A Week of "Port-Gate"

Significant news characterized the week of 13-18 February 2006. Not surprisingly, journalists spent their time on "bird-shot-gate," thereby missing the important news. The really big news came with the announcement that a secret government cabal, lead by the Treasury Department, gave the O.K. for Dubai Ports International to take over the security of our six biggest ports. This story gained no traction until the journalists had wrung the last "so what" out of "bird-shot-gate," THE non-story of this and the last century.

Dubai is the major city-state of the United Arab Emirates and is run by a monarch. Islam is the official religion, and sharia is the official law, with legal disputes decided ultimately by the monarch, when the sharia courts cannot get the job done. Because it has allowed some elements of capitalism, its oil-based economy may be the best of all of the Middle Eastern Islamic states. In terms of standard of living, one could do no better, among Middle Eastern states, than live in Dubai.

Our own government personnel quickly point out what a terrific ally Dubai and the UAE are. Perhaps that is why some of the government personnel "vetted" DP World, owned and run by the government of Dubai, to take over America's port security in the key ports. No one really knows because this cabal took place in secret and was sprung on Americans as fait accompli, offered to Americans with a haughty, "There's nothing you can do about it, either." The ever-diminishing Michael Chertoff, Director of Homeland Security, increasingly shills for the administration about how great turning over our ports to DPI is. This same political weather vane reversed himself in order to decry southern border fencing and tough enforcement.

Two camps have polarized within America about this "port gate," as talk show host Michael Savage dubs it.

One group declares the move as insane and dangerous, giving people from a dubious part of the world access to information about our port security and perhaps giving some of the same opportunities to use our ports against us, a la 9-11. So far, so good.

The other group comes from some conservative talk show hosts and alleged "capitalists." These people minimize concerns. They give ol' GWB another pass, because, they say, he knows what he is doing and would never jeopardize port security. The others within this second group proudly proclaim that the "free market" should be the determinant of success of not of turning port security over to Dubai Ports International.

This second group has been profoundly disappointing to us. It is clear from listening to them that they fail to grasp the essence and applications of capitalism ("free market," as they call it), and they fail to grasp the significance of Islam. Were we to discover that not one of them had done any background reading of any kind about Islam, we would not be surprised.

What is "free market" about a state-owned company? Any capitalistic elements that exist do so at the whim of the state, which can change policy in an instant. Note that the state is an Islamic monarchy dominated by sharia law. We fail to detect any warm fuzzies there.

Most people who frequent the Fox, CNBC, CNN, and Bloomberg financial news centers and who call themselves "capitalists" are simply "mixed economy" mentalities. Capitalism in full has never existed, although it almost did in the latter 19th century in America. From the first, the free elements essential to capitalism faced increasing incursions from the state, through laws, regulations, and judicial rulings. All of this accelerated severely through the 20th century. Today, there are very few persons who have not fully accommodated to accepting--as necessary and good--the role of government as fulfiller of needs and regulator of business, of course, as it is so glibly said, to keep businesses honest and accountable. This is the essence of the mixed economy.

Mixed economies, mixing freedom with controls, are unstable and almost always drift into statist tyrannies eventually. If you want to grasp this fully, read Atlas Shrugged.

Mixed economies are not free. At least we in America have what is left of our Constitution which ostensively protects our freedoms of action. However, Dubai has a monarch--who permits certain actions and freedoms. Make no mistake about it: the monarch is a Muslim, running an officially Islamic state, by means of sharia law.

If you have taken the time to do even the minimal reading about Islam, you know that no one subscribing to Islam can be trusted ultimately to be loyal to anything but Islam. And you learned quickly that Islamists will tell you anything they think you want to hear. Islam requires such dissimulations. We, in the West and as non-Muslims, are the enemy, to be annihilated: forget this at the peril of your survival.

Turning our port security over to a company based in Islamia is equivalent to turning the hen house over to the fox or the blood bank over to Dracula. While we are at it, we could turn over our Defense Department to Red China, agriculture over to North Korea, and education over to Iran.

We need to stand behind the growing chorus of protesting Senators and Representatives who see the potential perfidy in "port-gate." We need to keep the issue on the front burners, so to speak, and demand appropriate port security. What we have right now for port security is really bad, but the notion of going from bad to worse by opening the door to espionage and sabotage from Islamia has become intolerable.

As for the finacial talking heads, they need to get Andrew Bernstein's new book, The Capitalist Manifesto (reviewed on our web site, 6th Column Against Jihad) and study it. Then they can get their factual and moral houses in order.