak or Saddam or Gaddafi.

Mark Steyn ranks with me as being one of the un-surprised — and he recognizes how our blindness abroad leads to threats at home.

I’ll add too that relentless PC multiculturalism, which lauds every culture but our own, is de-programming the love of freedom bred into American DNA, and is therefore probably the greatest internal threat we face.

For years, I’ve been trying to articulate the difference between good immigrants and bad immigrants, meaning those that benefit a country and those that I’d like to see kept out.  This has become a particularly pointed concern for me in light of the PC attitude that encourages immigrants of all stripes not to give their allegiance to their home country.  Clifford D. May, in an article about Bat Ye’or’s latest book regarding the inevitable Muslimization of PC Europe, puts together in a single paragraph the concept I’ve struggled with for so long:

Immigrants can enrich a nation. But there is a difference between immigrants and colonists. The former are eager to learn the ways of their adopted home, to integrate and perhaps assimilate — which does not require relinquishing their heritage or forgetting their roots. Colonists, by contrast, bring their culture with them and live under their own laws. Their loyalties lie elsewhere.

It’s a depressing notion, but it is a relief to see it summed up so neatly.

I noted when I was in London that the City was filled with obvious Muslims (by which I mean burqa-ed and hijab-ed women, and their male escorts).  London, though, still felt like a modern western city.  Not so other cities in Europe.  Andrew McCarthy explains why, and warns us that the Obama administration is trying to take us down the same ideological road that led to sharia-only enclaves dotting Europe.

Just the facts, and you get to reach your own conclusion:

• Huma Abedin spent her formative years in Saudi Arabia.
• Huma’s mother is a member of the female branch of the Muslim Brotherhood
• While Huma was growing up, her father was a member of an organization closely linked to the Muslim Brotherhood.
• Huma’s brother works closely with members of the Muslim Brotherhood.
• Huma is herself a practicing Muslim.
• Muslim women cannot marry non-Muslim men.  If the man doesn’t convert, the marriage is not recognized.
• Anthony Weiner was raised Jewish and not publicly disavowed his faith.
• Bill Clinton officiated at Huma’s wedding to Anthony Weiner.
• Anthony Weiner was until recently a member of Congress.
• There is no way to know when Weiner started engaging in inappropriate sexual behavior.
• Huma is so tight with Hillary Clinton that, for many years, there were rumors that the two were lovers.
• Hillary Clinton is America’s Secretary of State, one of the most powerful international positions in the world.

(I’m too lazy and rushed to collected links, but each of the above statements is verifiable.)

UPDATE:  One last fact — The Muslim Brotherhood is not friendly towards America.

UPDATE II:  Robert Avrech reports on a deeply disturbing aspect of the whole Huma/Weiner thing, which again shows a complicit media — although it’s a little hard to tell whether it’s complicit in something solidly dangerous or just complicit in the usual dhimmitude that passes for reporting nowadays.  Add People Magazine to the list of products I’d stop buying if I actually bought them in the first place.

In the wake of Weinergate, a lot of people were pointing out that Weiner left himself open to some serious blackmail.  Given the fact that he’s not a fishmonger but is, instead, a member of Congress, the blackmail implications affect all of us.

It turns out, though, that this may be the least of our worries when it comes to Weiner.  Huma Abedin, his elegant wife, who is Hillary’s closest companion (so much so that there were rumors some years ago that they were lovers), has Muslim Brotherhood connections.  And yes, I know you’ve heard that before, but Rob, at Joshua Pundit builds on that basic fact to explain why it actually matters, as opposed to having mere headline value.

Both the SEALS and Charlie Sheen have been in the news lately, the SEALS for an extraordinarily well-planned, brave and effective operation, and Charlie Sheen because he’s a drugged-out piece of human detritus.  Did you know, though, that the two — that is, the SEALS and Sheen — have something in common?  Yup, they do:  A movie!

Back in 1990, Charlie Sheen starred in a movie called Navy SEALS, with Sheen playing (cough, cough, giggle) the second in command of a SEAL platoon.  You can read the silly, turgid and formulaic plot here.

The one interesting thing about the movie, aside from Sheen’s role as a (cough, cough, giggle) SEAL commander, is that the movie has a Muslim as the terrorist bad guy.  The seeds for PC are already in place, because the terrorist gets to explain that his terrorism was inspired, not by his religion and culture, but as revenge for the fact that the U.S. Navy bombed his home.  Nevertheless, the mere fact that Hollywood could even contemplate a Muslim bad guy just 21 years ago reminds us how far our country has traveled down the dhimmi, politically correct road to its own destruction.

If you need a good laugh tonight, here’s the original trailer:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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