Fort Hood: Workplace violence or act of terror?

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If you think the Fort Hood massacre was a terrorist act by a determined jihadist, rather than an “act of workplace violence that was coincidentally committed by a Muslim who spouted jihadist rhetoric,” consider signing National Review’s petition at Change.org:

Petitioning Chuck Hagel

The Ft. Hood massacre was an Act of Terror

Petition by National Review

The Fort Hood massacre was an act of war carried out by a violent jihadist who had infiltrated our Armed Forces while taking advice and encouragement from Anwar al-Awlaki, who was so clearly an al Qaeda commander that President Obama authorized his wartime killing by a drone strike. We are a nation at war based on a congressional authorization of military force enacted after al Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 Americans in the atrocities of September 11, 2001. If the war is to be waged seriously, the government must recognize that the Fort Hood massacre – in which twice as many Americans were killed as were killed in the jihadist bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 – was an act of terrorism committed by the enemy. We must honor the sacrifice of those killed and wounded at Fort Hood by acknowledging its true context.

To: Chuck Hagel, Secretary of Defense, U.S. Department of Defense

The Administration has designated the Ft. Hood massacre as workplace violence, and not what it was: an Act of Terror. By not designating this event as such an act, it disrespects the lives of the 13 who lost their lives that day, and dozens more who were injured and those helped their fellow soldiers.

Furthermore, Nidal Hassan will not be tried as an enemy combatant, but instead will be court-martialed.

Finally, without an Act of Terror designation, those wounded in defense of our nation will not receive a Purple Heart.

This is outrageous and I call on you to change the official designation now before the trial for Nidal Hassan proceeds any further.

Sincerely,
[Your name]

As of this moment, 340 people have signed the petition.  National Review is looking for 10,000.

Hat tip: Earl

Sweden fiddles while Stockholm burns

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When multiple people send me a link to the same story, it’s obvious that I must talk about it.  The story, which seems impossible to believe but is in fact true, concerns the Swede’s creative approach to dealing with those “youths” who are currently entering their sixth (or is it seventh) day of rioting in Stockholm.

Before I focus on the Swedes, I should say here that it seems downright cavalier for me to remind anyone that these “youths” are Muslims who refuse to assimilate.  After all, Sweden doesn’t want to talk about it, and those of us with a few non-PC brain cells left have figured it out anyway.

In this regard, the PC crowd has managed to turn Muslim “youths” into the Victorian equivalent of piano legs.  Victorians, horrified by the crude honesty of the word “leg,” are reputed to have referred to these piano appendages as “limbs” when they referred to them at all, and some are believed to have gone so far as to cover them with skirts.  Some realities are just too dreadful to contemplate.

As with those piano “limbs,” we know that Muslim rioters are there, but the reality is so devastating for delicate sensibilities that the fine minds on the PC side of the spectrum have concluded that we must refer to them as “youths,” if we have to refer to them at all.  They understand that those with dirty (or racist) minds will know what lurks beneath these gauzy, veiled allusions,  while the pure will be protected from ugly truths.

Now back to Sweden’s creative approach to these euphemistically named “youths”:  Swedish law enforcement is doing nothing at all.  Rather like the Londoners who just milled about aimlessly when the Woolwich murderers slaughtered and then butchered Drummer Lee Rigby, and then trolled the streets for attention and applause, the Swedish police are merely “monitoring” the riots:

But while the Stockholm riots keep spreading and intensifying, Swedish police have adopted a tactic of non-interference. ”Our ambition is really to do as little as possible,” Stockholm Chief of Police Mats Löfving explained to the Swedish newspaper Expressen on Tuesday.

”We go to the crime scenes, but when we get there we stand and wait,” elaborated Lars Byström, the media relations officer of the Stockholm Police Department. ”If we see a burning car, we let it burn if there is no risk of the fire spreading to other cars or buildings nearby. By doing so we minimize the risk of having rocks thrown at us.”

The Swedes seem to operate under the peculiar belief that Muslim rage will burn itself out.  In fact, Muslim rage may be the one thing that can refute those who rely upon the non-Prophet-approved laws of physics to claim that there is no such thing as “perpetual motion.”  We now know that there is definitely such a thing as “perpetual emotion,” with the laws of physics falling before the reality of Muslim rage.

Muslim rage is a perpetual fire that has burned untamed for more than 1,500 years.  The closest analogy is probably to those burning mountains of tires one reads about periodically.  They, by the mere act of burning, release ever more fuel to stoke their own perpetual flames.

However, even as the Muslim rage caravans passes by, once the dogs of war stop barking, life go on.  In Sweden, while the rioters get a pass, law-abiding Swedes are still in the line of fire.  The Swedish equivalent of “lovely Rita, meter maid” is undeterred by snow, sleet, rain, dark of night, or riot in the streets.  Car owners who were unlucky enough to see their cars go up in flames are getting one more grain of salt rubbed into their still smoldering wounds:

Photo by Fria Tider of Swedish meter maid at work

Swedish parking laws, however, continue to be rigidly enforced despite the increasingly chaotic situation. Early Wednesday, while documenting the destruction after a night of rioting in the Stockholm suburb of Alby, a reporter from Fria Tider observed a parking enforcement officer writing a ticket for a burnt-out Ford.

When questioned, the officer explained that the ticket was issued because the vehicle lacked a tag showing its time of arrival. The fact that the vehicle had been effectively destroyed – its windshield smashed and the interior heavily damaged by fire – was irrelevant according to the meter maid, who asked Fria Tider’s photographer to destroy the photos he had taken.

Everyone who sent me an email telling me about this story alluded in some way or another to Nero, who was widely reputed to have set Rome on fire so that he could rebuild it as a city worthy of his magnificence, and then to have serenaded himself with the fiddle as the city burned around him.  While that story is almost certainly untrue (the city probably burned because it had a lot of wood, a lot of refuse, and a lot of open flames, and Nero couldn’t have “fiddled” because fiddles didn’t exist), Sweden’s feckless behavior is a reality.

Nero is a cute analogy, but not a useful one.  I find Sydney Smith’s tale of Dame Partington’s battle with the Atlantic a little more on point, except that Sweden, rather than doing battle against the jihadist storm gathering against her, is issuing citations against those who aren’t wearing proper swim attire:

In the midst of this sublime and terrible storm [at Sidmouth], Dame Partington, who lived upon the beach, was seen at the door of her house with mop and pattens, trundling her mop, squeezing out the sea-water, and vigorously pushing away the Atlantic Ocean. The Atlantic was roused; Mrs. Partington’s spirit was up. But I need not tell you that the contest was unequal; the Atlantic Ocean beat Mrs. Partington.

At the end of the day, Sweden (and the rest of Europe) lacking Dame Partington’s fighting spirit, will be inundated more quickly even than she was, and will discover that the real problem was never the missing swimsuits.

One more thing.  On the subject of “youths”:

 

A quick riff on yesterday’s events in London

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Beheading is a peculiarly devastating form of murder, more so than shooting or stabbing. Human identity is tied to the head. From birth, we are programmed to recognize faces and voices. It’s the human face and the mind behind it that separate us, not only from other animals, but from each other: The contents of our minds and the features of our faces are what make us unique. Decapitation therefore doesn’t just kill people, it effectively erases them. It seems fitting, somehow, that jihadists who buy into an extremist Islam that demands complete submission – the denial of the individual — would use beheading as their preferred form of execution.

The Islamic-inspired murder of a British soldier yesterday on London’s streets horrifies us because the men who carried out sought, not just to kill a man, but to erase him. The brave women who stepped forward to challenge these men remind us that, at least for now, in the West individualism still exists. The entire event, which played out before witnesses who were tweeting, photographing and videoing, therefore had a bizarre, Kabuki-quality to it, as if the actors were carrying out culturally defined roles in a play.

Richard Fernandez noticed much the same thing, only he said it a lot better than I could:

This incident illustrates, if nothing else, the endpoint of the social engineering of the West. It has been remarkably effective.

From a certain point of view, the British crowd behaved perfectly and this is the way “they” all want us to behave. The populace sheltered in place, didn’t do anything rash, talked to the perpetrators as people. They waited for the police to come and the hospital helicopter to take the corpse away. Some will doubtless get counseling to overcome their shattering experience.

And then they will congratulate themselves on how tough British society is; resilience and all that. The more caring will leave some flowers by a railing and hold a few candle vigils for healing and peace, until these wither and blow away and the news cycle washes up a new object of attention.

The attackers knew they were actors in a drama — as keenly watched in their communities as on the BBC. And in that other audience they were asking: “How will the locals behave?” We know now. And that other audience may derive an entirely different lesson from this tableau: “See? Only their women act like men. They follow orders. They are nothing anymore — these Westerners. They are a civilization whose core has been destroyed.”

Well, exactly.

What Richard didn’t know yet when he wrote those words is that, while Prime Minister Cameron did so the attack was terrorism, the Department of Defence had a different response:  it told its troops to shed their uniforms when on British streets.  The DOD assured everyone that this was a temporary move, while they figured out what to do, but the fact is that the damage was done the moment the order went out.  The once mighty British Empire had been told to stand down.  When I saw the Scottish play “The Black Watch,” I wondered whether it spoke to the end of the British soldier.  The verdict is still out on the troops, but that’s irrelevant.  Without leadership, even the best troops in the world are pointless.  They’re merely victims along with everyone else.  England has been turned into one vast field of sheeples, watched over by the wolves her Labor government deliberately invited in in order to destroy the Tory party.  (And yes, of course I’m thinking of the Gang of Eight’s amnesty . . . er, immigration reform bill.)

One more thing.  While I was trolling through my overflowing email inbox yesterday, I found a link a friend had sent me shortly after the Boston Marathon Bombing, in which Leftist talking head (or do I mean writing hand?) Marc Ambinder says “Folks, you must stop blaming Islam” and then tells us that America’s gun culture was the reason the Tsarnaev brothers killed.  Now we know, of course, that Islam was why the Tsarnaev brothers killed.

Ambinder is right that in America we have free speech, that people are allowed to disagree on things, and that ugly ideas can exist as long as they don’t become ugly acts.  Islam, though, is sui generis because the Western idea of free speech and individualism is predicated upon voluntary assimilation.  We allow things to happen on the fringe because we assume that everyone will gravitate to the bell curve portion of society, and embrace society’s values, whatever they happen to be.  Islam, however, does not assimilate.

Think about that for a minute, because it’s a rather staggering concept.  One of the hallmarks of being human is that we adapt.  I do believe that only cockroaches have the ability to adapt to as many climates, including extreme climates, as we do.  For humans to have adopted a mindset so impenetrable that it is incapable of change is really amazing.  In any group, of course, you’ll have some people who are more adaptable than others, but we’re talking about a religion/worldview that renders adaption impossible.

When I was a child, my parents told me (rightly or wrongly) that Turkish soldiers could not be brainwashed.  They were so self-assured in their Turkishness that they were invulnerable to lies, blandishments, fantasies, etc.  They were Turks.  End of story.  It occurs to me now that this myth might have been true, not in terms of modern, secular Turks, but in terms of the Janissaries, who were the most elite soldiers of the Muslim Ottoman Empire.  Once your brain has been steeped in Islam, perhaps you become incapable of blending….

The Boston bombers and political correctness — by guest blogger Lulu

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The elephant in the middle of the room that no one seems to want to look at is that there are people in this country, perhaps many people, who have been welcomed into this country, lived here for quite a while, embraced by Americans and treated kindly, who smile at you and seem perfectly normal, and who would happily kill you as an infidel. All of Dzhokhar’s college pals who shared joints, partied together, and played on sports teams together are shocked, and who can blame them, because he seemed so nice and normal and settled. What they don’t understand is that he only seemed nice. For quite awhile, inside he thought they were all infidels worthy of murder for the cause. It could have been all of them in the dorm or a classroom, smiles and pleasantries forgotten. He and his brother chose another more symbolic venue to declare their jihad and hatred of America and infidels, but he would have killed his dormmates, teammates or classmates just as happily.

That’s scary and unsettling. Who wants to think that people who smile and eat lunch with us may be putting on an elaborate act, that behind the smile lies a hatred deep enough to put a bomb next to a defenseless child and kill him, horribly maim dozens of others, then go back to school, refer to himself as a “stress free kind of guy” on twitter, hit the gym, and fool the dupes around him. This is the definition of evil. Evil exists when sane people follow an evil ideology, or when people are sociopathic and warped. Which are the Boston jihadists? They are both. They show a callous indifference to human life and no doubt a triumphal game of returning to the dorm or daily routine, easy as pie, F*&% America and its slutty women and unbelievers.

The Boston politically correct brigade will try to understand them and explain their deeds, as if planting a bomb next to kids in a crowd of people enjoying a race can be explained in any way by anything we did, as if anything—anything—can explain their decision to wage jihad at the Boston Marathon. The media and academia have become accustomed to blaming external factors for everything; school failure, criminal activity, gangs, violence. But other immigrant kids don’t do this. Not every kid who feels alienated does this. Hell, not even every kid who hates America does this. The deeds of Dzhokhar and Tamerlin Tsarnaev reflect their choices and their values. Their playing a “nice guy” role to their American friends and acquaintances reflects choices and values too. They weren’t teased or bullied. You kidding? A Golden Gloves boxer and a wrestling champ? More likely they were welcomed and treated decently by naïve people perhaps, but people far better than they, people that don’t live deceitful, fraudulent lives, plotting murder with a smile on their faces.
The question for us, knowing that there are others like the Boston jihadists living here and smiling at us, is what do we do? How do we stay open as a society and safe? If the majority of decent, law abiding Moslems are appalled by these actions, how do we get them to engage in protest and widespread condemnation of the acts, instead of defensive accusations that they might be picked on? How do we become a society that accepts personal responsibility again? How do we become a people who again can face that true evil exists in the ideology of the brothers and must be fought as hard and devotedly as we fought the true evil that existed in Nazi ideology.

Islam — the ultimate umbrella organization for violent malcontents

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Turban Bomb

As was to be expected (and all of you predicted), the media is rushing to indict . . . America for having failed to give two Chechen immigrant brothers the love they needed.  Because of this, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26 years old, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19 old, became disaffected losers longing to kill.  Or, as their uncle, Ruslan Tsarni of Maryland, told reporters: “This has nothing to do with Chechnya.” Instead the Bomb Brothers were “losers — not being able to settle themselves [in America] and thereby just hating everyone who did.”

There’s your narrative:  this was just like Columbine all over again.  Islam was merely a religious bagatelle attached to two young men who would have been ticking time bombs regardless.  And most importantly as far as the Left is concerned, there’s no indication that these boys acted under al Qaeda’s guidance.  They were truly Americanized in that they were self-starters, arriving at terrorism due to their own disaffection and diligence.

To which I say, who cares about al Qaeda?  al Qaeda does not have to be involved in every attack before the bombing can be labeled as bona fide Islamic terrorism.  al Qaeda is just one head of the hydra.  It’s not the beast itself.

The problem is Islam — by which I don’t mean the garden-variety faith that millions of people practice as a party of their ordinary, non-hate-filled lives.  That’s a housebroken version of Islam, and I highly approve of it.

No, the problem is the very core of Islam — its Jihad element — which is a magnet for disaffected people.  The chicken and egg debate (i.e., which came first, Islam or disaffection?) is irrelevant.  The only thing relevant is that Islam comes last, right before the bomb explodes.  Whether Islam breeds terrorists or just provides an attractive justification for malevolent people doesn’t matter.  There it is, sitting like a big ticking egg, just waiting to go BOOM!

chicken_or_egg

I’ve quoted my cousin, the former prison minister (Christian), dozens of times here, but I think it’s important to say again what he once wrote in an email to me:

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 [sic] 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.

The core of Islam, which is built around Mohammad’s demands that his followers go forth and kill, both creates and attracts killers.  Until we address and de-fang Islam, there will always be “disaffected,” “lone wolves,” who just “coincidentally” have as their last words “Allahu Akhbar.”

European surrender

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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.

Principled, but suicidally stupid

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I’m deeply impressed by the integrity of those peace activists who are willing to challenge Obama, just as they did Bush.  They are free from the hypocrisy of those who took to the streets for one president while giving the next a pass.

Having said that, war is a useful device when a culture is bound and determined to kill you.  I’m not a fan of having my airplanes bombed, my airplanes turned into bombs, my subways destroyed, my nightclubs bombed, and various and sundry people being beheaded all over the place.  Nor am I going to enjoy life much when, as a female,  I’m swathed in a burqa and basically consigned to permanent house arrest.

Turning the other cheek in a mild dispute bespeaks a certain amount of grace; turning it in an existential battle, however, is suicidal stupidity.

The Huma problem

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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.

In the mad, mad, mad world of PC, silly little jokes about Islamist terrorists have only a one minute shelf life

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This morning, my friend Kim Priestap sent a group of us an email telling about the Yemeni man arrested for trying to yank open the cockpit door while hollering the standard “Allahu Akbar!”  Lee DeCovnik thinks we might have been seeing a dry run.  The man apparently raced from one end of the plane (the bathroom in the rear) all the way up to the front (the cockpit), and then tried to open the door:

There were a couple of disturbing items in this dry run. First, this was a single “dry runner” who was most likely timing the walk from the rear lavatory and the noting response from the aircrew, while shouting “Allahu Akbar.” We also know that other dry runs have had up to 13 possible hijackers on a single flight. Was this a dry run of the initial diversion, where the real action may start in the rear of the aircraft, where aircrews are often located?

Second, this dry run was so blatant, so unsubtle, that you have to wonder if this incident itself was a diversion from other airline or routes. Or conversely, because this was so blatant, will the authorities continue to give special significance to these particular circumstances? That’s a tough call by the Homeland Security either way.

Upon first hearing the news from Kim, I immediately fired a very silly email back to my friends:

A la the 24 hour spin that followed bin Laden’s death, we’ll soon be hearing that he was actually yelling “I need a bathroom” and was simply banging at the wrong door.

It was a joke.  I was joking.  Really.  Except I was also apparently plugged into the “lone crazy man/lone confused Muslim” line that is now de rigueur for all sudden jihad syndrome attacks.  When I trolled over to the British papers a few minutes ago, this is the first thing I saw:

The Yemeni man who was wrestled to the floor after pounding on the cockpit door of a plane approaching San Francisco may have mistaken it for the bathroom.

Rageit Almurisi cannot speak English very well and could have misunderstood the signs inside the jet, his cousin claimed.

The 28-year-old, who was heard yelling ‘Allahu Akbar’, had also only been on three planes in his life and would have been unfamiliar with the layout.

[snip]

Almurisi had been taking classes in English but was not happy with his progress. His cousin said: ‘He might have seriously mistaken the cockpit for the bathroom. He’s only been on three planes in his whole life.’

I find it embarrassing that my shallow, silly little joke turns out to be the party line.

Also, one does rather wonder how many flights people have to take before they start to understand the basic toilet versus cockpit principles.  Five?  Twelve?  Thirty-seven?  Does it matter if one was educated in a Madrassa, as opposed to PS 157?

Cross-posted at Right Wing News

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Islamists work to change the (veiled) head count in London

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A little less than a year ago, after the French enacted the burqa ban that just recently went into effect, I published a post entitled When is a burqa, not a burqa?  When it’s a weapon, in which I wrote the following:

Because Islamic religious trappings are not about man’s relationship to God but, instead, are about man’s relationship to the Islamic state, every Islamic procedure or practice, whether it’s abstaining from alcohol, ritual foot washing, burqas or minarets is, in essence, a body count.  The number of burqa clad women in any given society is the equivalent of a Western census.  If you can get all of your women to wear the burqa and then, through rape and acid-throwing intimidation, get all of their women to wear the burqa, you’ve won.  Who cares that the women so clad are not closer to Allah?  It’s enough that they’ve been submitted, willingly or not, to Islam.  There is no faith involved, just force and a numbers game.

Today, in a British newspaper, I read this:

Women who do not wear headscarves are being threatened with violence and even death by Islamic extremists intent on imposing sharia law on parts of Britain, it was claimed today.

Other targets of the ‘Talibanesque thugs’, being investigated by police in the Tower Hamlets area of London, include homosexuals.

Stickers have been plastered on public walls stating: ‘Gay free zone. Verily Allah is severe in punishment’.

[snip]

It is believed Muslim extremists are behind a spate of attacks being investigated by police, according to the Sunday Times.

An Asian woman who works in a pharmacy in east London was told to dress more modestly and wear a veil or the shop would be boycotted.

When she went to the media to talk about the abuse she suffered, a man later entered the pharmacy and told her: ‘If you keep doing these things, we are going to kill you’.

The 31-year-old, who is not a practising Muslim, said she has since been told to take holiday by the pharmacy owners and now fears she may lose her job.

She said: ‘Why should I wear a hijab (headscarf) or burqa? I haven’t done anything wrong.’

It’s all about body counts.  When the critical mass of women in London, Muslim or not, are in burqas, it’s an Islamic country.  Likewise, when the gays — the same ones who currently insist on siding politically with the Muslims against the Jews — are all hanged, it’s an Islamic country.

We in the West aren’t dying with our boots on; we’re dying in an abject, multiculturalist, politically correct grovel.

There’s a new U.C. in town

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There are a lot of University of California campuses:  UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC San Francisco (medical school only), UCLA, UC Santa Cruz, UC Santa Barbara, UC Riverside, UC Irvine, etc.

Oh, about those last two:  UC Irvine and UC Riverside have become the hotbeds of pro-Palestinian, anti-Jewish activism.  The campuses are in the news right now because some Palestinian students are being prosecuted for intentionally disrupting a speech by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren, depriving him of his free speech rights.  The verbal attack against Ambassador Oren is just a teeny example of what gets dished out regularly on those campuses (especially UC Irvine), but with Oren they picked such a high profile target that there was finally some push-back.

The AP has an incredibly brief report on the story.  What fascinated me was the headline, which I first spotted on the SF Chronicle’s home page:

I know that, when writing headlines, space is at a premium, but doesn’t that phrasing make it look as if there’s a new campus to add to the UC roster? You know: UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UCLA, UC Muslim….

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Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Middle East

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Israel as the next Saudia Arabia?

 

According to this article in the Wall Street Journal, Israel’s unusually large and high-quality shale oil reserves may yield as much oil as all of Saudi Arabia’s proven oil reserves.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703806304576242420737584278.html

 

These discoveries are in addition to of Israel’s recently diclosed gas reserves, also anticipated to be vaste.

 

There are few countries in the world as reality-based as Israel, because Israel has no other choice. It must be reality based in order to survive. This convinces me that Israel will waste  no time in developing these deposits, not only for self-sufficiency but also to gain leverage with the international community. Imagine the political consequences,, if you would, if Europe no longer had to depend upon the Middle East for its oil.

 

Oh, I wish I could say the same about our own country, rich beyond imagination in oil, gas and coal reserves. In our own country, a far-too-comfortable bourgeoisie entertains unicorn visions of Shangri La-like utopias, unspoiled by any energy development other than windmills and solar panels manufactured in China. The price of these idle visions is steep, as measured by lost jobs, investment capital, trade balances and tax revenues, not to mention military missions to fund our energy needs and keep world energy supplies safe. The self-satisfied American bourgeois elites sleep well, oblivious to the environmental, economic and social disasters inflicted upon our own country and others to satisfy our presumptions of environmental virtue. Not even a record recession (depression?) and all its accompanying miseries is enough to shake our self-satisfied masses from their ut-opium dreams.

 

The bottom-line is that most of the bad international news that we read about today, from Iraq to Libya, Iran, North Africa, Sudan, Nigeria and world jihadism in general, has to do with the quest for affordable energy. Take away oil as an issue by crashing its price on world markets through oversupply, and most of these issues cited above simply fade away, along with the revenues transfered to countries that use them to fund activities inimical to our prosperity and civilization. Crash the price of fuel, jihadism dies. Crash the price of fuel, the world’s poor and unemployed benefit. Israel gets it, we don’t.

 

North America enjoys the world’s largest deposits of oil, gas and coal. Europe has recently discovered immense gas deposits that should more-than meet its internal needs. It’s time for our civilization to wake up: we should be developing our own energy resources as a crack pace, if for nothing else than to avoid a world disaster. War and poverty also have environmental consequences.

 

Quick question about arming rebels

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Does the administration’s decision to arm the Libyan rebels remind you of anything?  It does me.  It reminds me of the Reagan administration’s decision to arm the rebels in Afghanistan.

Back then, the rebels were not our enemy, and they were fighting a sworn enemy against whom we’d been engaged in myriad proxy wars for decades.  This time, the rebels are our enemy, killing our civilians and soldiers all over the world, and they’re fighting a government that hasn’t does us any active harm in recent years.

Somehow, despite our pure and fairly reasonable thinking back in 1980s, I seem to recall that our decision to arm and train radical Islamists proved to have bad and lasting consequences for us.  (Hint:  the Taliban.)  This time around, we don’t even have the excuse of ignorance.  The Libyan rebels we’re arming, comprised of useful idiots, Al Qaeda operatives, and Muslim brotherhood members, were our active enemy yesterday; they’re our active enemy today; and tomorrow, pumped up with our weapons and supplies, they’ll still be our active enemy, only more dangerous.

Another jihad attack, this time against the American military *UPDATED*

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My condolences to the family and friends of the two airmen killed in Germany.  And my best wishes for a safe and speedy recovery for the two airmen who are seriously wounded.  And a plague and a pox on the media which tries so desperately to hide that this was not a random crazy man, but yet another assault in the Islamists’ ongoing war against the West.

The New York Times has reluctantly included in its report on the shooting a statement hinting that the shooter was a Muslim.  However, it not only buries this fact in the last paragraph, it never states it explicitly, choosing, instead, a tortuously oblique way of reporting that the shooter was dedicating his attack to Islam:

A man whose office is near the site of the shooting, speaking on condition of anonymity to protect his business, said witnesses told him that before opening fire the gunman shouted “God is great” in Arabic. Mr. Füllhardt said he could not confirm such reports.

I hate when our troops die, but I especially hate it when they are sitting ducks on the receiving end of a terrorist attacks.  These are men who are trained to fight and are committed to battle, and there is something almost insulting when they are attacked on the home bases or on buses in noncombat nations.  For a warrior to die like a civilian highlights the enemy’s evil, because it always seeks out soft targets.  I know that sounds stupid, ’cause dead is dead.  I guess this goes back to the Jewish thing of saying “never again” to the way in which civilians were meekly herded to their deaths.  It hits me viscerally.

Hat tip:  Jihad Watch

UPDATE:  The shooter’s uncle spells it out:  Devout Muslim.

It is (I hope) not futile to resist the Islamic Borg

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One of the things the Leftist multiculturalists refuse to acknowledge is that Islam does not assimilate.  Individual practitioners of the faith may, periodically and superficially, espouse the culture in which they live, but the fact remains that Islam, by its nature, is the Borg.

Borg-like, the Islam collective’s motto is “Resistance is futile.  You will be assimilated.”  The Borg/Islam collective does not recognize the possibility that it might be the entity that assimilates.  As with the fictional Borg populating Star Trek : The Next Generation, when the Islamists move in on a territory, they move in to conquer and for no other reason.

I mention this pop culture analogy here, because one of Singapore’s past leaders, Lee Kuan Yew, in an interview to promote his new book, spoke about Islam’s failure to assimilate, and he made a statement that is, I think, full comparable to Churchill’s speech about the Iron Curtain dividing Europe:

In the book, Mr Lee, when asked to assess the progress of multiracialism in Singapore, said: “I have to speak candidly to be of value, but I do not wish to offend the Muslim community.

“I think we were progressing very nicely until the surge of Islam came, and if you asked me for my observations, the other communities have easier integration – friends, intermarriages and so on, Indians with Chinese, Chinese with Indians – than Muslims. That’s the result of the surge from the Arab states.”

He added: “I would say today, we can integrate all religions and races except Islam.”

He also said: “I think the Muslims socially do not cause any trouble, but they are distinct and separate.”

Mr lee then went on to speak of how his own generation of politicians who worked with him had integrated well, including sitting down and eating together. He said: “But now, you go to schools with Malay and Chinese, there’s a halal and non-halal segment and so too, the universities. And they tend to sit separately so as not to be contaminated. All that becomes a social divide.”

He added that the result was a “veil” across peoples. Asked what Muslims in Singapore needed to do to integrate, he replied: “Be less strict on Islamic observances and say ‘Okay, I’ll eat with you.’”  (Emphasis mine.)

Certainly if there’s one image that epitomizes Islam, it’s the veiled face, whether the veil hides women from all civic interactions or masks the men on Western streets who commit violence with impunity as they hide their faces from the authorities.

Yew, who is no longer a power broker, has the luxury of age and retirement to speak of this veil.  It’s interesting, however, that Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron has suddenly decided to speak up as well about the Borg in Britain’s midst:

In an attack on Britain’s previous government, Cameron said authorities there had been too hesitant to intervene when some sectors of society espoused abhorrent views.

“We have even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run counter to our values,” Cameron said. “We have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and the mainstream.”

Cameron said a culture of tolerance had allowed both Islamic extremists, and far-right extremists, to build support for their causes. “We’ve been too cautious, frankly even fearful, to stand up to them,” he said.

Some European allies have criticized Britain for harboring hardline Islamic clerics and failing to clamp down on mosques that promote a perverted view of Islam.

Several terrorists involved in attacks or attempted plots in the U.S., Sweden, Denmark and Norway over the last two years have had links to Britain, or British-based clerics.

“If we are to defeat this threat, I believe it’s time to turn the page on the failed policies of the past,” Cameron said. “Instead of ignoring this extremist ideology, we – as governments and societies – have got to confront it, in all its forms.”

I am delighted to see people with bully pulpits begin to speak, although I don’t expect to hear anything intelligent on the subject from the world’s premier bully pulpit until January 2013 (assuming all goes well in the November 2012 elections).  As it is, my only hope now is that the Islamic/Borg invaders haven’t already reached to a tipping point from which there is no return.

Hat tip:  American Thinker

Cross-posted at Right Wing News

And Mussolini made the trains run on time….

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When I read that the Obama administration is good with having the Muslim Brotherhood on board in Egypt, because it’s really not such a bad organization, I keep thinking of 1930′s rationalizations about Mussolini:  He made the trains run on time.  Surely our standards of decency are higher than that?

Uh, no.  I guess not.

UPDATE:  Yet another example of the “Mussolini was efficient” attitude.

Two questions for you about Egypt

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1.  Faced with a popular revolt of the type we’re seeing in Egypt, can an American president make a difference?

My sense is that, while we’re certainly not going to drop bombs, the American president (any president, not just Obama) is such a vast presence that both his silence and his speech matter.  His bully pulpit is so large that, by appearing to support one side or another, either through silence or affirmative statements, he can affect the momentum within the other country.  What’s your point of view?  This is separate from whether Obama is being inept.  After all, if anything he does is meaningless theater, his ineptitude, if it exists, is irrelevant.

2.  What do you think will happen in Egypt?

I think that, while the average Egyptian on the street is not an Islamist (meaning he’s not committed to the Muslim Brotherhood’s jihadist goals), he really doesn’t know what he wants beyond not wanting the current situation.  That vagueness creates a vacuum, and I think the MB is poised to fill that vacuum.  If it does, I predict that, in four months, (a) Egypt will have sharia law; (b) Egypt will abrogate the treaty with Israel and attack; and (c) there’s a 50% chance that the Islamists will let their hostility to the Wets override their economic self-interest and shut down the Suez Canal.  Of course, if Mubarek can hang on long enough for a peaceful transition, maybe something good will come of all this.

Left again allies itself with radical Islam

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My husband has, for years, castigated me for refusing to listening to Cat Stevens’ music.  He makes two points, the first of which is valid, the second of which is not.  First, he says, the music predates Stevens’ conversion.  If I hear it on the radio, Stevens isn’t getting any royalties anyway, so there’s no harm, no foul.

This is true.  But I still hate to hear Stevens because he irritates me so much.  And why does he irritate me?  Well, that gets to the second reason my husband scolds me, and as to that reason, my husband is wrong:  “You don’t like him just because he’s a Muslim.”  No, buddy.  I don’t like him because he’s a jihadist who advocates the murder of those who disagree with Islam.

My twenty-year old mini-dispute with my husband (and it really is mini, because how often does Cat Stevens come up in daily life?) has suddenly taken on a bit more resonance for me, as my husband’s favorite comic du0 — Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert — happily and proudly hosted this jihadist at their rally to “restore sanity.”  I know I’m picky, but I don’t consider it sane for Americans, especially Jewish Americans, to cavort with jihadists.  I’m clearly out of step, though, with this “super hip” American zeitgeist.

If you want to know more, lots more, check out Ed Driscoll, who always has good stuff.

Obama’s “war” on terror at odds with Americans’ goals

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Andrew McCarthy hits the nail on the head in these paragraphs:

Obama sought the presidency as the candidate who would turn the clock back to the 1990s. He idealized the Clinton years, when terrorism was treated only as a crime, when preventing it was decidedly secondary to prosecuting it and the courthouse was the only battlefield on which the government had any interest in meeting al-Qaeda — an arrangement that suited al-Qaeda just fine.

Outside Obama’s left-wing base, Americans don’t share these sentiments. Their speed is more President Bush’s conception of counterterrorism as a defensive war to quell enemies — not defendants but enemies — who are actively making war against the United States. The war in Iraq and, now, in Afghanistan, turned unpopular, but that is because its focus drifted from defeating Islamist terrorists (an aim still strongly supported) to building Islamic democracies (an aim that never had strong support).

Leftists mistook the unpopularity of the war overseas for a rejection of Bush’s robust antiterrorism approach at home. They assumed that because the public was confused and angry over the unrequited sacrifices our troops were making, Americans must also have bought the ACLU narrative that Bush had shredded the Constitution. In point of fact, Americans are very content to have terrorists treated as military enemies and killed or captured before they can strike. They don’t think Gitmo is a gulag, they don’t see military justice as a kangaroo-court system, they don’t believe alien jihadists should automatically be endowed with constitutional rights, and they don’t want those jihadists brought into our country, where — the public adroitly suspects — our federal judges will find reasons to order their release.

Read the whole thing.  It’s good.

Two to read *UPDATED*

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Working on deadline, so I can’t blog right now.  (Anyway, I couldn’t say anything better than Danny did, in the post immediately preceding this one.)  I did, however, want to bring two posts to your attention, ’cause I think you’ll find them interesting.

The first is the Rosh Hashanah sermon from Rabbi Shal0m Lewis in Atlanta.  I’d like to believe the ideas expressed are game changers for American Jews but, so far, I’m only hearing about it from Jews who have already shifted to the conservative side.  I urge you to read it and send it to all your friends, Jewish and non-Jewish alike.

The second is a Greyhawk post about the problems in Pakistan, an unstable, dangerous, but currently necessary US ally, and the Obamaniacs’ . . . mmm, shall we say “creative” approach to that problem.

UPDATE:  Yet another liberal rabbi is figuring out there is a problem.  I wonder how long before they tug on those strings and realize that the other end is held firmly in the hands of the Progressive party, all the way up to the White House.  (h/t:  Bruce Kesler, who seems to have a nice rabbi who is open minded)

Kristof takes relativism to its logical and utterly stupid extreme *UPDATED*

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I admit it — I didn’t read the whole thing, because the obscene relativism permeating Nicholas Kristof’s first couple of paragraphs so disgusted me, my brain shut down.  Anyway, because of fair use concerns, I don’t want to quote more than the first two paragraphs, which more than adequately make my point:

Many Americans have suggested that more moderate Muslims should stand up to extremists, speak out for tolerance, and apologize for sins committed by their brethren.

That’s reasonable advice, and as a moderate myself, I’m going to take it. (Throat clearing.) I hereby apologize to Muslims for the wave of bigotry and simple nuttiness that has lately been directed at you. The venom on the airwaves, equating Muslims with terrorists, should embarrass us more than you. Muslims are one of the last minorities in the United States that it is still possible to demean openly, and I apologize for the slurs.

You understand that Kristoff just equated extreme Muslim conduct with what he perceives to be extreme American conduct, right?

It’s useful to list the conduct he’s speaking about.  First, extreme Muslim conduct against Americans and other Westerners:

1.  The first World Trade Center attack, in 1993 = 6 dead; 1,042 injured.

2.  The USS Cole attack = 17 dead, 39 injured.

3.  The Fort Hood attack =13 dead, 30 injured.

4.  The 9/11 attack = 2,996 dead.

5.  The Beslan massacre = 334 dead, mostly children.

6.  The Madrid train bombing = 191 dead; 1,800 injured.

7.  The Mumbai massacre = at least 173 people dead; at least 308 injured.

8.  The U.S. Embassy bombing in Africa = 230 or so people dead; approximately 4,100 injured.

9.  The attack on the U.S. Marines in Beirut = 299 dead.

10.  The Bali night club bombing = 202 dead; 240 injured.

And that’s just the short list of Islamic attacks against civilians.  The long list is here.  Since 9/11, the total number if attacks exceeds 16,000.  That’s not dead bodies; that’s just attacks — against Americans, Europeans, Christians, Jews, Hindus, and even fellow Muslims.

And now for extreme American conduct against Muslims:

1.  Many Americans complained that it was inappropriate for a mosque to be raised at Ground Zero, considering that it was practitioners of Islam that brought down the Twin Towers killing 2,996 people.  These same Americans pointed out that the Imam’s ostensibly reconciliatory rhetoric was belied by (a) his past words dreaming of a destroyed Israel and a sharia-controlled America and (b) his threats that, if Americans didn’t comply with his peaceful mosque plan, Muslims would get violent.  Finally, these aggressive Americans suggested that the mosque would be a fine thing if it was moved a few blocks away.  Dastardly Americans!

2.  Two Americans threatened to burn the Koran, sparking national outrage . . . against the ones threatening to burn the Koran.

I don’t know about you, but my feeling is that you’d have to have an IQ in the single digits to agree with Kristof that those Americans who failed to object to the Koran burning (about 50 Americans) or side with media about the GWM’s location (about 70% of Americans), are precisely the same as those Muslims who are utterly silent, nay, complacent, in the face of two decades of blood-saturated Muslim atrocities.

UPDATE:  This Austin Hill article is nicely on point.

Liberals demand Big Government, except when it comes to national security

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On my personal Facebook account, I linked to a report about the cartoonist who suggested “Everyone Draw Mohammed” day.  It turns out that this little moment of satire occasioned death threats so serious that she has now been forced into a life of hiding:

An American cartoonist whose satirical work inspired the controversial “Everybody Draw Mohammed Page” on Facebook has gone into hiding, the newspaper which published her comics said Wednesday.

Molly Norris, of Seattle, Washington, has moved and changed her name following a call for her assassination by US-born Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, The Seattle Weekly said.

“You may have noticed that Molly Norris’ comic is not in the paper this week,” the newspaper said. “That’s because there is no more Molly.”

“The gifted artist is alive and well, thankfully. But on the insistence of top security specialists at the FBI, she is, as they put it, ‘going ghost’: moving, changing her name, and essentially wiping away her identity.

“She is, in effect, being put into a witness-protection program — except, as she notes, without the government picking up the tab,” the newspaper said.

I understand this news story to demonstrate how Islamists and jihadists are using terrorist tactics to hijack American freedoms — in this case, freedom of speech. In America, we fight speech with speech, not with swords.

My Facebook post resulted in comments several friends, two of whom (both far Left liberals) used it as a springboard to vent, not about Islamic terrorism, but about America’s security infrastructure.*  One complained that the airport security measures encourage terrorism.  Huh?  The TSA measures are definitely inconvenient band-aids, that leave the root cause of terrorism unaddressed, but I’m completely confused as to how they relate to the fact that Islamists are threatening to kill Molly Norris because she made a joke about their religion.

The other made almost precisely the same point:  He didn’t say that jihadists or Islamists are the problem.  Instead, he said that the U.S. government uses these threats (which he dismissed without comment) to justify stripping us of our civil rights and fighting two wrongful wars.  In other words, it’s not “cause and effect,” it’s “effect and cause” in his world.

Is it too much to ask of the liberals that they say “these Islamists are bad people whose theocratic world view is a fundamental threat to our Constitutional civil rights?”  Why do I ask these dumb questions.  Apparently it is too much to ask.

It’s this vast ideological chasm that explains why it’s virtually impossible to hold a civil conversation, let alone a persuasive one, with a liberal.  For one thing, they do not see Islam as a problem.  Instead, they see our government as a problem — except that they’re also the ones who want to expand our government to totalitarian levels.  They want overwhelming welfare and nanny-statism, which is the one thing the Founders didn’t want; while utterly rejecting national security, which is the lowest common denominator of effectiveness for any functioning government, and is both an implicit and explicit part of the government’s obligations under the Constitution.  Without the latter, you end up without a state.  (Just ask the Romans.)

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*Yes, I do have liberal friends, because I grew up in a liberal part of the world.  These are people I’ve known for decades.  In any event, I find their views interesting, if not always intelligible.

About that “growing” anti-Muslim sentiment

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The MSM is bewildered.  How is it that nine years after 9/11, people are more hostile to Muslims than they were the day of 9/11, when 20 Muslims murdered thousands of Americans, and sought to decapitate the American government?  This article from the San Francisco Chronicle nicely presents the liberal confusion:

Anti-Muslim sentiment grows 9 years later

Nine years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, one thing remains certain: Some politicians and media types can stir the nation’s darker impulses to tar all Muslims with the same hatred most people feel toward the 19 fanatics who killed nearly 3,000 people in New York and Pennsylvania, and at the Pentagon.

The experts are pretty sure that the primary reason for this is because Americans are paranoid scapegoaters:

The roots of America’s continuing “ambivalence” toward Muslims and Islam is rooted in larger forces shaping the culture, said John C. Green, a professor of political science at the University of Akron and expert on the relationship of religion and politics.

“Part of it is the continuing threat of terrorism – not just in this country but around the world,” Green said. “A lot of it has to do with the economy. There is a sense that life is unstable. The American public is under siege. So, foreign threats are magnified. In a lot of people’s minds, there is this sense that this religion is associated with violence.”

Did you get that? Sure, there’s terrorism, but the real problem is that we’re scared, so we have “this sense” that Islam is “associated” with violence.

The article hastens to assure is that this sense is, to quote the article, “faulty.” Apparently the fault lies with Glenn Beck, but I have to admit to have gotten bored with the usual anti-conservative, pro-Muslim pabulum, so I kind of stopped reading about the time Glenn’s name came up.

Here’s the deal: The majority of Americans are more than smart enough to understand that the majority of Muslims worldwide are people who have no desire to bomb buildings or decapitate people.  Like us, they just want to live their lives.  We wish them well.

But we, the American people, have learned something in the last nine years, something that, prior to 9/11, only hyper-aware people knew: There are 1.3 billion Muslims in the world. A small percentage of them are jihadists, who are actively engaged in war against the United States and against Western culture generally, and have been so, with varying degrees of success and intensity since the early Middle Ages.

Given the 1.3 billion starting point, this small percentage point adds up to well more than a million Muslims around the world who actively wish us ill.  Actively.

They fight American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, they blow up our cultural allies in Israel, England, Spain, Bali, and other places around the world.  They gleefully decapitate their perceived enemies wherever they find them, whether in the Philippines, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, or anywhere else in the world.

They are also engaged in a concerted effort to use the threat of violence to blackmail Western culture into abject capitulation.  Free speech within the boundaries of Western nations  = death threats or, if you’re Theo van Gogh, actual death.  Women appearing in public per the norms of Western culture, within the boundaries of Western nations = death threats, rape, acid attacks, etc.  Open debate about Islam = death threats.

What Americans have also figured out is that the remaining billion or so non-violent Muslims are utterly passive.  With remarkably few exceptions, beyond saying “we’re not violent,” they are doing nothing whatsoever to stop the cancer that lies at the heart of their religious affiliation.  Frankly, that’s not good enough.  Fine, I understand that they’re deathly afraid too, but they certainly cannot expect Americans to respect them unreservedly if they (a) keep repeating, contrary to available evidence, that Islam is not connected to violence; and (b) do nothing to stem the violence.

So the reason Americans are more anti-Islamic now than they were on 9/11 is that, in the ensuing nine years, they’ve learned more about Islam.  What they’ve learned is that Islam, in active mode, is indeed a violent and threatening religion; and that Islam in passive mode, despite being the majority of Muslims, is useless at stemming the tide of millions of murderous Islamists.  This has nothing to do with American ignorance, paranoia and economic fear, and everything to do with paying attention.