Descent into Dhimmitude

The troubles with immigrants began in Denmark began BEFORE the cartoon controversy.

While most media accounts of the "cartoon jihad" focused on the publication of the cartoons, and on the ensuing violent reaction by some Muslims -- who were depicted by the much of the press as victims! -- few reporters have ventured to describe the increasingly hostile climate that Muslim extremists had succeeded in creating in Denmark before the publication. In fact, an examination of Jyllands-Posten's own pages reveals why its editors likely decided to publish the cartoons in the first place -- as well as why the obscurantist rioters were so confident that they would prevail.
In late 2004 -- a University of Copenhagen professor of Moroccan Jewish descent -- was kidnapped in broad daylight and brutally beaten by three Muslim youths for the "crime" of having read from the Quran during a lecture. A few months later, a Danish publisher used anonymous translators for an essay collection critical of Islam for fear that any named assistant would suffer a similar fate. And in an incident immediately preceding Jyllands-Posten's decision to run the cartoons as a test of self-censorship, Danish artists refused to illustrate a children's book about Muhammad.

These incidents, all disturbing, don't even scratch the surface of the appeasement Danes have made to accommodate the people who unleashed violence against them. In Copenhagen's public schools, the only food available to students -- regardless of their religious affiliation or lack thereof -- are Halal (prepared according to Islamic dietary requirements). In Denmark, a country which enjoys well-deserved praise for the courage with which citizens came together to save its small Jewish community during World War II, Danish Jewish students today cannot attend certain public schools because their very presence is viewed by administrators as >"provocative" to radicalized Muslim peers. The country's only Jewish school, Copenhagen's 300-pupil Carolineskolen, founded in 1805, nowadays is constrained to operate behind a double ring of barbed wire.

There has been little time and less effort made to assimilate the flood of millions of dissimilar immigrants into Europe. That the Danes have been unable to assimilate their immigrant population has had a detrimental effect on Danish society should be an object lesson for us all.

From Cox and Forkum

Business as Usual

Are You Suspicious?

Is anyone beside me and mine suspicious about the motives and methodology of Jill Carroll, the Christian Science Monitor reporter released by her captors in Iraq today? Something began stinking about this from early on into her "captivity." Something in the pleading videotapes just failed to ring fully true. Her appearance and behavior today after her alleged release also failed to ring true-as-presented. In some ways, Carroll reminds us of the story of that Georgia girl who became known as "the runaway bride," even though the Carroll situation is not the same in terms of concrete details. The Georgia girl story began stinking early on also. Of course, only time will tell the truth, if the truth differs from what is being presented.


We are curious to see if others are willing to acknowledge suspiciousness of Carroll before the truth comes out fully.

The Demonstrations Came Just in Time for Talks in Cancun

Graphic via: Michelle Malkin

The timing is perfect. Today, in Cancun, Mexico, President Bush meets Mexican President Fox and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper to discuss topics of mutual concern.

Last week hundreds of thousands of migrants "spontaneously" decided to get to get together in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities to flex their collective muscles. Yeah, right!

These demonstrations were planned long in advance with the collusion of individual American citizens, American Leftist Groups, American Business Associations, American politicians, but not in the fulfillment of the will of the people.

However, for decades Mexico's Fox and other Mexican politicians have been determined to create social policy in the United States, meddling and influencing the political process and demanding accommodation for Mexican citizens that he and his cronies should be caring for in Mexico. Instead these unfortunate people are sent north so that the American taxpayer and the American economy should provide what the Mexican elite refuse to do.

How do they convince their citizens to go north? Certainly by pointing out the disparity of wages in the U.S. vs. Mexico and by reminding their citizens in the United States and those remaining in Mexico that a very prosperous part of the United States once was part of Mexico and that Mexico should have jurisdiction over all American citizens of Mexican origin: Mexicans, regardless of place of birth should put Mexico first and maintain their "Mexicanness."

During World War II, President Roosevelt interned Japanese-American citizens, German-American citizens, and Italian-Americans for fear that they would sabotage the war effort. Some American citizens still held close emotional ties to both Japan and Germany and did spy for the enemy and did sabotage. Both governments found it to be in their interest to promote "Japanese-ness" and "German-ness" in the 1920's and 19330's, with predictable result.

But Germany and Japan did not abut the United States. Immigrants from those countries had to cross an ocean and enter in an orderly manner. Mexican immigrants must only step across a line in the sand.

Many Mexican-Americans are loyal citizens, but, again, others have been influenced by the policies of Fox and his cronies. They have refused to give up their emotional and legal ties to Mexico and are working against the United States. The recent demonstrations are proof of this pudding!

In Flag of Their Fathers by John Fonte at FrontPage, we see another graphic example of manipulation. Unconscionably school children from all over the United States have been recruited. Reminiscent of the Vietnam War Anti-War marches, students in school all over the Southwest and as far away as Wisconsin, students have been encouraged to walk out of class "in support of immigrants' rights."

Is immigration a right? Is citizenship a right? Is receipt of benefits at the expense of the U.S. taxpayer a right of immigrants? Of course not. None of these are rights, only possibilities, and machinations of meddling Mexicans and collusion of various Americans have made illegal immigrants hopeful of twisting the arms of the American taxpayer and extracting the goods and treasures of hard-working Americans, some of whom are Mexican-Americans that have lived here for centuries.

This is the hope that the Mexican government and others is holding out, benefits that they refuse to create for their own people. Instead, the constantly remind their citizens and former citizens that they are Mexican, "living in a stolen land," and Americans, the "gringoes," can pushed off into the sea or returned to Europe.

Michelle Marquez, a young Dallas student sums up the problem from a report in the Dallas Morning News. Although instructed to carry an American flag, she was rebuked by her classmates during a recent rally. As a defense, she replied to the crowd: “My heart is with the Mexican flag and with Mexico, but I’m standing on American ground and I’m Mexican-American.” Fox and the others are counting on that.

The recent demonstrations are a reminder to the American people and to President Bush of the riots in France. Could further machinations by meddling politicians set off that kind of violence? Surely that topic will come up in Cancun discussions at some point. How will our President and our Congress respond?

Twins

It's hard to tell them apart, isn't it? (hat tip to The Religion of Peace)

Nuclear Islamia

This morning, the Front Page Magazine War Blog carried two related stories: OUR FRIENDS THE NUCLEAR SAUDIS and HEAD OF ARAB LEAGUE PUSHES NUKE PROGRAMS. We looked back into our archives and found an article we published 22 July 2004, just a week after we started this blog. Bottom Line? Folks, this nuclear mess involving the Middle East Muslims is much farther along than our press have been reporting, and we are in much deeper trouble with a nuclear Islamia than anyone in "high places" dares acknowledge.

Our blog article, Words of Victor Mordecai, 22 July 2004, cited an Israeli terrorism analyst, Victor Mordecai, and his inside information. Victor wrote a book in 1997 predicting the events, in detail, of 11 September 2001, and he has been literally black-balled by all of the standard media, print and broadcast.

"He lives in Israel. His wife is an Egyptian Jew whose native tongue is Arabic; she has been monitoring Arabic and Farsi broadcasts for 20 years, gathering intelligence-applicable information. He obviously gets information from many other sources as well.

The conflict in the Middle East is fundamentally that between Shia and Sunni Islam. Since Ayatollah Khomeini set off the Iranian revolution, that revolution seeks now to take the heart of the Middle East, the oil producers. Iran stirs Iraq to get Shia Muslims to take it over, for its oil. However, Iran's biggest enemy is Saudi Arabia, because it is Sunni Islam. This conflict has been going on since the day Muhammad died, and the Shias have smouldered for revenge for 1400 years.

"Iran has nuclear weapons, mounted on missles, as does Saudi Arabia. Iran made its with the help of the Russians while Saudi Arabia got its from Dr. Khan in Pakistan and help from China. Shia Iran plans to annihilate Sunni Saudi Arabia which is 50% Shiite. The goal is to have a huge nuclear and oil empire taking in Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, as one huge Shiite expanse.

"Common talk across the Middle Eastern airwaves is that] as soon as is possible, Jerusalem must be destroyed by nuclear bombs. This will prove that the God of the Jews and Christians is weaker, reaffirming "Allahu Akbar," which means "Allah is greater." Greater means greater than the God of the Jews and Christians. On the other hand, if the Kaaba in Mecca should be nuked first, then it will prove that the Jewish and Christian God is greater. Muslims will abandon Islam and convert to Judaism and Christianity.

"The USA will have to invade Saudi Arabia to seize the oil fields to prevent global economic collapse. The USA remains in severe danger from Islam because of what the USA represents, which itself threatens Islam, and for what the USA can do to thwart aggressive ambitions in the Middle East."

From War Blog (Front Page Magazine), 29 March 2006
OUR FRIENDS THE NUCLEAR SAUDIS

"BERLIN (AFP) - Saudi Arabia is working secretly on a nuclear programme, with help from Pakistani experts, a German magazine reports in its latest edition, citing Western security sources. The German magazine Cicero says that during the Hajj pilgrimages to Mecca in 2003 through 2005, Pakistani scientists posed as pilgrims to come to Saudi Arabia in aircraft laid on by the oil-rich kingdom...Saudi bar codes can be found on half of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons “because it is Saudi Arabia which ultimately co-financed the Pakistani atomic nuclear programme”."

AND

HEAD OF ARAB LEAGUE PUSHES NUKE PROGRAMS

"KHARTOUM, Sudan - The head of the Arab League called on Arab states Tuesday to work toward “entering the nuclear club” by developing atomic energy — a new concern for a Western world already trying to rein in Iran’s nuclear ambitions and fretting about a possible Mideast arms race. Just yesterday, Charles Krauthammer envisioned a nightmare future, not of nuclear proliferation but of hyperproliferation. That future is headed toward us, and it’s coming fast."

Put it all together, and the final statements from above bear repeating:

Just yesterday, Charles Krauthammer envisioned a nightmare future, not of nuclear proliferation but of hyperproliferation. That future is headed toward us, and it’s coming fast.

Women 'go missing' and Are Brutalized by the Millions

Via: LGF

Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali Dutch member of Parliament is living in hiding under treat of her life since collaborating with Theo VanGogh who produced Submission,a film critical of the treatment of women in Islam. She has become an outspoken and controversial advocate for the plight of women. Her article follows below:

As I was preparing for this article, I asked a friend who is Jewish if it was appropriate to use the term "holocaust" to portray the worldwide violence against women. He was startled. But when I read him the figures in a 2004 policy paper published by the Geneva Center for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces, he said yes, without hesitation.

One United Nations estimate says from 113 million to 200 million women around the world are demographically "missing." Every year, from 1.5 million to 3 million women and girls lose their lives as a result of gender-based violence or neglect.

How could this possibly be true? Here are some of the factors:

In countries where the birth of a boy is considered a gift and the birth of a girl a curse from the gods, selective abortion and infanticide eliminate female babies.

Young girls die disproportionately from neglect because food and medical attention is given first to brothers, fathers, husbands and sons.

In countries where women are considered the property of men, their fathers and brothers can murder them for choosing their own sexual partners. These are called "honor" killings, though honor has nothing to do with it.

Young brides are killed if their fathers do not pay sufficient money to the men who have married them. These are called "dowry deaths," although they are not just deaths, they are murders.

The brutal international sex trade in young girls kills uncounted numbers of them.

Domestic violence is a major cause of death of women in every country.

So little value is placed on women's health that every year roughly 600,000 women die giving birth.

Six thousand girls undergo genital mutilation every day, according to the World Health Organization. Many die; others live the rest of their lives in crippling pain.

According to the WHO, one woman out of every five worldwide is likely to be a victim of rape or attempted rape in her lifetime.

Here are three challenges to overcome before countering these horrendous crimes that are occurring worldwide in all societies:

1. Lack of Organization:

Women are not organized or united. Those of us in rich countries, who have attained equality under the law, need to mobilize to assist our fellows. Only our outrage and our political pressure can lead to change.

2. Revival and Spread of Shariah

The Islamists are engaged in reviving and spreading a brutal and retrograde body of laws. Wherever the Islamists implement Shariah, or Islamic law, women are hounded from the public arena, denied education and forced into a life of domestic slavery.

3. Cultural and Moral Relativism Instead of Universal Human Rights

Cultural and moral relativists sap our sense of moral outrage by claiming that human rights are a Western invention. Men who abuse women rarely fail to use the vocabulary the relativists have provided them. They claim the right to adhere to an alternative set of values - an "Asian," "African" or "Islamic" approach to human rights.

This mind-set needs to be broken. A culture that carves the genitals of young girls, hobbles their minds and justifies their physical oppression is not equal to a culture that believes women have the same rights as men.

How to Begin to Turn Around the Situation

1. "A tribunal such as the court of justice in The Hague should look for the 113 million to 200 million women and girls who are missing."

2. "A serious international effort must urgently be made to precisely register violence against girls and women, country by country."

3. "We need a worldwide campaign to reform cultures that permit this kind of crime. Let's start to name them and shame them."

History and current events tell us that although these crimes occur in all societies of the world, the number of incidents will only increase with the spread of Islam, and it is obvious that more women will "disappear" or become the survivors of the brutality described above.

"Round Two of Dubai Investment Issue Begins, This Time for U.S. Defense Plants"

Via The Counterterrorism Blog -- UPI reports the following:

Dubai International Capital, an investment company owned by the emirate's ruling al-Maktoum family, inked a deal last year to acquire a privately held British aerospace company called Doncasters Group, Ltd. The company owns nine plants in the United States, and makes parts for U.S. tanks and military planes, including for the Joint Strike Fighter -- currently at the center of a transatlantic row about contracts and technology sharing.

After senators questioned officials about the Doncasters deal earlier this month, the secretive inter-agency panel known as the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, which is responsible for assessing such takeovers, announced that it was launching a special 45-day national security review of the purchase. The attention led Dubai International Capital to announce last week it was postponing the $1.2 billion takeover for two months while the CFIUS review went ahead.

The lobbyists at Hill & Knowlton have their work cut out for them.

What Do Colleges (And Obviously High Schools) Forget to Teach?

The answer: Civics

Without instruction and discussion, how else can expect them to understand the system of rights and responsibilities?

What is the source of this educational breakdown? The trouble isn’t the students—they’re bright and eager to learn. It’s that too few teachers are presenting students with the Founders’ philosophy, much less introducing them to the great issues, some still with us today, that divided the Founders.
And if teachers aren’t teaching the Founding’s principles, where will students learn them? They’re not likely to get any sense of the distinction between the delegated powers of the national government and the general jurisdiction of the states from any newspapers, national magazines, or television news networks, that’s for sure. Have the editors of the New York Times and the folks at CBS News even heard of that distinction yet? News travels slowly, true; but it shouldn’t take 218 years.
The solution to this educational breakdown is straightforward: we need to make a commitment at every level of schooling and within the public media to promote a deep awareness of the principles of the American Founding. Why educate students into archaism? some will doubtless object. Surely governing principles set forth in the eighteenth century have little relevance to us in the twenty-first. But American ideals, as embodied preeminently in the Declaration of Independence, are universal and timeless. ...”

Read it all.

Our schools are in a progressive decline.

Greater Islamia

Here is your Sand Savage Moment of the Day: The United States of Islam (thanks to Foundation for the Defense of Democracy).

And here is the hot link page text (unformatted) from the Islamic website that goes with the map:

A Few years from now, by the turn of the 21st century most part of the world shall be united into strong multipower blocks of nation. I.E. the power full federations and the confederations of states.

These powerful blocks shall not just dominate the world political scene but shall rule the world in all aspects trade and commerce, economic, defense and security issues and other spheres.

Who are these powerful blocks of nations?

They are:
The North American Alliance (NAFTA)
Comprising:
• USA
• MEXICO
• CANADA

Russian Federation

The largest single nation state in the world
China

The biggest economy of the 21st century and the world’s most popular country
European Union , A powerful confederation of rich prosperous European states having a single currency

Do we have an answer to these powerful blocks of Nations?

Do We think standing alone as individual Muslim nation states we could withstand their ever increasing influence and dominance?

No

There is only one answer

Unites States of Islam !

A Powerful confederation of all 55 Muslim nation states andl Islamic people. Uniting in all aspects of trade, commerce, economics, foreign policy, defense and security issues.

But does United States of Islam exists

No-------------it does not

Why does it not exist, when we have these blocks of nations:
• United States of America (NAFTA)
• Russian Federation
• China
• European Union

Why? Because we never sincerely worked for it? & They did…………………….. .?
Still we don’t want to work for it and they do-------------------------------?

Why dont we ?
Because we are often lethargic lacking in ambition, failing to find the right kind of political will necessary to achieve United States of Islam.

Recommendation
A Secure future for the Muslim world lies in Unity not disunity
United States of Islam is not an illusive dream, an utopia, as everyone would tell you.
It is a simple idea, a rational plan which if implemented with sincerety of purpose shall achieve what it should achieve.
The ultimate unity of all Muslim beings.
It does not demand "A radical Islamic Revolution"
Or a political movement
Any unlawful act or anarchy
Its essential are sincerity of purpose and a strong political will to be appred by Muslim Nation States and Islamic people.

Allah's Animals

A UK pet shop owner has found the markings on one side of his tropical fish appear to spell the word "Allah" in Arabic and a fortunate cockerel in the Central Asian republic of Kyrgystan has saved itself from the pot after crowing what its owner claimed was "Allah."

To be even handed, Christians also find likenesses and figures in unusual places: 'Virgin Mary' toast; 'Christ-like' shell.

Meanwhile, Off the EAST Coast, U.S. Wants Own Inspectors at Bahamas Port

The Bush administration will negotiate to station American customs inspectors at the largest seaport in the Bahamas, where the United States is hiring a Hong Kong conglomerate to help detect nuclear materials inside cargo, a senior customs official said Monday.

Any such agreement will require approval by the Bahamian government. Diplomatic talks are expected to begin soon to give agents from U.S. Customs and Border Protection a presence at the sprawling Freeport Container Port, just 65 miles from Florida's coast...

The administration has acknowledged the deal represents the first time a foreign company will be involved in running sophisticated U.S. radiation-detection equipment at an overseas port without American customs agents present.
Ahern was expected to testify Tuesday at a Senate oversight hearing on radiation detectors in the United States. He said the Homeland Security Department originally intended to station U.S. customs inspectors in the Bahamas by spring under its port-security program, called the Container Security Initiative.

The pending diplomatic talks were confirmed by John Meredith, the group managing director for Hutchison's port subsidiary, which runs the Bahamas port.

"They are getting close to fixing up a deal between the Bahamas and the U.S.," Meredith told the AP. "If they want to put American people out there to have a look at it, that's fine. But people should respect also that you've got to have trusted partnerships, both with the private sector and with foreign governments."

The Bahamas contract is being finalized by the National Nuclear Security Administration, part of the Energy Department. It has said employees of Hutchison -- the world's largest ports operator -- will drive the towering, truck-like radiation scanner at the port under the direct supervision of Bahamian customs officials...

The GAO urges the installation of radiation monitors at ports pronto if not sooner!

The Islamic Threat Is Greater Than German and Soviet Threats Were

via: JihadWatch

The understatement of the day: "There is much less you can do against people who value dying more than living."

One is the number of people who believe in it. This is a new phenomenon among organized evils. Far fewer people believed in Nazism or in communism than believe in Islam generally or in authoritarian Islam specifically. There are one billion Muslims in the world. If just 10 percent believe in the Islam of Hamas, the Taliban, the Sudanese regime, Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, bin Ladin, Islamic Jihad, the Finley Park Mosque in London or Hizbollah -- and it is inconceivable that only one of 10 Muslims supports any of these groups' ideologies -- that means a true believing enemy of at least 100 million people. Outside of Germany, how many people believed in Nazism? Outside of Japan, who believed in Japanese imperialism and militarism? And outside of universities, the arts world or Hollywood, how many people believed in Soviet-style totalitarianism?

A far larger number of people believe in Islamic authoritarianism than ever believed in Marxism. Virtually no one living in Marxist countries believed in Marxism or communism. Likewise, far fewer people believed in Nazism, an ideology confined largely to one country for less than one generation. This is one enormous difference between the radical Islamic threat to our civilization and the two previous ones.

But there is yet a second difference that is at least as significant and at least as frightening: Nazis and Communists wanted to live and feared death; Islamic authoritarians love death and loathe life.

That is why MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) worked with the Soviet Union. Communist leaders love life -- they loved their money, their power, their dachas, their mistresses, their fine wines -- and were hardly prepared to give all that up for Marx. But Iran's current leaders celebrate dying, and MAD may not work, because from our perspective, they are indeed mad. MAD only works with the sane.

There is much less you can do against people who value dying more than living.

Prager's analysis falters here: "The evils committed by Nazism and Communism were, of course, greater than those committed by radical Islam." As do many, he does not understand that in reality there is no radical Islam, only the Islam that can not set aside any part of the Koran, that disdains all non-Muslims and take offense at even mild criticism of Islam, Muslims, and Mohammed, propelling so-called moderate Muslims into a frenzy of retribution in the name of "justice." (Retribution does not have to be violent.)
Spengler of Asia Times reminds us that "Islam does not know moderation or extremism: it only knows success or failure" and that "the Muslim either is a soldier of the ummah, or he is nothing." All or nothing.

Islam does not have to produce an Auschwitz or a Gulag system to as proof of its greater danger, for entire civilizations and uncounted cultures have been destroyed in the maw of Islam since Mohammed left his cave.

What Is the Frankfurt School?

A plague be on your house! The now-in-power Baby-Boomer generation is infected with "cultural Marxism," created by a tiny group of Nazi-German philosophers.

...Who in America today is at work destroying our traditions, our family bonds, our religious beginnings, our reinforcing institutions, indeed, our entire culture?  What is it that is changing our American civilization?...
Just such a core group did, indeed, exist.  That is, history identifies a small group of German intellectuals who devised concepts, processes, and action plans which conform very closely to what Americans presently observe every day in their culture.  Observations, such as those made in this series of essays, can be directly traced to the work of this core group of intellectuals.  They were members of the Frankfurt School, formed in Germany in 1923.  They were the forebears of what some proclaim as 'cultural Marxism,' a radical social movement that has transformed American culture.  It is more commonly known today as 'political correctness.'

'Cultural Marxism' and 'critical theory' are concepts developed by a group of German intellectuals, who, in 1923 in Germany, founded the Institute of Social Research at Frankfurt University.  The Institute, modeled after the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, became known as the Frankfurt School [3].  In 1933, when the Nazis came to power in Germany, the members of the Frankfurt School fled to the United States.  While here, they migrated to major U.S. universities (Columbia, Princeton, Brandeis, and California at Berkeley).  These intellectual Marxists included Herbert Marcuse, who coined the phrase, 'make love, not war,' during the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations.

By promoting the dialectic of 'negative' criticism, that is, pointing out the rational contradictions in a society's belief system, the Frankfurt School 'revolutionaries' dreamed of a utopia where their rules governed [4].  "Their Critical Theory had to contain a strongly imaginative, even utopian strain, which transcends the limits of reality."  Its tenets would never be subject to experimental evidence.  The pure logic of their thoughts would be incontrovertible.  As a precursor to today's 'postmodernism' in the intellectual academic community, [5] "...it recognized that disinterested scientific research was impossible in a society in which men were themselves not yet autonomous...the researcher was always part of the social object he was attempting to study."  This, of course, is the concept which led to the current fetish for the rewriting of history, and the vogue for our universities' law, English literature, and humanities disciplines -- deconstruction...

The Frankfurt school studied the 'authoritarian personality' which became synonymous with the male, the patriarchal head of the American family.  A modern utopia would be constructed by these idealistic intellectuals by 'turning Western civilization' upside down.  This utopia would be a product of their imagination, a product not susceptible to criticism on the basis of the examination of evidence.  This 'revolution' would be accomplished by fomenting a very quiet, subtle and slowly spreading 'cultural Marxism' which would apply to culture the principles of Karl Marx bolstered by the modern psychological tools of Sigmund Freud.  Thus, 'cultural Marxism' became a marriage of Marx and Freud aimed at producing a 'quiet' revolution in the United States of America.  This 'quiet' revolution has occurred in America over the past 30 years.  While America slept!

What is 'cultural Marxism?'  Why should it even be considered when the world's vast experiment with the economic theory of Karl Marx has recently gone down to defeat with the disintegration of Soviet communism?  Didn't America win the Cold War against the spread of communism?  The answer is a resounding 'yes, BUT.  We won the 55-year Cold War but, while winning it abroad, we have failed to understand that an intellectual elite has subtly but systematically and surely converted the economic theory of Marx to culture in American society.  And they did it while we were busy winning the Cold War abroad.  They introduced 'cultural Marxism' into the mainstream of American life over a period of thirty years, while our attention was diverted elsewhere.

The vehicle for this introduction was the idealistic Boomer elite, those young middle-class and well-to-do college students who became the vanguard of America's counter-culture revolution of the mid-1960s -- those draft-dodging, pot-smoking, hippies who demonstrated against the Vietnam War and who fomented the destructive (to women) 'women's liberation' movement.  These New Totalitarians [7] are now in power as they have come to middle-age and control every public institution in our nation.  But that is getting ahead of the story.


The cauldron for implementing this witches brew were the elites of the Boomer generation.  They are the current 'foot soldiers' of the original Frankfurt School gurus.  The counter-culture revolution of the 1960s was set in motion and guided intellectually by the 'cultural Marxists' of the Frankfurt School -- Herbert Marcuse, Eric Fromm, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Wilhelm Reich, and others [8,9].,  Its influence is now felt in nearly every institution in the United States.  The elite Boomers, throwbacks to the dangerous idealist Transcendental generation of the mid-1800s, are the 'agents of change,' who have introduced 'cultural Marxism' into American life.


William S. Lind relates [10] that 'cultural Marxism' is an ideology with deep roots.  It did not begin with the counter-culture revolution in the mid-1960s.  Its roots go back at least to the 1920s and the writings of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci [11].  These roots, over time, spread to the writings of Herbert Marcuse...


But how can we claim the 'causes' of the breakdown of our schools, our universities, indeed, the very fiber of our culture were a product of a tiny group of intellectuals who immigrated from Germany in 1933?  Given all of the special-interest groups involved in these activities, how can we trace these 'causes' to the Frankfurt school?  Look at some of the evidence.


 As an example, postmodern reconstruction of the history of Western Civilization (now prevalent in our universities) has its roots in the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School.  This rewriting of history by the postmodern scholars in America has only recently come under attack.  Keith Windschuttle, in his book, 'Killing of History,' has severely criticized the rush to 'relativism' by historiographers.  What is truly astonishing, however, is that 'relativism' has largely supplanted the pursuit of truth as a goal in historical study [14].  George G. Iggers' recently published book, 'Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge,' reminds us of the now famous line by Hayden White, a postmodernist, "Historical narratives...are verbal fictions, the contents of which are more invented than found."  He quotes other postmodernists, mostly non- historians, who [15] "...reinforce the proposition that truth and reality are primarily authoritarian weapons of our times."  We now recognize the source of this postmodern assault -- the cultural Marxists of the Frankfurt School who became experts in criticizing the 'authoritarian personality' in American culture....


 Most Americans do not yet realize that they are being led by social revolutionaries who think in terms of the destruction of the existing social order in order to create a new social order in the world.  These revolutionaries are the New Age elite Boomers, the New Totalitarians [26].  They now control every public institution in the United States of America.  Their 'quiet' revolution, beginning with the counter-culture revolution of their youth, is nearly complete.  It was based on the intellectual foundation of the 'cultural Marxists' of the Frankfurt School.  Its completion depends on keeping the American male in his psychic 'iron cage.'


The confluence of radical feminism and 'cultural Marxism' within the span of a single generation, that of the elite Boomers (possibly the most dangerous [27] generation in America's history), has imposed this yoke on the American male.  It remains to be seen whether or not he will continue his 'voluntary submission' to a future of slavery in a new American matriarchy, the precursor to a state of complete anarchy.


If we allow this subversion of American values and interests to continue, we will (in future generations) lose all that our ancestors suffered and died for.  We are forewarned.  A reading of history -- it is all in mainstream historical accounts -- tells us that we are about to lose the most precious thing we have -- our individual freedoms.

Stomach churning stuff! /Read it all.


Does Dual Citizenship Erode American National Identity?

In a recent speech, President Bush naively stated that the rapid influx of different cultures would not affect American identity. What a foolish thing to say. Cultural identity is created over the span of decades and sometimes generations and to believe otherwise demonstrates an ignorance of history and the principles of acculturation. Someone should slip him a copy of this symposium.

There will be an effect on the established population regardless of where the migrants are from. Just as in Europe, the many millions of migrants now realize that there is more than safety in numbers; they realize that they have power and are now able to make demands of the government and of the citizens of the country into which they have wandered.

Apparently American high schools and universities skipped the chapters on the falll of Rome. The "final blows" were administered by tribes moving in from the borders. The Romans couldn't or wouldn't defend their borders and were summarily overrun. For some reason our political, business, and religious elite can't grasp the reality of our situation. Nor do they understand the principle, paraphrased: those that don't learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.

A Picture Is Worth a Million Words

This time it's a set of maps.

Then, contemplate this.

Malkin - Welcome to the Reconquista

She has pictures tand video feed as well. Read it all.

Center for Immigration Studies: Current Numbers includes links to various articles on the subject of debate.

During the 1990s, an average of more than 1.3 million immigrants — legal and illegal — settled in the United States each year. Between January 2000 and March 2002, 3.3 million additional immigrants have arrived. In less than 50 years, the U.S. Census Bureau projects that immigration will cause the population of the United States to increase from its present 288 million to more than 400 million.

The foreign-born population of the United States is currently 33.1 million, equal to 11.5 percent of the U.S. population. Of this total, the Census Bureau estimates 8-9 million are illegal immigrants. Other estimates indicate a considerably higher number of illegal immigrants.

Approximately 1 million people receive permanent residency annually. In addition, the Census Bureau estimates a net increase of 500,000 illegal immigrants annually.

The present level of immigration is significantly higher than the average historical level of immigration. This flow may be attributed, in part, to the extraordinary broadening of U.S. immigration policy in 1965. Since 1970, more than 30 million legal and illegal immigrants have settled in the U.S., representing more than one-third of all people ever to come to America's shores.

At the peak of the Great Wave of immigration in 1910, the number of immigrants living in the U.S. was less than half of what it is today, though the percentage of the population was slightly higher. The annual arrival of 1.5 million legal and illegal immigrants, coupled with 750,000 annual births to immigrant women, is the determinate factor— or three-fourths— of all U.S. population growth.

A day without Americans. Now there's and idea!

A Trans-Atlantic Conversation

Today, we received this email. We have removed sender identifications.

Subj: Just keep up the blog and information

I am a fairly liberal minded United Kingdom citizen, but in 1989 I became concerned at the reaction of what I once thought were my friends and nieghbours (mostly from Pakistan) against Salman Rushdie, an Indian that wrote the Satanic Verses, which was a novel revolving around the lives of some minor Indian actors and their thoughts and reactions to Islamic rules. I bought and read the book, and thought it nothing special, but the Islamicists said it denigrated their religion. I was very confused as I didn't read anything bad about religion.

Until I saw the taliban destroying statues of Buddha, I was quite happy living alongside my Muslim friends, then I started asking 'why do these taliban destroy these statues' and had vague half-hearted replies. Then along came 9/11. I met an Islam friend at a curry house (UK curry restuarants are run by people from Pakistan or Bangladesh, all Muslims) and was surprised that the guy that owned the place was quite happy that the US had been "hit at last."

I was quite upset about the attitude of some people I thought were my friends and colleagues. Why did they react like this? Was the US such a bad place? So I embarked on a research of Islam, and was very surprised at what I learnt. The "religion of peace" was nothing like that, and I looked at my friends in a different light. I still hate to dislike them because of their "religion," as I like them and have had many good times with them.

So I remain friends, but have become alittle bit removed from them, which saddens me. I hope we can sort it all out.

Regards

~~~~~

6thCAJ & Sixth Column Response

Thank you for writing. What an agonizing journey your have described for yourself. Although so many of us have taken differing routes, we have ended at the same destination, along with you. I knew precious little about Islam and Muslims until the events of 11 September 2001. I bought my first koran and was so horrified by what I found in it that I began what has felt like a quest-without-end to learn all I could. It did not take long to discover that Islam has no redeeming aspects, that its contradictions are played up to unsuspecting and ignorant Westerners to mollify them, and that there is NO "moderate" Islam. That has made me totally suspicious of all Muslims. Given their proclivity for sanctioned deception, I can never tell when a "nice" seeming Muslim is for real or is just playing me, waiting for the awakening of his sleeper cell. It sounds so paranoid to write this, but I have to put the blame onto them.

Best to you//George Mason

What Muslims create for themselves world-wide is bad press and rotten reputations. Do they care at all? Or is their obsession to destroy and rule the ruins all they can manage? Have they not read any of their own history--do they not know that Islam paralyzes their minds and productivity so that they can only destroy but are cursed never to create and build? If they actually took over the world, anything worthwhile would quickly become rubble, and they could never rebuild because they are total parasites. Why would anyone want this? Why have they wanted this for 1400 years?

Malkin - Shame on President Bush

What did he do? His pecados include those he did and those he failed to do.

Read Malkin.

Stay tuned for further developments.

The War Against Swedes

Fjordman posts this time at Gates of Vienna. (Fjordman used to post at his own blog which he is unable to update because of lack of time. He posts intermittently on cooperating blogs.)

Social disintegration is occurring all across Europe as young Muslims rape, bomb, and pillage, violent crimes as a form of warfare.

....“I read a report about young robbers in Stockholm and Malmö and wanted to know why they are robbing other youths. It usually doesn’t involve a lot of money,” she says. She interviewed boys between 15 and 17 years old, both individually and in groups.

Almost 90% of all robberies that are reported to the police were committed by gangs, not individuals.

“When we are in the city and robbing, we are waging a war, waging a war against the Swedes.” This argument was repeated several times. “Power for me means that Swedes shall look at me, lie down on the ground and kiss my feet.” The boys explain, laughingly, that “there is a thrilling sensation in your body when you’re robbing, you feel satisfied and happy, it feels as if you’ve succeeded, it simply feels good.” “It’s so easy to rob Swedes, so easy.” “We rob every single day, as much as we want to, whenever we want to.” The immigrant youth view Swedes as stupid and cowardly:

“The Swedes don’t do anything, they just give us the stuff. They’re so wimpy.” The young robbers don’t plan their crimes: “No, we just see some Swedes that look rich or have nice mobile phones and then we rob them.”

Read it all.

100 More Saudis to Enroll at Arizona

The UA will enroll about 100 new Saudi Arabian students this summer, which could signal the reverse of a post-Sept. 11 trend of having fewer international students in the United States, especially those from the Middle East. 

The students are part of a new large-scale scholarship program by the Saudi government, which will send about 6,000 students to American universities this year after just 1,442 Saudi students had visas to study in the United States in 2004.

About 80 of the students are already at the UA, enrolled in English-immersion classes before they start their academic programs in the fall. More are expected by the start of next semester as they secure visas.
"International education and student mobility are critical to a lot of positive initiatives worldwide," said Joanne Lagassé Long, director of the Office of International Student Affairs. "The best way to do that is have students study in each other's countries."

The Saudi scholarship program comes at a time when international student interest in American universities is rebounding nationwide. After Sept. 11, 2001, new federal procedures and delays in obtaining U.S. visas caused a decline in foreign students in the United States.

International-student enrollment at the UA surged from the late 1990s until 2002, but has dropped sharply since. The UA had 3,011 international students in 2002 but was down to 2,446 last fall. There's a distinct economic benefit to international students, with the new Saudis expected to have an impact of about $3 million a year on the Tucson economy.
But with this new crop of Saudi Arabian students, it's clear the UA is a hit.
"U of A is famous in Saudi Arabia," said Abdullah Alshammari, 35. "All of them didn't come by chance. They made a plan."

Alshammari, who will be a doctoral student in environment engineering, said he chose the UA because of its reputation. Teachers of his in Saudi Arabia studied here and recommended it highly.

Most of the students at the UA had positive recommendations from alumni in Saudi Arabia, including family members, friends and teachers. Aside from the academic quality, many remember Tucson as a comfortable place.
"Arizona is like the Saudi climate," he said.

The UA had a large number of Saudi Arabian students in the 1970s and early 1980s, but that number declined in the mid-1980s as Saudi Arabia began building universities to keep its own students, said Alfred Stover, assistant Center for English as a Second Language director for outreach and development.

"Now they really want to foster positive relations with the U.S. and that's one of the many reasons they want to send students here," he said. "We're hoping this is positive because the purpose is to facilitate a relationship between countries, just like international education does."
The program grew out of an agreement in April by President Bush and then-Crown Prince Abdullah, with the more open policy part of larger efforts at improving relations between the two nations.

Hattip: LGF

Read the rest.

Not surprising as Tucson was also the favorite destination of bin Laden followers and others with terrorist connections. Saudi Arabia also has extensive investments in the United States, sort of like the fox providing for the chickens in the henhouse its about to raid!

Kiss Me, I'm Illegal

From New York Times

Too Late? Deconstructing America

A sea of humanity 500, 000 strong, floods the streets Los Angeles and many American cities, demanding "with powerful voices" their rights. They want a better life, a better education, etc., etc. The mayor of Los Angeles Villaraigosa, who swore to uphold the Constitution and to protect the U.S. from all threats, backs up these people.

They say that we are a nation of immigrants. Not true. We are a descendants of immigrants. The great majority of Americans were born and some are descendants of immigrants who have lived within these borders for hundreds or thousands of years.

During the early days of our republic, our founding fathers feared the effect of unchecked and indiscriminate immigration into the United States.

The Founders’ Views of Immigration and Assimilation
In the late 18th century, the young republic needed a larger population and encouraged immigration. At the same time, America's founders were concerned with assimilating immigrants. Thus, George Washington, in a letter to John Adams, stated that immigrants should be integrated into American life so that "by an intermixture with our people, they, or their descendants, get assimilated to our customs, measures, laws: in a word soon become one people."  In a 1790 speech to Congress on the naturalization of immigrants, James Madison stated that America should welcome the immigrant who could assimilate, but exclude the immigrant who could not readily "incorporate himself into our society." In Notes on Virginia, Thomas Jefferson wrote: 
 
Every species of government has its specific principles. Ours...is a composition of the freest principles of the English constitution, with others derived from natural rights and natural reason. To these nothing can be more opposed than the maxims of absolute monarchies. Yet, from such, we are to expect the greatest number of emigrants. They will bring with them the principles of government they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty. These principles, with their language, they will transmit to their children. In proportion to their numbers, they will share with us the legislation. They will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and tender it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.

Alexander Hamilton insisted that "the safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common national sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of citizens from foreign bias and prejudice; and on the love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education, and family." The ultimate success of the American republic, he maintained, depends upon "the preservation of a national spirit and a national character," among native born and immigrant alike.

Hamilton opposed granting citizenship immediately put to new immigrants: "To admit foreigners indiscriminately to the rights of citizens, the moment they foot in our country would be nothing less than to admit the Grecian horse into the citadel of our liberty and sovereignty."  Instead, he recommended that we gradually draw newcomers into American life, "to enable aliens to get rid of foreign and acquire American attachments; to learn the principles and imbibe the spirit of our government; and to admit of a philosophy, at least, of their feeling a real interest in our affairs."

Clearly, Washington's call for "one people," Madison's insistence that the immigrant "incorporate himself into our society," Jefferson's concern that some newcomers might not be prepared for "temperate liberty," and Hamilton's emphasis on the "safety" of our republic and the "love of country," are all more or less of one piece. They are a clarion call for "patriotic assimilation."  Given the founders' forthright insistence on patriotic assimilation, it is not surprising that the Naturalization Law of 1795 required that before becoming American citizens, aliens would have to "renounce under oath" all previous sovereign allegiances.  This "renunciation clause" remains today part of the naturalization law and part of the oath to the U. S. Constitution that all new citizens must take.

(Hattip) Michelle Malkin

Obviously their words have been forgotten.

Not forgotten, though, are the words of foreign leaders who are exhorting their citizens to move in.

In 1997, then Mexican president, Ernesto Zedillo told Mexican nationals in Chicago, "I have proudly affirmed that the Mexican nation extends beyond the territory enclosed by its borders and that Mexican migrants are an important--a very important--part of this." (Scroll down and listen to the RealAudio Sound Clip)

During the 19th century, Mexico invited immigrants from the United States to settle its territories in the north. Land was given to entrepreneurs with the understanding that attracted settlers would become loyal Mexican citizens. Mexico expected that these settlers would: learn Spanish, follow the Catholic faith, and follow all laws created by the government in Mexico City. A few thousand settlers came and some decided that they didn't want to adhere to the rules and regulations of settlement and that the laws promulgated in Mexico City were tyrannical and they fomented an armed rebellion.

Now we have a reverse of fortune for the United States. Rather than a few thousand, we have more than ten million settlers who find the rules and regulations of migration to be unworthy and the laws promulgated in Washington D.C. and the various state legislatures to be tyrannical. Will these millions remain peaceful or will they follow the example of the 19th century Texans and Texicans?

For several troubling decades, the people of the United States have been in a state of unease because of the lack of will demonstrated by the Federal Government. Next month George W. Bush goes to Mexico to "negotiate" an immigration policy. With millions of its citizens on this side of the border, it appears that Mexico is in a position of strength.

Jorge Castenada, Mexican Secretary of State in 2001, is one of the meddling Mexicans who attempts to make policy for the United States. Castenada on democratic ideals: It is "undemocratic" for California to exclude non-citizens, specifically illegal aliens, from voting."

Ironically he is supported in this view by the former US Immigration and Naturalization General Counsel, T. Tlexander Aleinikoff, who declared that

"[we] live in a post assimilationist age," adding that majority preferences simply "reflect the norms and cultures of dominant groups," (as opposed to the norms and cultures of "feminists and people of colour.") In effect what is being said is that American democracy is not authentic and that "real" democracy is yet to be created when the different "peoples" or groups within America "share power" as groups.

In other words, over the decades, people within and without various administrations and power elite groups have been deconstructing America, discounting the feelings of ordinary Americans, the majority.

What we have here is also "denationalization" and "transnationalization."

"Denationalised" citizenship 
  
          Another concept which is being advanced, writes Fonte, is that citizenship should be "denationalised." In the name of "inclusion," "social justice," "democratic engagement" and "human rights" some theorists argue for "transnational citizenship," "postnational citizenship" or even "global citizenship" embedded in international human rights accords and "evolving" forms of transnational arrangements. To this end, a number of books have been published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, dealing with such matters as "challenging traditional understandings of belonging and membership" in nation-states and "rethinking the meaning of citizenship." These essays by authors from countries such as France, Germany, Britain and Canada argue for new and "evolving" transnational forms of citizenship as a normative good. 
  
          Fonte believes that the theory of transnationalism will be the next stage of the multicultural ideology and he expects it to be for the first decade of the 21st century what multiculturalism was during the last decade of the 20th century. A kind of multiculturalism with a human face, a concept that gives the elites an empirical tool (a plausible analysis of what is) and an ideological framework (a vision of what should be). My dictionary defines plausible as being "apparently right, using specious (pleasing to the eye) arguments." Those who argue in favour of transnationalism believe that globalization requires some form of transnational "global governance" because, like our Mr Martin, they think that the nation-state and the concept of national citizenship are not suited to dealing with the global problems we may expect in the future.  
  
          We can expect to be bombarded with all kinds of combinations of terms preceded by the word transnational such as "t-citizenship," "t-actors," "t-organisation," "t-migrants,"and "t-jurisprudence." Academics at public policy conferences will be spouting these words, just as during the last decade they wittered on about multiculturalism and education, law, literature and citizenship. A distinguished anthropologist from the University of Chicago has opined that the USA is in transition from being a "land of immigrants" to "one node in a post-national network of diasporas." 

Enough of theory. The practical application is already in place with reality of the many millions that are just here. What are we to do with them? There is no practical way to solve the problem without creating something worse. Too late. The noises being made is legislatures of the land are nothing but "sound and fury." America is falling apart, devolving into interest groups. The commonality decreed by the founders has been put aside.. Yes, the United States exists as an address, but the concept of America has been sold out to the highest bidder. Get used to it.

Joe Guzzaardi's Promise: "I'll Never Give Up!"

Yes, the shape of immigration is important for we have seen how the shape has transformed Europe in the past few decades. We should all be concerned about pending Senate legislation.

Read all of Guzzardi's Promise and the informative internal links.

Then check out We hate gringos. (Caution: explicit language and gestures) and "Without immigrants, this country wouldn't be anything."

Are Hispanics Becoming American?

Mexican flags are waving in the streets of the United States. This part of the problem. Linda Chavez states that Hispanics are "becoming Americans" as did those of previous waves of immigrants. Are they? The answer is "maybe." The answer is "sometimes." Some Hispanic immigrants are choosing to become Americans while others are here to exploit and even to undermine the American system.

For example, irredentist groups such as Maldef and MEChA are decidedly interested in the latter choice, openly advocating a position of creating a separatist state. Meddling Latin American governments such as Mexico claim that "immigration" is problem that must be solved "in partnership with the United States" while also advocating positions that are undermining and hostile to the United States. For instance, Mexico is making four demands: (listen to Four Mexican demands)

1. The documentation of regularization of Mexicans currently in the United States. (As many rights as possible, to as many Mexicans as possible, as soon as possible and many rights listed on the ram audio file.)

2. Border safety and violence;

3. Permanent visas for Mexicans and removing Mexico from the country quota or country quota or country ceiling category because of the "special relationship" that exists;

4. Guest worker programs or temporary worker programs.

The Mexican economy benefits from the billions sent home in remittance. Dual citizenship divides immigrants loyalties. Are they Americans or are they Mexican, or Guatemalan, or Russian, or what ever?

In the case of Mexicans, who can really know as Mexico encourages immigrants to run for office in Mexico while residing in the United States, as Mexican officials proudly boast that America (meaning the United States) is becoming more Mexican every day. The Mexican government has set up Consulares throughout the United States that issue and ID card and help Mexican citizens to obtain services and rights in the United States while "maintaining their Mexicaness." an obvious hostile act to the interest of the United States. Unfortunately Mexico is not the only government that hold these policies. The importance of focusing on Mexico is that Mexico is the only country that shares a long border over which pour millions of its citizens!

Mexican migrants are not unique in their refusal to assimilate to the United States. I hesitate to call them immigrants for an immigrant is one that willingly and enthusiastically embraces that culture, language, and mores of the adopted country. Today's Hispanic migrants are choosing not to learn English and have self-segretated into metropolitan areas in which Anglos feel uncomfortable or even fear to go. They have become "no go areas," or neo-cultural and political zones, hence fulfilling the aspirations of groups such as Maldef and MEChA. Some are warning Hispanics that Anglos will turn on them in a shooting war.

IMMIGRANTS AND MIGRANTS ARE DEMANDING THEIR RIGHTS. Mainstream Americans aren't anti-immigrant so much as they are against those that refuse to assimilate, refuse to learn English, refuse to abandon parts of their culture that are not appropriate to life in the United States, or refuse to offer to the United States an undivided loyalty by forgoing dual citizenship, in whom the citizenship oath has from a true home.

Next week Bush travels to Mexico to "negotiate." Shouldn't he, as does Mexico, make demands that Hispanics from this country come in the interest of the United States and not the interest of their home country?

Protecting U.S. Strategic Assets

Did you know that "most U.S. ports are managed by foreigners and that Saudi Arabia has 50% ownership in the Houston-headquartered Motiva Enterprises LLC?

According to an article by Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld and Alyssa A. Lappen published March 24, 2006 in FrontPage, Motiva is a "joint venture of the Shell Oil Company and Saudi Refining, a subsidiary of Aramco, the Saudi government-owned company, shipping petroleum products, including gasoline and aviation fuel into Connecticut where it owns and operations portions of the New Haven and Bridgeport ports.

In addition, Motiva operates:

portions of 15 other ports nationwide in Tampa; Fort Lauderdale; Dania, Fl.; Hollywood, Fl.; Baltimore; Lawrence and New York, N.Y.; Newark and Sewaren, NJ; Convent and Norco, La.; South Portland, Me.; Providence; Port Arthur and Port Nechas in Texas; Since 2002, Motiva received in one year alone,  at least 14 port security grants totaling at least $4 million from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, according to undated DHS documents. The grants were awarded for “surveillance” and “physical enhancement.”  Finally, Motiva owns two Louisiana refineries and full or partial interests in 47 product terminals. Motiva also owns above-ground storage tanks in the port of Baltimore, as in the other ports. Motiva and its partner Shell Oil, “collectively account for about 10 percent of total U.S. refining capacity and a 13 percent share of U.S. gasoline sales.”

Saudi Arabia also owns and operates:

In the New Haven port, Motiva owns storage tanks containing a portion of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve—the part set aside as the Northeast Heating Oil Reserve – the second largest heating oil reserve in the Northeast. And according to a December 2004 letter from Senator Christopher Dodd to then Homeland Security Secretary, Tom Ridge, New Haven harbor is also the starting point for “the jet fuel pipeline that provides 2.7 million gallons of petroleum liquids per year to Westover Air Force Base in Massachusetts and Bradley Airport.” Bridgeport serves as a major import hub for perishable goods, and as a passenger ferry terminal. Motiva, like other companies operating in Bridgeport and New Haven, manages its own security.
 
In Delaware, where until last year Motiva owned a facility, the company pleaded guilty “to negligently endangering workers at its former refinery in Delaware City, Delaware, discharging pollutants into the Delaware River and negligently releasing sulfuric acid into the air .” Motiva was fined “$10 million and to serve a three-year term of probation.”

It seems that we are inextricably tied to a nation that "continues to fund the spread of radical Islam around the world," an Islamic nation, by definition, one that is duty bound to destroy us.

If that's not enough:

No less troubling is the 10 North American shipping terminals managed by the Riyadh based National Shipping Company of Saudi Arabia (NSCSA). Established  in 1979, it operates eight of these terminals in the U.S.: Newark, NJ; Brooklyn, N.Y.; Wilmington, NC; Savannah, GA: Baltimore, MD; Newport News, VA; Houston, TX, and New Orleans, LA.
 
Despite these substantial properties in strategic locations, the Saudi holdings sailed below the radar when the controversy arose over the DP World debacle. Moreover, little complaint was heard regarding the 2004, DP World acquisition of several U.S. port terminals in its $1.1 billion purchase of the international terminal business from U.S. railroad and shipping giant, CSX Corp.

Saudi Arabia's holdings "sailed below the radar" during the controversy over the DP World.

It gets worse. Dubai is involved again. Read it for yourself.

"Operation First Responder" Needs Your Help!

Folks,

Many of you already know about the extraordianry symposium to be held by America's Truth Forum on 29 April 2006. FrontPageMagazine has published the story of just how difficult the combined forces of PC and Islam have made it to pull off something like this - you know, the TRUTH!

They have been using the usual tactics, especially fear and intimidation. Potential symposium sites have pulled out, and even the biggest corporations have been scared off of supporting this amazing conference. If the Big Boys are too afraid to help out, who's left?

WE ARE! As usual, if you want a job done right, do it yourself. Borders, ports, and now, meetings and freedom to tell the truth.

This is just me - no one has asked me to go begging, but this meeting is so important for all of us that I am proud to beg: PLEASE DONATE WHATEVER YOU CAN TO HELP. It might be too scary for Boeing, General Dynamics, Halliburton, Lockheed Martin, Dupont, and so on (see list below), but if we all pull together, it isn't too scary for Tom, Dick, Harry, Jane, Sally, and Mary.

Please send whatever you can to support this magnificent and daring effort. What an investment! The long-term benefits are incalcuably great!

Here is the full report from FrontPageMagazine:


DENYING THE TERRORIST REALITY
By Joe Kaufman FrontPageMagazine.com March 21, 2006


America's Truth Forum's symposium, The Underlying Roots of Terrorism: Terrorism's Threat to World Peace and National Security, is set to take place April 29th. Speaking at the event will be some of the biggest names in the counter-terrorism field. While those involved in the symposium understand the reality of the terrorism threat, there are many that have, whether out of fear or ignorance, chosen to ignore it.

The event was originally scheduled to be held in Connecticut on September 21st of 2005, but it was sidetracked by CBS/Infinity Radio, who at the last minute, refused to air paid advertisements from America's Truth Forum (ATF). "Too many people might be emotionally affected by the subject matter. It's too controversial to be aired at this time," was their response. This being the case, Jeffrey Epstein, the group's President, decided to move the symposium, both time and location.

The new venue didn't come without its own snags. On November 4, 2005, Epstein flew into D.C. to sign a contract with the GeorgetownMarriottConferenceCenter. But during negotiations with the hotel, Epstein was abruptly ushered out of the Marriott's office. Two weeks later, Marriott Corporate Headquarters issued the following statement: "Due to the high density of Muslim students on the Georgetown campus, members of the staff at Marriott Georgetown were afraid of the potential for violent protests, injured hotel employees and property damage. This is the official stance of the Marriott Corporation."

Today, a new venue in the Greater Washington, D.C. area has been secured, so far without a hitch. But just as things seemed to be going smoothly, a new problem arose - finding sponsorships for the affair.

The war on terror has affected so many different areas of our everyday lives. Many industries have had to change the way they run, especially with regard to security. With this in mind, who better to solicit sponsorships from than those that have had to deal firsthand with the extremist threat?

Epstein worked the phones, calling every entity he figured would be interested in such an important event as his organization was planning. But when one takes a glance at the list of those corporations that have declined to get involved, one is faced with a terrible foreboding for our future.

The following companies, according to Epstein, were contacted for support and showed no interest. Stock answers included "lack of funds" or "terrorism isn't high on their list of priorities," while others chose not to respond at all.

ATK - not involved in war on terror. makes ammo for military and law enforcement.
Boeing - no interest. then refused to purchase seats for first responders due to budgetary considerations.

BAE systems - not interested.
General Dynamics - left messages. no interest.
Halliburton - unable to fund our request at this time.
Maersk Line - no formal reply.
Northrop Grumman - no interest.
Lockheed Martin - no money.
Raytheon - already budgeted out - most likely no funds.
Dupont - declined, because they can't favor every request; subsequent requests for purchase of a couple of seats for law enforcement agents went ignored.
Motorola - no response.
DRS technologies - won't fit with their overall plans.
Zodiac - no funds.wished us well.
Honeywell - no outside solicitation accepted.not interested in program.
L3 Communications - no response.
Rolls-Royce North America - no response.
United Technologies - can't support due to budget limitations.
Pepsi-Cola Military Sales - can only afford to support a small number of worthwhile projects.
Voight Aircraft Industries, Inc . - no interest.
Red Lobster - our request doesn't fit into their brand's strategy.
Anheuser Busch Companies - directed me to local distributors. no response.
Coors - no interest or funds.
American Airlines - no money.
Southeast Airlines - no response.
Wynn Las Vegas - Mrs. Wynn had no interest.
Wal-Mart - no response.
National Beer Wholesaler's Association - no response.
Airline Pilot's Association - no response.
International Association of Firefighters - no response.
Outback Steakhouse - no response.
Wendy's Restaurants - no response.
Yum Brands - no response.
Brinker International - no response.
National Truckers Association (NTA) - no response.
Chevrolet Corporate Relations - no interest.
Insurance carriers that underwrote 9/11 losses:
QBE - won't support.
Chubb Insurance - no response.
American Reinsurance - no response.
Zurich American - no response.
One Beacon Insurance - no response.
Crum & Forster - no response.
Oil companies contacted:
Sunoco - no response.
BP P.L.C. - terrorism isn't of concern.
Bresnan Communications - no response.
Kantor Fitzgerald (securities company that lost employee in trade center) - no interest.
Hotels that suffered recent bombings:
Radisson Hotel - no response.
Grand Hyatt - no response.
Days Inn - no response.

The list is overwhelming to say the least. It would be comical, if the subject being discussed were not so serious!

To work around this unfortunate response from those that should, but are not, concerned, America's Truth Forum has had to get creative. One of the ways the group did this was by implementing a new initiative titled, 'Operation First Responder.'

According to Epstein: "'OPERATION FIRST RESPONDER' effectively bridges the gap between concerned citizens that share ATF's concern for future generations, but can't attend due to a variety of reasons, and those law enforcement agencies that lack the financial wherewithal to be adequately represented at the forum. We are simply providing folks with a viable alternative - the opportunity to purchase seats on behalf of first responders and law enforcement agents, who would greatly benefit from being in attendance. After all, experts like Dr. Harvey Kushner and Dr. Bruce Tefft have dedicated their careers to training thousands of law enforcement agents worldwide. The information they intend to share might eventually prove to be life-saving."

Epstein continued: "We are fighting for the very survival of Western society. Yet, American corporations refuse to support educational initiatives designed to assist those on the front lines. In consideration of the 3000 victims who perished on 9/11, it's not acceptable for these corporations to not step up to the plate and, in the very least, purchase a few seats for law enforcement agents and first responders - people that have shown great interest in the symposium and would benefit from being in attendance. Once again, the burden falls on our citizenry."

If you would like to attend this event, or if you want to take part in 'OPERATION FIRST RESPONDER,' go to www.americastruthforum.com to register for the April 29, 2006 symposium, 'The Underlying Roots of Terrorism: Terrorism's Threat to World Peace and National Security.'

The terrorism threat is real. If we continue to turn our backs on those that are fighting the war, then how will we ever win?

Right to Life or Right to Consign One's Country and Culture to the Dustbin of History?

We will have to make a choice.

Mark Steyn: Salute Danna Vale

Demography is destiny, the theme that Spengler of AsiaTimes keeps hammering is being painfully brought home by others who are noticing that there are "fast-growing and culturally confident Muslim populations in Scandinavia" and other unexpected places in the world.

Demography doesn't explain everything but it accounts for a good 90 per cent. The "who" is the best indicator of the what-where-when-and-why. Go on, pick a subject. Will Japan's economy return to the heady days of the 1980s when US businesses cowered in terror? Answer: No. Japan is exactly the same as it was in its heyday except for one fact: it stopped breeding and its population aged. Will China be the hyperpower of the 21st century? Answer: No. Its population will get old before it gets rich.

Check back with me in a century and we'll see who's right on that one. But here's one we know the answer to: Why is this newspaper published in the language of a tiny island on the other side of the earth? Why does Australia have an English Queen, English common law, English institutions? Because England was the first nation to conquer infant mortality.

Why are we reading this and other publications in English? Why has English become the world's lingua franca, the language of mass transportation and mass communication? Why is English now the langauge of the educated and the sophisticated rather than...Cree, Moldavan, or even Arabic? The answer will surprise you:

By 1820 medical progress had so transformed British life that half the population was under the age of 15. Britain had the manpower to take, hold, settle and administer huge chunks of real estate around the planet. Had, say, China or Russia been first to overcome childhood mortality, the modern world would be very different.

The concept of conquest by population has been noted by another culturally confident group. Look at these numbers:

What country today has half of its population under the age of 15? Italy has 14 per cent, the UK 18 per cent, Australia 20 per cent - and Saudi Arabia has 39 per cent, Pakistan 40 per cent and Yemen 47 per cent. Little Yemen, like little Britain 200 years ago, will send its surplus youth around the world - one way or another.

Danna Vale, Australia backbencher, "unsensitively" pointed out the obvious: "Australia is aborting itself out of recognition and that therefore Islam will inherit (Australia and the world) by default. Her remarks were termed: "outrageous," "insensitive," "offensively discriminatory," and "bigoted."

Here we walk in a minefield for to opine on abortion, one way or another is an invitation to blow one's self up.
Look at the evidence. Earlier generations of women concluded that personal ambition, her "right to choose" was most important. They didn't consider beyond that consequence. They didn't consider the possibility of conquest by demographics, national bankruptcy, or cultural annihilation brought on by the power of other women's wombs.

... given that today's wee bairns are tomorrows funders of otherwise unsustainable social programs, all responsible governments should be seriously natalist. The reason Europe, Russia, and Japan are doomed boils down to a big lack of babies. Abortion isn't solely responsible for that but it's certainly part of the problem...seventeen European nations are now at what demographers call "lowest-low fertility - 1.3 births per woman, the point at which you're so far down the death spiral you can't pull out.

In theory, those countries will find their population halving every 40 years or so. In practice, it will be quicker than that, as the savvier youngsters figure there's no point sticking around a country that's turned into one big undertaker's waiting room: not every pimply burger flipper is going to want to work himself into the ground to pay for new shuffleboard courts at the old folks' home.

And here's the nitty gritty:

In 2005, some 137 million babies were born around the globe. That 137 million is the maximum number of 20-year-olds who'll be around in 2025. There are no more, no other sources; that's it, barring the introduction of mass accelerated cloning (which is by no means an impossibility). Who that 137 million are will determine the character of our world.

The shape's already becoming clear. Take those Danish cartoons. Every internet blogger wants to take a stand on principle alongside plucky little Denmark. But there's only five million of them. Whereas there are 20 million Muslims in Europe - officially. That's the equivalent of the Danes plus the Irish plus the Belgians plus the Estonians.

You do the mathematics. If you want the reality of Europe in a nutshell, walk into a supermarket belonging to the French chain Carrefour. You'll be greeted by a notice in Arabic: "Dear Clients, We express solidarity with the Islamic and Egyptian community. Carrefour doesn't carry Danish products." It's strictly business: they have three Danish customers and a gazillion Muslim ones. Retail sales-wise, they know which way their bread's buttered and it isn't with Lurpak.

For retail sales, it's "strictly business," but for real politick and for real culture, the shape of those "outsourced reproducers" does matter. It's a hell-of-a lot-more-than-business!!

Greek, Vietnamese, Korean, Ibo, Italian, Mexican, and so on, are all tribes and nationalities that have come under scrutiny and eventually have eased themselves into society. But, and there is always a but, for Islam, the "shape" is different. As Steyn points out while paraphrasing Vale:

But Islam is a religion, and an explicitly political one - unlike the birthplace of your grandfather it's not something you leave behind in the old country. Indeed, for its adherents in the West, it becomes their principal expression - a Pan-Islamic identity that transcends borders.

But Islam is a religion, and an explicitly political one - unlike the birthplace of your grandfather it's not something you leave behind in the old country. Indeed, for its adherents in the West, it becomes their principal expression - a Pan-Islamic identity that transcends borders.

When the fastest-breeding demographic group on the planet is also the one most resistant to the pieties of the social-democratic state that's a profound challenge...

"That's a profound challenge" is understating the problem. Steyn points out the condition of the aging populations of uni-cultures such as Japan and bi-cultural Europe, he also reminds us that multicultural London, Gaza, and a Bali are in a "literal baby boom" as they did not fall victim to those "silly books about overpopulation," and I would add, those books on self-actualization that created the mindset of postponing or forgoing parenthood that have caused the problem in the first place.

The Americas, Australia, and Southern Africa will be the beneficiaries of the fleeing European talent, but as Islam has arrived to those shores as well and Muslims are beginning to play the same tricks that made them so successful in Europe and other parts of the world, these societies don't have the luxury of time to figure out how to reverse the effects of "me culture" and at the same time neutralize and thwart Islam and the Muslims on their shores.

The Evolving Al Qaeda Threat

There Are Others, but Al Qaeda is Bush's pick for the nastiest and most low down of the bunch. There inspirational and nominal leader, Osama bin Laden is hiding or may even be dead. A wealthy Yemeni, whose many sons and son's-in-law could carry on the fight. Right now a co-hort, an Egyptian doctor Ayman al-Zawahir is his second in command.

Al Qaeda goes with the flow, adapting to circumstances and to the enemy. For them, here's the rub: we are also adapting.

emaah Islamiah, captured in Thailand; and Hamzah al-Rabbiyah al-Masri, a key operational leader killed in Pakistan. More than 4,000 suspected al-Qaeda members have been arrested worldwide since September 11, 2001. Al-Qaeda cells have been uncovered, dismantled, and disrupted in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. More than $140 million of its assets have been blocked in over 1,400 bank accounts worldwide.

Al-Qaeda remains a potent threat to the United States, its allies, and a wide variety of other states. But al-Qaeda's leaders increasingly must focus on their own personal security and have less time for plotting mass murder. It is more difficult for bin Laden and his lieutenants to recruit new members, train them, communicate with them, or carry out new operations. The isolation of al-Qaeda's top leaders, believed to be hidden along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, has reduced their ability to supervise the network's activities in other regions. They often must resort to unsecure low-tech communications such as letters carried by couriers. A letter from Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's second in command, to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda's operations in Iraq, was intercepted last year. Zawahiri chastised Zarqawi in that letter, dated in July 2005, for unleashing indiscriminate violence on Iraqi civilians, whose political support would be important for turning Iraq into a radical Islamic state.

Despite their tactical differences, al-Qaeda's leaders share the same long-term goal: the creation of a single, unified Muslim state governed by a harsh brand of Sharia (Islamic law). To recreate a version of the caliphate and build a radical Islamic empire, bin Laden and his associates seek to play the role of a vanguard party that will serve as a catalyst to inspire other Muslims to join in building their new utopia. Just as fascist and communist revolutionaries were willing to kill tens of millions of people to impose their utopian schemes in the 20th century, al-Qaeda's leaders are willing to spill the blood of millions to create their own radical vision of an Islamic empire in the 21st century.

According to Philips, the author, we must destroy the center of gravity, the leadership structure and finally the ideology which won't be easy:

Capturing or killing AQC leaders is more of an intelligence problem than a purely military one. Neutralizing the top leaders would not end the threat posed by al-Qaeda's network of quasi-independent cells, but over time it would diminish the scale of the threat, hinder their ability to coordinate operations, restrict their financing, and set back the recruitment, training, and deployment of new terrorist operatives. Capturing or killing bin Laden could demoralize his followers and deprive the organization of its charismatic recruiter, fundraiser, and financial backer. Without its top leaders, the network could fracture into independent franchises that would each pose less of a threat to the United States and its allies than al-Qaeda's present threat, which remains substantial.

The war against al-Qaeda will be a protracted struggle. There is no silver bullet, nor a single target that the U.S. could hit to win the war in one stroke. Even if Osama bin Laden is captured or killed tomorrow, Muslim extremists will continue to attack the United States for decades to come. "Bin Ladenism" has become a threat that will outlast bin Laden. It is important that he be caught or killed, but it is even more important that his ideas, his ideology, be decisively discredited.

Bin Laden is not just a terrorist, but an Islamic revolutionary...a very serious statement. The conclusion is that bin Laden movement is a true revolution, revolting against apostates all over the world, corruption in Middle Eastern States, the existence of foreign troops on "Muslim lands," the "occupation of lands formerly in Muslim hands at any time in history by Muslims, immoraltiy, and the destruction of Muslim values through the polution of modernity and the corrupting presences of other cultures that lure Muslims away from Islam.

There is a method is his madness:

He seeks not only to kill Americans, but ultimately to overthrow every government in the Muslim world, with the possible exception of the radical regime in Sudan, which once gave him sanctuary. His ideological fantasy is to unify the entire Muslim world in one state, ruled under his harsh and radical brand of Islam.

There are four crucial fronts in the war against Al-Qaeda

1. Pakistan/Afgjanistan.

Al-Qaeda emerged as an organization during the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan and was based there after the Taliban movement seized power in 1996. The defeat and ouster of the Taliban in 2001 led many al-Qaeda members to flee to neighboring Pakistan, where they have been hidden and assisted by Pakistani sympathizers who seek to build radical Islamic states in both Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Pakistan is an extremely important front because it is one of the largest, most powerful Muslim countries and already possesses nuclear weapons. The coming to power of an extremist Islamist government possibly could lead to the transfer of nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction to al-Qaeda or other terrorists favored by that regime.

2. Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia is an important front in the struggle because Saudis have provided leadership, financing, and ideological indoctrination to al-Qaeda members. Moreover, Saudi Arabia is the strategic storehouse of roughly one-quarter of the world's proven oil reserves. If the Saudi royal family were overthrown by a regime sympathetic to al-Qaeda, the future economic security of all oil-importing countries would be put at risk. If al-Qaeda gained control of Saudi oil wealth, or the two holy places (Mecca and Medina), it would be in a much better position to boost its jihad.

The Saudi ruling dynasty has made a Faustian bargain with the Wahhabi religious establishment in which it lavishly funds Wahhabi efforts to spread their fundamentalist brand of Islam in exchange for the Wahhabis turning a blind eye to the corruption and un-Islamic behavior of many members of the royal family. The Saudi government initially was happy to deflect bin Laden to attacks on American, rather than Saudi targets. But after al-Qaeda's May 2003 bombings inside Saudi Arabia, the Saudis cracked down on al-Qaeda supporters and undertook limited reforms in religious charities that had been funding bin Laden.

3. Iraq

Iraq is a critical front in the war against al-Qaeda because it has become a rallying point, a major propaganda issue, a staging area, and a potentially fertile recruiting ground for al-Qaeda. The United States and its allies cannot allow Zarqawi's al-Qaeda thugs to establish a permanent base in Iraq, which would become a strategic springboard for al-Qaeda to penetrate the heart of the Arab world, threaten moderate Arab regimes, and disrupt Persian Gulf oil exports.
In an audiotape released on December 27, 2004, bin Laden named Abu Musab Zarqawi as his deputy in charge of al-Qaeda operations in Iraq. Zarqawi, a Jordanian of Palestinian descent, met bin Laden during the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, but had retained his independence, in part because he believed bin Laden was too soft. Although they shared the same long-term goal of building a global Muslim state under a new caliphate, Zarqawi held a fierce hostility to Shiite Muslims, whom he regarded as heretics who should be converted or slaughtered, while bin Laden was willing to paper over sectarian differences until the "far enemy," the United States, was defeated.

As a former prison enforcer, Zarqawi also displayed a ruthless streak that shocked even some of bin Laden's supporters. He deployed truck bombs against Shiite mosques and religious ceremonies in Iraq in an attempt to provoke a civil war that would make Iraq ungovernable. Zarqawi also has made extensive use of videotaped beheadings of hostages in Iraq, which became a kind of popular jihadist pornography on extremist Islamic Web sites.

4. The European Front

he United States and many European countries have developed different perceptions of the threat posed by al-Qaeda. While the United States considers itself to be at war, many Europeans continue to view the threat as a law enforcement problem. The United States itself took this approach before 9/11. Indeed, al-Qaeda's first attack on the World Trade Center, a truck bombing in 1993 that killed six people and injured over 1,000, was treated as an isolated criminal incident. Al-Qaeda's local allies were arrested and brought to justice, but Ramzi Yousef, the ringleader dispatched from Al-Qaeda Central, escaped to plot more attacks until he was captured in Pakistan in 1995. Once the 1993 World Trade Center bombers were convicted of their crimes and put in jail, the American law enforcement authorities went back to sleep, unaware that American intelligence agencies were uncovering mounting evidence of al-Qaeda's threat to U.S. national security.

Europeans now have a greater sense of urgency about combating terrorism after the Madrid and London bombings. Europe's growing population of alienated Muslim immigrants forms an important reservoir of potential recruits for al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. Britain has reversed its long-standing policy of granting sanctuary to radical Islamic ideologues, which allowed them to use mosques in "Londonistan" to poison the minds of Muslims born in Britain. The London and Madrid bombings also demonstrated the need to combat al-Qaeda's ideology, not just its organized killers, because both terrorist attacks appear to have been carried out by local members of the Muslim immigrant community who were inspired by, but not formally affiliated with, al-Qaeda.

But Europe remains an important front for al-Qaeda, which essentially used one of its cells based in Hamburg, Germany, augmented by thugs dispatched from the Middle East, to launch the 9/11 attacks. Some of al-Qaeda's most dangerous members are believed to be European Muslims, who tend to be better educated, more capable, more mobile, and better able to blend into Western societies than those who grew up in the Middle East or South Asia. Abu Musab Zarqawi's predominantly Palestinian/Jordanian terrorist network, which merged with al-Qaeda in 2004, is reported to have relatively strong support from European Islamic radicals, and poses a growing threat not only to Europe, but to the United States and the Middle East.

WMDs are out there, being built, for sale, and eventually will be smuggled in to cause destruction and chaos. We must be ready for our citizens and to counter the threat.

Deterrence is a Countermeasure

The United States and many European countries have developed different perceptions of the threat posed by al-Qaeda. While the United States considers itself to be at war, many Europeans continue to view the threat as a law enforcement problem. The United States itself took this approach before 9/11. Indeed, al-Qaeda's first attack on the World Trade Center, a truck bombing in 1993 that killed six people and injured over 1,000, was treated as an isolated criminal incident. Al-Qaeda's local allies were arrested and brought to justice, but Ramzi Yousef, the ringleader dispatched from Al-Qaeda Central, escaped to plot more attacks until he was captured in Pakistan in 1995. Once the 1993 World Trade Center bombers were convicted of their crimes and put in jail, the American law enforcement authorities went back to sleep, unaware that American intelligence agencies were uncovering mounting evidence of al-Qaeda's threat to U.S. national security.

Europeans now have a greater sense of urgency about combating terrorism after the Madrid and London bombings. Europe's growing population of alienated Muslim immigrants forms an important reservoir of potential recruits for al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. Britain has reversed its long-standing policy of granting sanctuary to radical Islamic ideologues, which allowed them to use mosques in "Londonistan" to poison the minds of Muslims born in Britain. The London and Madrid bombings also demonstrated the need to combat al-Qaeda's ideology, not just its organized killers, because both terrorist attacks appear to have been carried out by local members of the Muslim immigrant community who were inspired by, but not formally affiliated with, al-Qaeda.

But Europe remains an important front for al-Qaeda, which essentially used one of its cells based in Hamburg, Germany, augmented by thugs dispatched from the Middle East, to launch the 9/11 attacks. Some of al-Qaeda's most dangerous members are believed to be European Muslims, who tend to be better educated, more capable, more mobile, and better able to blend into Western societies than those who grew up in the Middle East or South Asia. Abu Musab Zarqawi's predominantly Palestinian/Jordanian terrorist network, which merged with al-Qaeda in 2004, is reported to have relatively strong support from European Islamic radicals, and poses a growing threat not only to Europe, but to the United States and the Middle East.

There are many goals and objectives in the deterrence factory: deterring the harboring and supporting of terrorists through state sponsorship or by individuals; the appearance of victory is a deterrence and the overthrowing of tyrannical regimes and improving the lives of targeted peoples is a deterrent who hopefully will not cooperate with the insurgents.
And we must evolve

he United States and many European countries have developed different perceptions of the threat posed by al-Qaeda. While the United States considers itself to be at war, many Europeans continue to view the threat as a law enforcement problem. The United States itself took this approach before 9/11. Indeed, al-Qaeda's first attack on the World Trade Center, a truck bombing in 1993 that killed six people and injured over 1,000, was treated as an isolated criminal incident. Al-Qaeda's local allies were arrested and brought to justice, but Ramzi Yousef, the ringleader dispatched from Al-Qaeda Central, escaped to plot more attacks until he was captured in Pakistan in 1995. Once the 1993 World Trade Center bombers were convicted of their crimes and put in jail, the American law enforcement authorities went back to sleep, unaware that American intelligence agencies were uncovering mounting evidence of al-Qaeda's threat to U.S. national security.

Europeans now have a greater sense of urgency about combating terrorism after the Madrid and London bombings. Europe's growing population of alienated Muslim immigrants forms an important reservoir of potential recruits for al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. Britain has reversed its long-standing policy of granting sanctuary to radical Islamic ideologues, which allowed them to use mosques in "Londonistan" to poison the minds of Muslims born in Britain. The London and Madrid bombings also demonstrated the need to combat al-Qaeda's ideology, not just its organized killers, because both terrorist attacks appear to have been carried out by local members of the Muslim immigrant community who were inspired by, but not formally affiliated with, al-Qaeda.

But Europe remains an important front for al-Qaeda, which essentially used one of its cells based in Hamburg, Germany, augmented by thugs dispatched from the Middle East, to launch the 9/11 attacks. Some of al-Qaeda's most dangerous members are believed to be European Muslims, who tend to be better educated, more capable, more mobile, and better able to blend into Western societies than those who grew up in the Middle East or South Asia. Abu Musab Zarqawi's predominantly Palestinian/Jordanian terrorist network, which merged with al-Qaeda in 2004, is reported to have relatively strong support from European Islamic radicals, and poses a growing threat not only to Europe, but to the United States and the Middle East....

Bush Steps Up

By identifying the enemy specifically as Islamic radicalism, rather than the more generic "terrorism," Bush's speec was a step forward in the evolving U.S. approach to defeating al-Qaeda. The change signifies a recognition that terrorism is only a part of bin Laden's revolutionary strategy for imposing his harsh Islamic ideology on the Muslim world, and that "bin Ladenism" will outlast bin Laden. A wide variety of radical Islamic groups have copied al-Qaeda's terrorist tactics and share its revolutionary ideology. To defeat al-Qaeda, the U.S. and its allies must not only destroy its leadership, but also destroy its ability to recruit replacements by discrediting its violent ideology.

Bush also restated his five-point strategy for defeating Islamic terrorists: prevent attacks before they occur; deny terrorists weapons of mass destruction; deny terrorists sanctuary; prevent terrorists from gaining control of any nation; and promote democratic reform, respect for human rights, and enforcement of the rule of law in the Middle East to undermine the ability of terrorists to recruit new followers.

President Bush's October 6 speech was important proof that his Administration recognizes the importance of the global war of ideas as well as the war against terrorists in Iraq and other battlefields. The President set crucial long-term goals and outlined a broad strategy for defeating Islamic radicalism. Now the U.S. government must follow through with effective operational plans to build a stable democracy in Iraq; encourage democratic, economic, and educational reforms in the Middle East; and work with a broad coalition of allies in the Muslim world and elsewhere to discredit and defeat the lethal ideology of radical Islam.

March 21, 2006, in a Presidential Press Conference, George Bush identified the enemy as killers with an agenda to destroy America. He told us in plain words that this war would last a very long time. Mistakes were made and we are adapting as is the enemy. Victory is this war is essential.

The focus is on Al Qaeda now, but there are many, many other groups that will for the gap when the destruction is complete. Afghanistan and Iraq are merely battles in the war which the President labeled WWIV, pausing and regressing to name the time period after WWII known as the "Cold War," WWIII. But he still persists in calling WWIV the "War on Terror" and Al Qaeda our main enemy whose ideology is with which we are at war.

Pipes - Mauritania - Europe's New Border

According to blogger and Middle East Expert Daniel Pipes:

Mauritania, a country in West Africa far from Europe, has become the latest boundary for desperate would-be immigrants. They travel by boat for three days and nights to cover the 500 miles from Mauritania's long coastline to the Canary Islands, which is Spanish soil. Once in the Canaries, the whole of Europe lies before them.




The voyage is perilous and over a thousand Africans have died during the past four months while sailing the Atlantic Ocean in traditional wooden fishing canoes called pirogues, normally used for net-fishing expeditions. The vessels are uncovered, are usually powered by a single outboard engine, and rarely carry navigational or emergency equipment. Up to 40 per cent of those who attempt the crossing from Mauritania may not make it. Still, 8,519 Africans reached the Canaries in 2004, 4,751 in 2005, and over 3,500 so far in 2006. The Spanish government has has detained at seamore than 1,000 migrants in the last 10 days alone.

Mauritania, one of the world's poorest countries, is unable to handle the influx. Its prime minister, Sidi Mohamed Ould Boubacar said that the country. "can't control its borders and needs help against this massive wave of immigrants. We can't resist this growing pressure. We need help of all types: planes, boats, vehicles." He said the authorities arrested 3,900 migrants in 2005 and already 1,200 in the beginning of 2006. "What is arriving is unimaginable."




Migrants in a high-sided wooden boat that set out from Mauritania and was intercepted by the Spanish coast guard off the Canary Islands. (Gustavo Gonzalez/ AFP/ Getty Images)



The increase appears to result from the crackdown at Ceuta and Melilla. Unable to reach there, the Canaries became the destination of choice. "The smugglers have just moved the boats south because the Moroccan police and border patrols are now stronger," says Manuel Pombo, a Spanish ambassador-at-large.
A delegation of Spanish officials has arrived for talks to establish an "urgent plan of co-operation" by which the Spanish government helps its Mauritanian counterpart patrol its coastline and establishes centers to process migrants in the country. Between 10,000 and 15,000 Africans, mostly from Senegal and Mali, are thought to be in Mauritania planning to get to the Canaries. (March 19, 2006)

In humanitarian terms this migration is a human tragedy; for Europe its a horrific nightmare. For tens of thousands are pouring in to change the demographics and eventually change ancient European customs and mores to Eurabia and Sharia while exacting the jizya on the unfortunate non-Muslim survivors.
http://www.danielpipes.org/

The Bitter Lament of Muslim Women

Many thousands of women are being slaughtered for they were raped. Parliament remained silent on the issue. No one wanted to offend the mullahs.

...Our political leaders are exactly like those eunuchs. These leaders talk in high-sounding, noble words such as ‘freedom’, ‘non-discrimination’, ‘secularism’ and many other beautiful words. But alas, they do not have the means to apply a single such word to the day-to-day life of our Muslim society. And so, the crying and weeping of the Muslim women go on unchecked; from one age to another. Their tears are symbolized by the waters that cover three quarters of this planet. What a horrible, inhuman and illogical existence we have!...

What an unbearable existence for us to live and survive among co-wives! Innumerable children, unhealthy surroundings, poverty and lack of education have made a mockery of our social lives. Even goats and cows live better than us. The frequent fights among the co-wives, the pulling at one another’s hair are so degrading! And then, God forbicl, if the miyan or husband gets into the fray, then we get beaten like a beast until we cannot take it anymore. And after the beating, to make it even more degrading, the miyan takes his other wife into the bedroom and shuts the door into our face...

Just the pronouncement of the word ‘Talaq’ [divorce] three times can move the earth from under the feet of the Muslim wife. The consequence? Cheap labour or prostitution. The little children suffer from lack of mother’s love, a sense of awesome insecurity and an unhealthy environment. If the children manage to survive then the society is burdened with more beggars and criminals. Admittedly such occurrences do take place in other societies as well, but then they are much fewer in number and, what is more important, in other societies such a state of affairs is not allowed to persist in the name of their ‘religion’, while in our society the mullahs preach such treatment to us women in the name of ‘Islam’. The motto among us is: ‘Breed and profit’—take over the land by increased birth rate. And we, the married Muslim women, have to bear all the burden of the entire operation. That is why no one ever finds a married Muslim woman who is not nursing her own baby or is not pregnant. They are with a child all the time. They die young...

...Many bad social customs and practices have disappeared in other societies. Even in our Islamic society some good changes have taken place—but then these changes have always been to the advantage of Muslim males only...

...But for us, nothing has changed. The men of our society are completely without concern for their women. By granting a few property rights they seem to think that a lot has been done for us Muslim women. What good are these property rights when our marriages are scarred with an unending chain of divorces and re-marriages? The Muslim law has, on the other hand, given rise to a lot more persecution of Muslim women. If a divorced Muslim woman files a suit for her property and alimony rights, then the Muslim court moves very slowly indeed. In the meantime, the husband can get remarried without any hindrance from our Islamic laws. The law of the land that helps women of all other communities under similar circumstances is of no use to us Muslim women because we are supposed to go by the laws of Islam only and nothing else...

The Islamic soldiers of Pakistan’s Yahya Khan gang-raped hundreds of thousands of women in Bangladesh. More than two hundred thousand women became pregnant. A great number of these women later became insane. Only Mujibur Rahman tried to help a little, but the rest of the Islamic world maintained a complete silence. Khomeini’s Iran is currently killing hundreds of women. Their fault is that they do not support his rule. So, in the name of Islam, these women are being butchered. Vishnu Upadhyay has written about the incidents in the newspaper ‘Aaj Kal’ but then no one says a word—the Muslin world is still silent. In any other society, if a woman is raped, the papers cry out in her support, raising a storm of protest in the community. Islam means peace. To watch silently the persecution of women is perhaps this peace. Such lack of concern for women has prevented all improvement in our condition. No blessing or show of kindness from our angels has been bestowed upon us and so, Allah, we are telling you once again about our sadness. You are the master of this world and universe. You are the one we are addressing our complaints to. You have denied us a happy life. If we happen to be one of many wives of a rich Muslim then we spend our lives in jealousy, rivalry and unending pregnancies. If on the other hand, we belong to a poor husband then there is back-breaking hard work for all day and one pregnancy after another as well. Wherever we go, the sword of ‘Talaq’ or divorce always hangs over our heads. The uncertainty and insecurity of our lives affect not only ourselves but our children as well. They have no better choice and get into begging and street crimes. You have seen the crowds of Muslim women and their numerous children roaming around the Howrah station of Calcutta. That they are Muslims can be guessed by the presence of the bearded mullahs that hang around these women. The only concern of the mullahs is to ensure that these women remain Muslims. They are not concerned with their health, well-being, safety and simple humanness. And so, there is nothing for a Muslim woman to look forward to. There is a lot of tears to shed though. A lot of weeping that has no remedy. And so we are crying out to you, Oh Allah, you have given us one and only one privilege and that is to weep. Please therefore let us weep in peace and leave us alone.

Read it all.

Bloggers from both sides oppose FEC regulations

The FEC was expected to publish its proposed Internet regulations yesterday on its Web site. However, the agenda item was listed as "submitted late." When The Washington Times contacted the FEC, it said the item is now scheduled to be posted this morning.


    When the FEC wrote its campaign-finance-reform rules in 2002, Internet communications were exempted. But finance-reform proponents Reps. Christopher Shays, Connecticut Republican, and Martin T. Meehan, Massachusetts Democrat, disagreed and were joined by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, which ruled in 2004 that the Internet exemption was at odds with the statute's intent.


    Bloggers across the political spectrum have united in opposition to proposed FEC regulations.


    "Hopefully, when faced with actual regulations that affect political speech, Congress will stand up to the so-called 'reform community' ..." said Mike Krempasky, co-founder of the popular conservative blog RedState. "We can't really know how the FEC will rule. All we know is that since the House failed to pass [the bill], the Internet will be less free because of it."


    Markos Moulitsas, founder of the influential liberal blog Daily Kos, and Mr. Krempasky co-authored a letter to the FEC last year protesting restrictions on online political speech.


    The Hensarling bill also has broad bipartisan support, including from House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, Illinois Republican; Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Tennessee Republican; and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat. Reid spokesman Jim Manley said Mr. Reid is "concerned" the FEC could pass unnecessary regulations that would "silence this new and important form of political speech."


    The Democratic and Republican congressional campaign committees, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Family Research Council have signed on as well.


    Reps. Tom Allen, Maine Democrat, and Charles Bass, New Hampshire Republican, have their own so-called "blog bill."


    That proposal would restrict the efforts of political blogs with annual operating budgets of more than $10,000. That would mean that larger political blogs, such as the Daily Kos or RedState, would become regulated while smaller sites would not.

How will a "political blog" be defined? Could this regulation later be used to silence all speech of a political nature such as political criticism not just political fund raising.

Could criticism of Islam be construed as political speech? If so, sooner or later this regulation will be used as a tool to get around the First Amendment.

How to Terrorize the Taliban

Borgman at Cincinnati.com Are they MORE afraid of us than we are of them?

Al Qaeda Isn't the Only Islamists Group Causing US Problems

Focusing on Al Qaeda could be a mistake: Revolution in the Pakistani Mountains.

The Taliban have established a foothold in the Pakistani tribal areas of North and South Waziristan along the Afghanistan border, but it is not simply a question of their having marched in and established their writ.

Their ability to impose themselves, which is the result of a virtual revolution in the region, has far-reaching consequences for both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

News reports tend to focus on the renewed capabilities of the Taliban, in terms of their reorganization, their base in Pakistan, improved weaponry and their mass of suicide bombers. What is overlooked in the troubled tribal areas is an astonishing change in local dynamics, which neither the British Raj nor successive Pakistani or Afghan governments had been able to engineer, the ramifications of which threaten the existing order of the whole region.

According to the ATimes Report, centuries of tribal custom has been upended:

Previously, the tribal areas had representation in both the upper and lower houses of parliament, but the delegates were chosen by the jirga (tribal council) system.

In terms of this, a few tribal chiefs sat together and chose representatives from their ranks. As a result, the tribal chiefs held all the political clout, and they grew rich and powerful.

The electoral system broke this supremacy, and in the most recent general election, in 2002, the power and base of the tribal chiefs were destroyed. For the first time, downtrodden clerics, many of whom owned no more than an old bicycle or a mud house, were elected as members of the Senate and the National Assembly.

This coincided with the re-emergence of the Taliban, driven out of Afghanistan in 2001, and in effect the centuries-old tribal order was no more. Youngsters in their teens and early 20s became the new "chiefs", and even took over the jirgas. More than 100 tribal chiefs were killed; the remainder either fled to the cities or began a new life under the rule of poverty-stricken but highly religiously motivated youths.

Tribal identities are being entangled under "Impossible" alliances:

Three major tribes live in North Waziristan, which has become the Taliban's prime stronghold outside of Afghanistan: the Wazirs, the Mehsuds and the Dawar.

British soldiers referred to the Wazirs as wolves, and the Mehsuds as panthers of the mountains. The Dawar have traditionally been peace-loving, preferring shopkeeping to guns and towns over mountains.

The Mehsud and Wazir tribes, though, have been arch-rivals for centuries. Traditionally, the Mehsuds have been part of the Pakistani establishment, and as recently as the past few years they supported the military's actions against Wazir tribes, who are mostly Taliban.

In today's North Waziristan, though, Maulana Sadiq Noor and Maulana Abdul Khaliq are the unbending leaders of the Taliban-led resistance. They are both Dawar and, even more startling, the Wazirs and the Mehsuds are under their command. The man in charge of launching mujahideen raids into Afghanistan is Maulana Sangeen, an Afghan from neighboring Khost province.

In South Waziristan, Haji Omar, a Wazir, is the leader of the resistance against Pakistani forces, while Afghan operations run from the area are taken care of by Abdullah Mehsud, of the Mehsud tribe.

"Nobody has seen such an arrangement in centuries, where the Mehsuds and Wazirs are fighting side-by-side, and more, under the command of the Dawars," said a local bureaucrat in Waziristan who spoke to Asia Times Online on the condition of anonymity.

The consequence is:

warning of direct attack across (the borders of) both countries (Afghanistan and Pakistan) against top army and civilian officials. As a result, according to the sources, Pakistan stopped military operations in North and South Waziristan that were aimed at rooting out Taliban and foreign forces.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban strategy is to terrorize Afghan officials and prevent them from cooperating with foreign forces. And once the allied forces are alienated, attacks on them will be intensified.

There is evidence of yet other Islamist groups:

There is no doubt that radical Islamists, whether those of the Hizb-i-Islami, the Ittehad-i-Islami led by Professor Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, the alliance led by Yunus Qanooni or dozens of independent former Taliban, are now at the helm of political affairs in Kabul.

And the US-backed ruling and nominally secular officers of the Pakistani army are more on their own than ever before. A silent alliance of religious elements and religious parties is keeping a sharp eye on developments in the mountains, waiting for its chance to join in the revolution as it rolls off the mountaintops.

We are not fighting a group, we are fighting a movement whose different elements have similar goals: our annihilation and the consolidation of all power under the flag of Islam and the implementation of Sharia.

Lying by Omission: Muslims, Bosnia, and the Balkans

It's back. And, what is back is that awful gut sense of being aware of something very big and very bad but not being able to come fully to grips with it yet. Like a lock's tumbrils, another key piece has just fallen into place, joining the first. The issue is Bosnia as the undealt-with center of Islamic terrorism, an issue treated by politicians/bureaucrats and journalists as if it does not exist.

Back in early November 2005, we blogged something totally new to us in At Last: The Real Reason for What Is Happening In France. At that time, Muslim youth were tearing apart France. Most journalists seemed committed not to identifying who these rabble really were, and all journalists totally avoided asking and answering why these Muslim youth were rampaging.

Then, we heard a startling revelation, one which seemed like the dropping of a massive boulder into a small pond, but one which surrealistically produced no ripples at all among journalists and politicians.

To recap some of what we heard in November 2005 and wrote about:

News host, John Gibson of The Big Story on the Fox News Channel, interviewed Mr. Greg Copley of the Institute for Strategic Studies Association (ISSA). ISSA has been studing all matters concerning terrorism and more, and has been doing so for years. Apparently, this group is so well respected that our intelligence agencies and cardinal units of our government pay very close attention to what ISSA personnel have to say. In what follows, Mr. Copley indicated that the information came across a long time from multiple Islamic sources, some friendlies and some foes, and has been validated.

...What is happening in France is not accidental as some would say--you know, pent up frustration bursting forth...What we are observing, as Mr. Copley outlined, is what the jihadists themselves call "The Great Ramadan Offensive." It is the beginning of a new type of UNRESTRICTED WARFARE to be waged on Western Europe, the USA, and South East Asia. This war will take place endlessly over a very broad front, with intentions of escalating "terrorism" where it has not gone before. This offensive began with the Bali bombings in late October.

Most astoundingly new was Mr. Copley's revelation that the war against the West is being coordinated from BOSNIA. Obviously too few know this at large, but too few in American security either know it or want to acknowledge it.

Then, silence resumed. No ripples.

Recently, the second tumbril fell into place with Julia Gorin's article on Front Page Magazine, A Balkan Base for Al Qaeda?. The ripples from this boulder feel like a tsunami.

Julia Gorin is a journalist who presents information corroborating Mr. Copley's remarks about Bosnia and much more. Furthermore, it is looking like the entire Balkans Kabuki dance of the 1990s, lead by the Clinton administration, was based on lies, and it set in motion factors having the potential to cause World War III.

Writes journalist Julia Gorin from this article (the whole article is well-worth the time to read):

(All emphases are ours in all article quotes.)

"The War on Terror suffered a major blow three years before it was ever announced. It happened when the people of this democracy were misled into attacking the sovereign, emerging post-Communist democracy of Yugoslavia--over rumors of genocide and ethnic cleansing that proved false. In so doing, we put the final touch on delivering the Balkans to al Qaeda.

"Today we are being asked to seal that historical blunder, whose repercussions seven years later are only escalating as those we “rescued” turn their weapons against UN and NATO forces. While NATO spends most of its time rooting out terror cells in Kosovo and Bosnia—which served as the logistics bases for the London and Madrid bombings--the 2006 deadline to complete our eagerly forgotten debacle and determine the province’s final status is fast approaching..."

From deeper in the article she wrote things that can raise the hair on the back of your neck:

• "...In November, 2001, what should have been an explosive article appeared in the European edition of the Wall St. Journal. Headlined “Al Qaeda’s Balkan Links,” it read: “For the past 10 years…Ayman al-Zawahiri [bin Laden’s second in command] has operated terrorist training camps [and] weapons of mass destruction factories throughout Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Turkey and Bosnia…Though the Clinton administration had been briefed extensively by the State Department in 1993 on the growing Islamist threat in former Yugoslavia, little was done to follow through….”



• "Nor did a December 2003 article in Britain’s Sunday Mirror register a blip: “Posing as members of the Real IRA, we…made our deal in Kosovo, a breeding ground for fanatics with al-Qaeda links. Our contact was the deputy commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army Niam Behljulji, known as Hulji…Hulji is said to supply terrorists across Europe and has been accused of massacring Serbian women and children during the war. He even posed grinning for a photograph, holding the severed head of one of his victims…Hulji said: ‘The plastics (Semtex) is the old type. No metal strips inside. It cannot be detected at airports.’”



• "Hulji, according to the December issue of London's Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy journal, is the man who supplied the Semtex-like explosives used in the London and Madrid attacks.



• "For the past four years, the Hague's International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia has been finding what multiple international forensic teams have found--that claims of Serb “atrocities” were exaggerated and often invented. [But avoided being reported by the press!]



• "As UN human rights observer Jiri Dienstbier notes, "If NATO and the UN can't defeat terrorism in an area the size of one-eighth of the Czech Republic, how do they expect to confront global terrorism?" Balkans author Vojin Joksimovich seconds the question: "Although the intelligence community is fully aware of the threat, political leaders are denying it and the media are silent. Given this cover-up, it's fair to ask whether we are able to prevent yet another major terrorist act." Indeed, can you fight terror with one hand while abetting it with the other?



• "In early 2001, German TV broadcast a report titled "It Began with a Lie," which publicized the findings of the observer force Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) that no genocide had taken place in Kosovo...



• "But to perpetuate the version of events we were sold from the beginning, all these connections have gone purposefully unmade by our nation’s “journalists,” who were gung-ho supporters of our 1999 offensive against a historical ally and the culmination of our pro-terror policies in 1990s Yugoslavia. How many Americans know that the terrorists who carried out a spate of suicide attacks in Iraq in August 2004 were trained in Bosnia, or that al Qaeda’s top Balkans operative, al-Zawahiri’s brother Mohammed, had a high position with our terrorist KLA "allies"? And who wants to bring up what former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia James Bissett has--that in Bosnia we'd fought alongside at least two of the 9/11 hijackers. The American public certainly won't hear that Bosnian charities have been raided for funding terrorism or that in 1992 Bosnia issued passports to Osama bin Laden and al-Zawahiri. We’ll never know that Bosnia today is the European “one-stop shop” for all the terrorism needs--weapons, money, shelter, documents--of Chechen and Afghani fighters passing through Europe before heading to Iraq. Or that at an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, troops recovered one Albanian Kosovar’s application, reading, “I have Kosovo Liberation Army combat experience against Serb and American forces. ...I recommend operations against parks like Disney.”

A number of other articles on the Balkans are on Julia Gorin's website and are worth the time to read. We also cannot commend too highly the article Did an "Islamofacist Narco-Terrorist Hoax" Start the War in the Balkans? written by our blogging colleague Eleanor, 16 March 2006.

How many tumbrils are left, left to fall into place to open the lock on the truth? Not only are Mr. Copley's statements about Bosnia being the center of Western-directed jihad finding corroboration, and from multiple sources, but we are learning that the Clinton-Albright-Clark policies ineptly enabled and whitewashed enormous atrocities committed by Muslim Balkan groups. To this very minute, Islamic terrorist plotting, planning, and training goes on in Bosnia, aimed at crippling and destroying all of us infidels in the West.

Meanwhile, we waste precious soldiers, materiel, and money fighting like a cripple in Iraq. Only we cripple ourselves--while Bosnia and Iran skate.

Britain Oblivious to Old Adage "Be careful what you wish for"

Larry The Cable Guy would have to say about this (excerpted) story, "Now, that's funny--I don't care who you are."

Britain Aims to Become Europe's Most 'Islam-Friendly' Economy
By Kevin McCandless
CNSNews.com Correspondent
March 20, 2006

London (CNSNews.com) - As more and more British banks offer special services to Muslims, the government says its wants to make the United Kingdom the most Islam-friendly economy in Europe. [Part of Blair's new "Giving-Britain-Away-as-a-Tax-Deductible-Donation" program. Or, as Churchill did not say, Making Britain safe for everybody but Britons.]

Treasury officials said they wanted to create a "level playing field" for banks selling financial products that comply with Islamic law (shari'a.) [Muslims will indeed level them out, more like crushing those whom they do not behead.]

In addition to providing for the 1.8 million Muslims who live in Britain, Treasury spokesman Tom Youldon said the government would continue to promote the country as a center of Islamic finance for Muslims based abroad. [What do they think Islamists will do with England when they acquire it?]

"In Islam, there's a saying that in matters of [business] dealings, everything is possible - unless it's prohibited," he said. [Oh, my, that is sooooo funny--except that it isn't.]

(Emphases and notes in [] ours)

We would have to place this British behavior in the "come-and-get-it" category. And, Britain, they surely will.

Here is an illustration for the story from our files:



Looking for The Road to Dhimmidom

Hey, Ma, Look What We Done!

This story (excerpted below) was painful to listen to on the morning news.

FOXNews.com - U.S. & World News - Afghan Man Faces Death for Allegedly Converting to Christianity

Sunday , March 19, 2006

KABUL, Afghanistan — An Afghan man who allegedly converted from Islam to Christianity is being prosecuted in a Kabul court and could be sentenced to death, a judge said Sunday. The defendant, Abdul Rahman, was arrested last month after his family went to the police and accused him of becoming a Christian, Judge Ansarullah Mawlavezada told the Associated Press in an interview. Such a conversion would violate the country's Islamic laws.

During the hearing, the defendant allegedly confessed that he converted from Islam to Christianity 16 years ago when he was 25 and working as a medical aid worker for Afghan refugees in neighboring Pakistan, Mawlavezada said.

Afghanistan's constitution is based on Shariah law, which states that any Muslim who rejects their religion should be sentenced to death. "We are not against any particular religion in the world. But in Afghanistan, this sort of thing is against the law," the judge said. "It is an attack on Islam. ... The prosecutor is asking for the death penalty." The prosecutor, Abdul Wasi, said the case was the first of its kind in Afghanistan. He said that he had offered to drop the charges if Rahman changed his religion back to Islam, but the defendant refused.

Mawlavezada said he would rule on the case within two months. Afghanistan is a deeply conservative society and 99 percent of its 28 million people are Muslim. The rest are mainly Hindus.

(All emphases are ours)

If there is anything we have been shouting to the rooftops, it is the fact that ideas count. Tagged to that is another fact: People are only as good as the ideas they hold. Sadly, homo sapiens, even in America, have trouble understanding this, judging from the egregious contradictions allowed to stand in a civilized country such as ours, and a billion people accepting the destructiveness of Islam without question.

It reminds us of a fantasy that popped into mind a good while back: Imagine Paul Revere and Sybil Luddington shouting that the British are coming, only to hear from the bedroom windows something like, "Close that window so we can go back to sleep." Happily some do get the importance of ideas to homo sapiens, and others are receptive, but they are presently outnumbered and do not hold positions of power--yet.

The first pain is for the poor man in Afghanistan who was turned over to sharia by his family because he converted to Christianity, and now he faces death at the hands of the Afghani government, which we installed. That leads to the second pain: Look what we done!

We, under President Bush, expended blood and treasure on Afghanistan, then turned around and let them have an Islamic government with sharia law. This man is not the first under the Kharzai government to suffer sharia; an editor was threatened with death unless he recanted criticisms of Islam.

Truly, we got everything we asked for in Afghanistan.

Where is the protest about our establishing an Islamic-sharia government in Afghanistan from our public figures? Sadly, almost no protest has come from the American people either. The fact remains: We got rid of al qaeda and the taliban, a ruthless dictatorship oppressing Afghanis, so we could put in our own dictatorship, one which uses exactly the same ideology. Does that make any sense? The difference between governmental behavior under the taliban and this post-taliban government is solely a function of time: The post-taliban government has not yet had the time to devolve into full tyranny. It has begun, however.

The Bush administration has done the same thing in Iraq, for exactly the same reasons, and few Americans have protested. Most protests we see and hear are worn-out, repetitious, and stale liberalism.

We will never get anything better from the Bush administration because of the quality of the ideas they hold. Very bad ideas cannot be rationalized by some superficiality such as they-voted-democratically. Besides, Bush et al will do anything to keep from identifying Islam for what it is.

When it comes down to brass tacks, we are not fighting any war against terror--We are fighting a war to prevent our own success.

The American people have to take a big hit on this as well. So many polls point out how religious Americans are, in very high percentages. Their dedication to religion, mostly Christianity and Judaism, has tied their brains behind their backs. The popular mental paralysis takes the form of this syllogism: All religions are good; Islam is a religion: therefore, Islam is good. Added to that is the prohibition instilled in childhood never to criticize any religion. Islam and Islamists could ask for nothing better for ensuring their jihad.

No one can change anyone's mind except that person himself or herself. We can hope that Americans can overcome their self-induced blindness about Islam before we are fighting Muslims and each other in our homeland.

Food for Thought - "A Balkan Base for Al Qaeda?"

Were we manipulated into removing the traditional buffer between the West and the Muslim world?

The War on Terror suffered a major blow three years before it was ever announced. It happened when the people of this democracy were misled into attacking the sovereign, emerging post-Communist democracy of Yugoslavia--over rumors of genocide and ethnic cleansing that proved false. In so doing, we put the final touch on delivering the Balkans to al Qaeda.

Today we are being asked to seal that historical blunder, whose repercussions seven years later are only escalating as those we “rescued” turn their weapons against UN and NATO forces. While NATO spends most of its time rooting out terror cells in Kosovo and Bosnia—which served as the logistics bases for the London and Madrid bombings--the 2006 deadline to complete our eagerly forgotten debacle and determine the province’s final status is fast approaching. To persuade the international community that only one final status will be acceptable, our Albanian "rescuees" have been stepping up the violence, a message to the West that it has only one possible exit strategy: grant unconditional independence--without border compromises with Serbia and without protection guarantees for what’s left of the non-Albanian minorities.

If we allow this to happen, the peacekeepers will have to leave, and with them our eyes and ears in this terror haven and thruway. Still, congressional, State Department and UN sentiment seems to be tilting toward self-determination and the logic that if you’ve dug yourself into a hole, keep digging.

Read it all.

It must be drummed into our dear little heads that the present "War on Terror" isn't the beginning of our conflict with Islam in spite of the pronouncements to the contrary of our fearless leader and protector.

Neither Desert Storm nor the conflict in the Balkins, our subject, certainly weren't the first. Most Westerners think of The First Crusade called by Pope Urban f as the beginning of conflict, of "the struggle." The word "struggle" is appropriate as jihad really means struggle. There had been many struggles beginning with Mohammed and his cohorts who mounted hundreds of skirmishes and battles of conquest with surrounding tribes to force them to accept "monotheism," the "religion" that Mohammed received from Allah in a cave. Over the centuries, thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions eventually gave in to the efforts of the "strugglers," the jihadists who moved in all directions.

Europeans felt the wrath of Islam as it jihadists swept through the Iberian Peninsula and the Balkan Peninsula only to be thwarted and pushed back to Africa and the Middle East. Western Europeans forgot what it was like to live on Islam's bloody borders, but those in the east, in the Balkans lived in an uneasy "state of peace" with their Muslim neighbors until the late twentieth century when NATO and the United States were convinced that removing Milosevic and neutralizing Serbia would solve the regions ethnic problems and bring "real peace" to the region.

Was the world duped? Do we now realize that that Clinton and NATO were convinced to remove the buffer, once again unlocking Europe's Eastern back door, throwing Euorpe back centuries to relive the same nightmare? The war to stop Serbian ethnic cleansing of Muslims has has an ironic opposite effect: instead of the expulsion of Muslims from Serbian lands, non-Muslims have been forced to move as they can no longer hold Islam and Muslims in check.

Another irony exists on the Iberian Peninsula, where one jihadist' bomb brought and the threat of others brought down a government and Muslims immigrants are flooding in from Africa into Europe over barbed wire and off of leaky boats at a rate, if unabated, with natural increase, within decades will realize Eurabia, a piece of the Islamic state called for by Islamists all over the world.

Maybe it isn't the teachers; maybe it's you

In response to Martha Zoller's recent column, Laura Hirschfeld Hollis at Townhall.

The combination of irresponsible parents, pie-in-the-sky theorists and Education Department bureaucrats has turned public schools into laboratories where problems fester, education decays, teachers are set up to fail, and all children – yes, even those without emotional, psychological or development problems - suffer.

Unfortunately, America does have lousy parents.  But a substantial number of these parents could be – and should be -- held accountable for their children’s problems.  This would enable teachers to be teachers again. 

Yes, there are some ineffective teachers.  It’s true that we will always have some children who need special help.  And we will always need school lunches, social workers and other remedial and supplemental programs.  Perhaps it’s even true that  public schools will never be models of stellar education.  But if more parents would grow up, step up to the plate, and be parents, schools would certainly be able to do a better job than they can now.

Read it all.

Underreporting Muslim Violence

The mainstream media falls over itself to publish any alleged violence toward Muslims in the West and examples that are labeled "Islamophobic" by groups such as CAIR. But, according to columnist John Leo, the routinely underreport or even ignore acts of violence and statements by Muslims. Concentrating first on the "misleading and low-key report of the murder in Paris of Ilan Hamlimi:

A much bigger example is the misleadingly low-key reporting of the Ilan Halimi murder in Paris. We now know that Halimi was killed as a classic expression of Jew Hatred. But with so much evasiveness and misdirection by police, government and press, it took a month to get that fact clearly on the table. Halimi, a cell phone salesman, was kidnapped and held for ransom by a mostly Muslim gang. He was horrifically tortured for three weeks, then slain.  From time to time, neighbors had come to watch the torture or to participate in it. Nobody called the gendarmes. At first the government and the press presented this story as a straightforward kidnapping for ransom. A spokesman said Jewishnesss may have played a role simply because the kidnappers thought Jews were rich. AP and UPI, in feeds to the U.S., barely mentioned the possibility of anti-Semitism. After arrests were made, the BBC worked hard to avoid using the word “Muslim,” though verses from the Koran were recited during the torture...

In an excellent article last week, Colin Nickerson of the Boston Globe said the crime was being attributed to a “predominantly Muslim youth gang” notorious for  “virulent anti-Semitism.”  The gang’s taunting phone calls to Halimi’s father were filled with anti-Semitic slurs and a rabbi had been told, “We have a Jew.” The Globe said hatred of Jews is now a hallmark of what’s cool in France, even among young immigrants from non-Muslim nations. Very strong article. No dancing around, just good reporting.

And its not just the news media:

Governments and the media often avoid calling terrorism by its proper name. Presumably the idea is to calm the public and avoid embarrassing Muslims. It took nine months for the FBI and the government to admit that the attack on L.A. airport in 2002 was a terrorist operation. We had been told that personal reasons might explain why a pro-Palestinian gunman, who openly admitted the desire to kill civilians, would kill two people at an El Al counter. The same verbal dance took place recently when the Iranian student rented a large van and tried to run down and kill as many students as possible in North Carolina. He said he was attempting to: “avenge the deaths of Muslims around the world.”  But the university tried desperately to avoid the obvious T-word.

      Tony Blankley wrote a column on March 8, 2006 on the underreporting of Muslim violence. He said British politicians tell him there is increasing radical Muslim street violence, explicitly motivated by radical Islam, but not reported or characterized as such. Blankely said rioting Moroccan youths in Antwerp went on a rampage, beating up reporters, and destroying cars, but police were instructed not to arrest or stop them. A database search shows little reports on Antwerp riots. The scary riots in Australia last December, pitting Lebanese immigrants against native whites, were well covered.  But nobody seems quite sure that we are getting the full story about other serious disturbances. From time to time, the Internet carries reports of riots that don’t make the newspapers, but they are mostly uncheckable.

Blankley, Washington Times editor and the author of The West's Last Chance makes a valid point:

The public has the right and vital need to have the events of our time fully and fairly described and reported. But a witch's brew of psychological denial and political correctness is suppressing the institutional voices of government, police, schools, universities and the media when it comes to radical Islam.

It is obvious that we are being manipulated. It is out demagoguery or fear of violence? Is the media and are politicians afraid for OR of Muslims in the societies in which they reside?

We can't make a rational response to danger or to problems within our society without all the facts.

A Different Wrinkle - Are Iraqi Militants Really Proxies Fighting for Iran?

From a report in the news.telegraph:

The Iraqi firebrand cleric, Moqtadr al-Sadr and the chief of the armed Shia group Hizbollah in Lebanon, Hassan Nasrallah, held separate consultations with leading officials in Teheran.

Al-Sadr commands thousands of fighters in Iraq, with the power to destabilise further the country and target British and American troops, while Hizbollah's missile-wielding fighters are stationed on Lebanon's southern border with Israel. The revelation of their visits to Teheran has stoked fears that Iran's Shia clerical rulers are drawing up plans to wage a co-ordinated proxy war, using foreign Shia militias, in the worsening dispute with the West over its nuclear ambitions...

The visits of al-Sadr and Nasrallah to the Iranian capital went unmentioned in state-controlled media, but were reported on the Iranian expatriate internet site, roozonline, widely regarded as a reliable source of information from inside the tightly controlled Iranian regime.

While Iraq and Lebanon are home to the most powerful Shia militias, the voice of Iran's ruling clerics also holds sway with Shia minorities and Iranian communities in Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Its capacity to destabilise the Middle East also extends to the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Stay tuned for further developments.

UK - Terror Suspect Escorted into House of Commons by First Muslim Peer

Mahmoud Suliman Ahmed Abu Rideh was invited to attend a session of Parliament -- as the guest of a Labour peer.

He was invited to Westminster on Tuesday by Lord Ahmed, who met him at Regent’s Park mosque three weeks ago...

Lord Ahmed confirmed he invited Abu Rideh, 34, to see him — and said he QUIZZED him over the suspected al Qaeda link.

He said: “I gave an appointment to see him this week. He came to see me as a Parliamentarian. It was my duty to hear what he had to say.

“He came through the peers’ entrance. He went through the security check and I met him at security. He did not leave me for one second.

“I did not take him into any public gallery.

“I asked him, ‘Have you ever been linked with al Qaeda?’ and he denied it.”

But did he ask him his views on various other topics: Islamic Imperialism, the re-establishment of the Caliphate, the treatment of women, dhimmitude for non-Muslims, and so on? The article gives neither his views nor those of Lord Ahmed.

Lord Ahmed said he escorted Abu Rideh from the building after the interview in his office.
It is not known when the suspect got into the Commons gallery.

Abu Rideh explained the visit by saying: “I was meeting some people to help me with my problem.”
The Palestinian suspect came to Britain in 1995 and was given permission to remain permanently in 1998.
He was detained as a terror suspect in December 2001, accused of fundraising for groups linked to al Qaeda.
David Blunkett directly accused him of the link to Osama bin Laden’s organisation when Home Secretary.

Abu Rideh has admitted to officials in a statement that he “used to travel around Afghanistan, disguised as a beggar, with large sums of money hidden in a plaster cast on his leg”...

He says he's innocent. Of course I believe him. Don't you?

Hattip: LGF

Muslims Take Cartoon Case to UN's "Allah" Commission

More on the attempt to make "defaming" Muhammed a universal crime.

The Islamic Faith Community, an umbrella organisation of 27 radical Muslim organisations in Denmark, is lodging a complaint against the state of Denmark with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Right (OHCHR) in Geneva (by the way, take a look at the Office's log with resembles the Arabic script for Allah). The reason for the complain is last Wednesday's refusal of the Danish director of public prosecutions to press criminal charges against Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that published 12 Muhammad cartoons in September 2005.

The Islamic Faith Community says that Denmark "acts as a barrier to justice" by its refusal to pursue the case against the paper. The Muslim organisation announced that it also plans to sue Jyllands-Posten for defamation in a Danish court.

Islam Faith Community spokesman Kasem Said Ahmad said that:

"Muslims living in the Islamic world have greater confidence in the United Nations than in the European Union."

Ahmad's statement tells much about the thinking of Danish Muslims.


1.Danish Muslims believe that although they constitute 5% or less of the total population, Denmark is "part of the Muslim world," or Ummah.

2. They believe that the laws of the United Nations should override the laws of Denmark and that Denmark should have no national sovereignty.

3. Muslims have no confidence in the European Union and apparently they do in the United Nations to settle a score in their favor.

4. Muslims believe that "defaming Mohammad" is an international crime and the perpetrators will be brought to justice by the United Nations.

Ahmad Akkari, the radical Danish imam who was caught lying and distributing bogus cartoons, accused Denmark of breaching UN human rights conventions.

He was caught in a blatant lie, and distributed false evidence to defame Denmark, has the temerity to accuse Denmark of violating "human and political rights" and demanding that Denmark be censured.

Our point is that in failing to censure Jyllands-Posten, Denmark has committed a breach of its duties a signatory of UN conventions on human and political rights as well as international agreements on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination.

What racial discrimination? Islam is not a race. Publication of cartoons is not a violation of human or political rights. A long-dead man can no longer be defamed, only that of his memory.

Mohammed was only a man, not God. His reputation was trashed in the Koran, in the Sura, the Hadiths, and in historical accounts of his contemporaries. What Muslims want to Mohammad is historical revision and a blind-and-sheepish acceptance by Muslims and non-Muslims alike of a white-washed version of Mohammad's life. They also want non-Muslims to overlook that Muslims yearly do commit thousands of violent acts in the name of Islam, invoking Allah and Mohammad as their inspiration.

The publication or non-publication of cartoons about Mohammad or about Muslims will obliterate neither historical memory or contemporary accounts of violence and discrimination AND DISRESPECT by Muslims against non-Muslims.

As Paul Belien explains in a recent article in The American Conservative

"Those who believe that the whole issue has to do with 12 cartoons are naïve. Denmark is being punished for its alleged Islamophobia. Its crime is not the publication of 12 drawings [...]. Its crime is the staunch refusal of the Danish Vikings to allow Muslim immigrants to impose their laws on their host country. [...]. Since Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen's center-right coalition came to power in 2001, Copenhagen has introduced the most sensible immigration policy in Europe.

Islamophobia is a disputed neologism "referring to fear and accompanying hostility towards the religion of Islam and its adherents, or by extension to predominately Muslim cultures, reflecting the influence of multiculturalism and identity politics.

What do we call the historical reverse behavior of Muslims toward non-Muslims? They certainly aren't "phobic,"or fearful of non-Muslims. We should create a descriptive term that summarizes the disdain of Muslims for non-Muslims, the willingness to discard their lives as beneath contempt, the belief that when dealing with non-Muslims, anything is acceptable. The term would have to be more forceful than xenophobia or bigotry, racism or feelings of superiority. Is there such a term? If not, one should be coined.

For the beginning with Mohammad, the imposition of the will of Muslims is behind all troubles involving Muslims and non-Muslims. For this reason, non-Muslims have learned to be wary of what Muslims say and do. Is that a "phobia" or commonsense and self-defense?

When a U.S. Citizen Is Not an American

Dual citizenship is divided loyalty.

As the furor over the warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens by the National Security Agency continues, liberals are stentorian in condemning this supposed outrage. But their objections are partly based on the naive belief that if someone is a U.S. citizen his loyalty to America should not be questioned.

In fact, such a belief is not only naive, but it also completely ignores a widespread practice among today's immigrants. This is the practice of dual citizenship (or dual nationality), where naturalized immigrants keep their native citizenship as well as U.S. citizenship. This duplicitous practice by immigrants of having two citizenships is hardly mentioned in public debates. But in this age of terrorists masquerading as nice guys, dual citizenship should be a prominent national security issue.

There are no official statistics of dual citizens, but naturalization numbers over the last thirty years indicate that there are some 15 million U.S. citizens today who are either dual citizens or are eligible to hold dual citizenship. That is a lot of people with potentially conflicting loyalties.

Despite all the politically correct nonsense about immigrants, there is a simple question that will get to the heart of the matter -- if someone was truly loyal to America, why would he keep another citizenship?

Why indeed?

However, to many immigrants today, U.S. citizenship is not an object of patriotism. To these people, U.S. citizenship means the convenience of having a U.S. passport that enables them to come and go without worrying about immigration problems. Though on paper they are U.S. citizens, in practice they are foreigners...

They refuse to assimilate, following customs that are clearly incompatible with Western traditions. In other words, they may be U.S. citizens, but they are not Americans.

How is this possible?

Due to liberalization of naturalization rules, the burden of proof of the loyalty of intending citizens is very low. Other than taking the naturalization oath, which has now become rather perfunctory, immigrants are not required to provide cogent proof of their loyalty to America...

Obviously unacceptable and clearly dangerous to the United States:

For terrorists and their sympathizers, U.S. citizenship is a powerful tool. It gives them unabridged rights of access to the country, not to mention the right to work in sensitive installations such as nuclear plants, defense facilities, etc. To those who are intent on destroying America from within, obtaining U.S. citizenship is a critical step. To them, it is a clever subterfuge that wards off suspicion.

It gets worse:

From the beginning, dual citizenship is a contradiction. For, before you can become an American citizen, you must take the oath of naturalization, which says: "I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty...."

The language of the oath is clear. Therefore, to allow people to turn around and retain their former citizenship is a gigantic mockery of the oath.

On its website the State Department says, "The U.S. Government recognizes that dual nationality exists but does not encourage it as a matter of policy because of the problems it may cause....However, dual nationals owe allegiance to both the United States and the foreign country."

In other words, the naturalization oath does not mean a thing.

Moreover, dual citizens can legally possess a U.S. passport and a passport from the other country at the same time. And they can vote in foreign elections. Worse, they can even hold public offices in both countries.

An individual with parents who hold citizenship in separate countries and born in a third country can hold tri-citizenship. Is the practice of dual, or even multiple, citizenship a furtherance of an agenda for discarding a national identity in favor of a world central government?

Intellectual Terrorism?

intellect |ˈintlˌekt| |ˌɪn(t)lˈɛkt| |ˌɪntəlɛkt|
noun
the faculty of reasoning and understanding objectively, esp. with regard to abstract or academic matters

terrorize |ˈterəˌrīz| |ˌtɛrəˈraɪz| |ˌtɛrərʌɪz|
verb [ trans. ]
create and maintain a state of extreme fear and distress in (someone);

The Cartoon Controversy rages on in Pakistan:

ISLAMABAD: The government has blocked all websites that carry caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) on the Internet, and the attorney general has been asked to explore legal avenues for implementing a global ban on these sites.

The petition is addressing:

The federal government (of Pakistan), the Telecommunications ministry, PEMRA, PTA, Yahoo Incorporated USA and 1&1 Co, the host of websites carrying the cartoons, are respondents in Imran Uppal’s petition...

Advocate Qamar Afzal stated in his arguments that the availability of the caricatures on the Internet, which have hurt the religious sentiments of Muslims worldwide, should be declared “intellectual terrorism”. Maulvi Iqbal Haider stated that though the site had been blocked, the sacrilegious cartoons could still be accessed through various search engines. Advocate Ibrahim Satti, counsel for Iqbal Haider, also stated that an FIR on the availability of the sacrilegious material under blasphemy laws...

What right do judges in Pakistan have to declare what non-Muslims in other countries and cultures may say, do, publish, or otherwise express themselves?

Blasphemy is a relative term, depending on many sentiments. Although all sects of Islam consider the cartoons, blasphemy, what does that have to do with non-Muslims. In fact, viewpoints of Muslims toward Christian dogma is considered blasphemy to most Christians. No one is up in arms or taking Muslims to court or physically attack Muslims because of their beliefs that are variance with those of Christianity or Judaism which are routinely disregarded by Muslims.

How is the publication of the cartoons causing "a state of extreme fear and distress?" As Muslims have murdered and created mayhem because of the publication of cartoons is terrorism. To expect non-Muslims to "be sensitive to the feelings of Muslims" and to call them "intellectual terrorists" is hypocritical.

Not All Meddling Politicians Are Mexican

I wasn't aware that there is a problem with illegal Irish immigrants in the United States. Bertie Ahern, Prime Minister of the Irish Republic has "sought help" to remedy the problem by attempting to use the U.S. as a safety valve for unemployed workers as do the Mexicans.

Apparently Ireland is having its own "guest worker problem," a "consequence of the Treaty of Nice, which expanded the European Union to the old Eastern Block. Membership of the EU makes the theoretical demand that labor be permitted to move freely between member nations."

On June 8, 2001, the Irish people rejected the treaty via referendum. "Or so they thought."

Ahrern was not deterred by a matter so slight as the will of the Irish people. He held a second referendum in 2002, which the pro-Nice camp won, on a turnout of 48 percent; after considerable interference by the Eurocracy.

What is the point. I'm getting there, but first:

Recently, on December 9, 2005, 100,000 Irish joined a strike in support of the staff of Irish Ferries, whose management was seeking to displace them with cheaper Eastern European agency labor. Irish ferries later got its way, but only by guaranteeing the Eastern Europeans the Irish minimum wage.

Irish workers lost 38,000 jobs which is a large number in a population of only four million. Unemployment is rising even though the number of jobs in Ireland is growing. How can this be? "The thought that this might be connected to mass migrant labor now comprising 9 percent of the workforce and providing 50 percent of jobs growth does not appear to have occurred to An Taioseach (Prime Minister) Ahern.

And another thing: "the Irish wage rate is falling; an inevitable consequence of packing a small workforce with more and more people."

Does this sound familiar? It should as more and more American jobs have gone off shore or to so-called "guest workers."

"That this (fall of Irish wages) could have happened within a space of just under two years shows just how devastating an impact mass migration has had on the Irish Republic."

A a reminder: Fjordman has written an excellent essay about the effect on Europe of other "guest worker program." Both the Irish Republic and Scandinavia have imported workers of a different cultures which clash significantly with the native populations.

Like capital, labor is "only a commodity" that is now being encouraged to migrate to locations of "superior return on investment" and where "wages and working conditions." The example given by workers in the Irish Republic and other parts of Europe show that cheap labor brings down wages and lowers the standard of living for existing labor, regardless of the education and skill level of any concerned.

Is there a lesson to be learned? Our leaders persist with the notion that a guest worker program will best serve the United States. How will this program be adapted to best "reflect our values and benefit our economy and protect our homeland?" If wage arbitrage patterns follow those of Europe and India, will American workers be forced to emigrate as have "guest workers" in other parts of the world?

Pack your suitcases.

When Danes Pay Danegeld - Dealing with Islam in Scandinavia

I ran across this essay written by Fjordman who used to have his own blog which he discontinued for personal reason last December. The essay gives a sad and shocking account of what Europeans are going through because they invited Muslim guest workers to live and work among them.

One thousand years ago Scandinavians were the barbarians of Europe, spreading fear and extracting “Danegeld” from their more civilized neighbors. In the 21st century Scandinavians are peaceful and soft-spoken, and the roles seem to have been reversed with certain newly arrived immigrants. There are claims that immigration costs Sweden 40 to 50 billion Swedish kroner every year, perhaps even several hundred billions, and has greatly contributed to bringing the Swedish welfare state to the brink of bankruptcy.

In Denmark right-wing politicians are already debating the threat of immigrant “welfare tourists,” should the Swedish system collapse. In Norway almost half of all children with a non-Western background claim social security benefits. This is ten times the rate of the native population. A Danish commission concluded that Denmark could save 50 billion kroner every year by 2040 if it shut the door to third world immigration. At the same time, statistics indicate that Scandinavians will become a minority in their own countries within a couple of generations, if the current trends continue. While their political elites insist that immigration is “good for the economy,” Scandinavians are in reality funding their own colonization.

Although the cost of welfare is significant, it pales in comparison to the price paid through rapidly declining social harmony and increasing insecurity caused by Muslim immigration. Some of the increase in insecurity is due to the rise of mafia groups and organized crime, but most is mainly due to terror threats and intimidation of critics of Islam and Muslim immigration.

Read it all as a cautionary tale.

CAIR-ful

Can Condoleeza Rice find the real CAIR?

Thanks to Cox and Forkum.

Danish Muslims Sue Over Cartoons

Still claiming that the publication of cartoons depicting Muhammed and Muslims in an unfavorable light are a "violation of civil rights," Danish Muslim are "report Denmark to the UN Commissioner on Human Rights for failing to prosecute the newspaper that first published the controversial cartoons..."

The 27 Muslim groups also plan to sue the newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, for defamation in a Danish court, according to their lawyer, Michael Christiani Havemann.

"Denmark is obliged through the UN to secure the civil rights of its citizens," Havemann said by telephone. "The national prosecutor won’t pursue the case and, therefore, acts as a barrier to justice to the complainants."
Henning Fode, Denmark’s director of public prosecutions, announced on Wednesday that he would not charge Jyllands-Posten, ruling that the drawings it published last September did not violate Denmark’s laws against blasphemy and racist speech.

Mr Fode said that the cartoons could be considered an affront to the Prophet, but did not break Danish law.

The idea that the publication of cartoons about a religious figure is a violation of civil rights is ludicrous. Restricting of speech, refusing the franchise, limiting access to government, torture, and the like are violations of civil rights.

Muslims make up 3% of Denmark's population. Muslims make up 6.052% of Europe's population and 100% of their problems!
In comparison, Muslims make up 1.147% of North America's population: Canada 2%; Mexico 0.3%; United States 1.4%; Central America (south of Mexico, North of Venezuela) 0.199%.

http://www.answers.com/topic/islam-by-country

The Ultimate Insult

It has seemed to us that a good yardstick for approximating how ready we are to deal with Islam--as it ought to be dealt with--shows up as humor, at the expense of Islam. Humor can be benign or not. When it is benign, it is therapeutic. When it is not benign, it is a powerful weapon. In this case, we have True Believers who declared war on the USA, the West, civilization, knowledge, freedom, and happiness--all in the name of some moldy old crap that survived its own self-imposed Dark Ages. Yeah, we mean Islam.

We have seen a few potshots from Jay Leno and David Letterman, but a whole lot of kowtowing from the morally uncertain in the world. The world until recently seemed to have a case of the cat-got-its-tongue (or is it, the Muslims-got-their-heads?). Then came the CARTOON FLAP, originating over a dozen cartoons lampooning Islam and Muhammad, in a tiny European country that still believes in free minds and free actions, as rights.

What was the significance of the flap? Ali Sina in a fabulous interview put it this way:

"Muslims committed the huge blunder of revealing their vulnerability [cartoon
flap]. Now the world knows what hurts them. When you find your opponent’s weak
spot, it is exactly where you want to hit him."

Incidentally, that interview is entitled "An Interview with Ali Sina On Muslims in Europe By Jarek N. 2006/02/26." All Ali Sina quotes in this blog come from that interview.

Ali Sina, a former Muslim, did not stop there.

"Muslim psychology…is all pomposity and bravado. I give you my word that if Islam is ridiculed publicly and systematically, it will be defeated. Shame is a great motivator as well as deterrent. Do not underestimate the power of ridicule. This is serious stuff not a laughing matter…"

and

"When you find your opponent’s weak spot, it is exactly where you want to hit him… if Islam is ridiculed publicly and systematically, it will be defeated."

and

"How much ridicule is enough? Until it hurts. The pain of shame must become bigger than the comfort of clinging to this false fetish. When you see their eyes are popping out of their eyeballs, their veins bulging in their necks, foam forming at their mouths, and they are ready to explode, you know that the remedy is working. Give them more. They will either die of heart attacks or they will come to their senses and recover from this insanity."

No one has said it any better, and Ali Sina is "right on!"

Ali Sina also made a terrific recommendation:

Every one of us must become a cyberwarrior and mock Muhammad, Islam and the Muslims. Use your talent. Draw cartoons based on the hadith and the Quran. You can find tons of ridiculous stuff in these books to lampoon. Write articles, lyrics, jokes, plays, do whatever you can to ridicule Muhammad the prophet pretender and Muslims. Don’t heed to their howls and cries.

A new blog took Ali Sina's recommendation for action, and they created The Ultimate Insult. As they state right under their blog title, they are "Trying to discover just exactly what the 'ultimate insult' to Islam really is." You must admit, when people go nuts over absolutely everything, as Muslims do, finding out what really ticks them off presents a huge challenge.

They have risen to the challenge, and in the short life-span of this blog, there is much to get a kick out of, and all of it is at Islam's expense.

There are now several blogs poking fun at Islam and its nutsy followers. This is a very positive sign as we see it. It takes a real sense of moral certainty to feel free enough to ridicule the ridiculous, even if they threaten to remove your head from your body. This kind of derisive humor is not for Islamists' benefit. It is just the right medicine for us.

The Ultimate Insult is so opposite from political correctness, as it is from multiculturalism and cultural relativism. Not a whiffle of dhimmitude can be found on the site and won't be. You will find all the foregoing Ali Sina quotes in the blog's banner. Check out The Ultimate Insult .

New Material on 6th Column Against Jihad for March 2006

6th Column Against Jihad has new material just published.

NEW FOR MARCH 2006

From Jacob Thomas, An Advocate for “Muslim Rights” in Europe Cries Foul! and Western Columnists: Please Do Your Homework When riting About Islam (by an Arab, from the Middle East)

From Ali Sina's site, A former Muslim tells How to Deal with Muslims

From Jane Scully, Hatred of the Angels, Chapter 3: Christian Quarter. (An original novel about Eurabia, of tomorrow)

From Amit Ghate, All for One (outstanding context setting for the Islamic jihad and the profound value of Western civilization)

New Links on Recommended

A few stragglers that might make it this month, or next

Please visit.

6,000 terror watch list hits inside U.S.

Hattip: Counterterrorism Blog

The U.S. government's Terrorist Screening Center says there have been about 6,000 "encounters" inside the United States between law enforcement or other officials and people on the center's terrorist watch list since it was set up on Dec. 1, 2003.

Donna Bucella, the center's director, told reporters in Washington Tuesday that "about 6,000 individuals who are known or suspected international terrorists have been encountered within the United States."
She said that about 40-50 percent of the encounters were "repeats" -- i.e. the same person encountered more than once -- but declined to give the total number of individuals involved.

"I don't mean at our borders," Bucella added, saying the encounters could have happened as a result of traffic stops by state or local law enforcement, or when the watch-listed person applied for a gun permit or a commercial driver's license to haul hazardous materials.

She said there had been "a very small number" of arrests as a result of the encounters.
Other officials sought to play down the impression that thousands of terrorists were lose in the United States, saying that some of the individuals might have only a peripheral connection to some terrorism investigation.
"Not everyone in the database is Mohammed Atta," said Bucella's chief of staff, John Lightfoot.

"Among the 6,000 there are grades that go all the way from pale white to dark black and all the shades of grey in between," added John Miller, the FBI's head of public affairs, pointing out that the FBI's national security branch had between 15,000-20,000 open investigations at any one time, each of which might involve more than one person.
"These could be main subjects in a case, these could be early subjects in a case" that were later eliminated from the inquiry, Miller explained of people on the watch list.

Bucella said the center had received roughly 56,000 inquiries since it was set up on Dec. 1, 2003, and "about half" were positive, but most of these were from abroad, for instance when a person applied for a visa at a U.S. embassy or consulate.
The Terrorist Screening Center is an interagency unit set up to unify the dozen-plus watch-lists of terror suspects run by the U.S. government prior to the Sept. 11 suicide hijackings.

"This was something that law enforcement across the country was calling for" after Sept. 11, said Miller, describing the nation's 18,000 state and local law enforcement agencies as "a post Sept. 11 force multiplier" for U.S. counter-terrorism efforts.

Bucella said that the center had got positive matches from people that counter-terrorism officials did not know were in the United States.

The system is "a kind of radar" for counter-terrorism officials, "to show where these people are moving around," said Miller.
The screening center runs a database containing more than 350,000 names of people known or suspected to have ties to terrorism. In about 200,000 of those cases, Bucella said, there was enough information to enter the individual into the National Crime Information Center, or NCIC, an FBI-run database that local police and government agencies can check to see if individuals have a criminal record or are wanted by the authorities.

The NCIC is updated automatically in real time as names are added to or taken off the screening center's list, but with databases maintained by other agencies -- like the State Department's visa database, CLASS, or the Border Patrol's IBIS system -- center officials upload updated versions of the list every day, Bucella said.

I was surprised. That's a lot of "encounters" with individuals with "possible ties to terrorism."

Why are these people still at large in the United States?

The "Counterterrorist," who claims to be a "former INS special agent," notes the following:

...how many of the individuals who were encountered by law enforcement officers during the course of carrying our their duties were aliens who are illegally in the United States. While it is certainly quite possible that there were people who were stopped because their names were similar to someone on a watch list, while they were not involved in terrorism, it is also entirely possible that some of the individuals who were stopped were involved in terrorism but while they are being scrutinized there is not sufficient evidence to take a law enforcement action against them. In such cases, it would be worthwhile to consider seeking their removal for committing immigration law violations if, in fact, they have violated these laws. The problem is that there are far too few ICE agents to handle these issues as effectively as they should. It would be interesting to know how many of these people who aroused suspicion were interviewed by an ICE agent, presuming that such person was, in fact, an illegal alien.

The point is that by enforcing the immigration laws from within the interior of the United States in that fashion, when individuals suspected of an involvement in terrorism are encountered, can yield benefits in two ways.
First of all, it may lead to the removal of an alien who, in addition to violating the immigration laws, is part of a terrorist organization. This random encounter with law enforcement resulting in such action being taken could conceivably disrupt the activities of a terrorist organization operating within our borders. Second, such an encounter might lead to the cultivation of an informant who might act as the "eyes and ears" of law enforcement officials engaged in investigating terrorist activities within our nation's borders. It should be remembered that terrorist activities are not limited to committing acts of violence but can include recruiting members for a terrorist organization, conducting surveillance of future targets and fund raising to bankroll terrorist operations either inside the United States or within another country.

These law enforcement activities require that we have an adequate number of special agents employed by ICE who can carry out these activities in support of our nation's purported war on terror. With fewer than 3,000 special agents assigned to the enforcement of the immigration laws at ICE for the entire United States of America, it is doubtful that ICE responded to many of these situations where their unique authority might have been brought to bear.

Did a "Islamofacist Naraco-Terrorist Hoax Start the War in the Balkans?

How the U.S., NATO and the Western media were conned in Kosovo

Peter worthington of the Toronto Sun

Back in March, 1999, what tipped the scales for then U.S. president Bill Clinton to launch an air war against Serbia, were reports of a massacre of 45 Albanian civilians by Serb security forces at the village of Racak, some 30 km from Pristina in southern Kosovo.

Clinton told the world on March 19, 1999: "We should remember what happened in Racak ... innocent men, women and children were taken from their homes to a gully, forced to kneel in the dirt and sprayed with gunfire." Photos circled the world. NATO bombing began March 24, and lasted 78 days.

White House press secretary Joe Lockhart said of Racak: "A strong message will be brought to President (Slobodan) Milosevic about bringing those to justice who should be punished for this ... "

U.S. Foreign Secretary Madeleine Albright, eager to make war against then-Yugoslavia and speaking on CBS´ Face the Nation, cited Racak where, she said, there were "dozens of people with their throats slit." She called this the "galvanizing incident" that meant peace talks at Rambouillet were pointless, "humanitarian bombing" the only recourse.

Germany´s Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer, told the newspaper Berliner Zeitung that the Racak massacre "became the turning point for me" and war was the only answer.

Canada´s then foreign minister, Lloyd Axworthy, called the massacre "a disgusting victimization of civilians."

Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported the dead had fingernails torn out - evidence of torture.

On Jan. 16, the day after the actual massacre, William Walker, the veteran American diplomat who headed peace verifiers for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), was taken by Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) members to Racak to see the bodies in the ditch. He declared that the dead "obviously were executed where they lay."

His OSCE report spoke of "arbitrary arrests, killings and mutilations of unarmed civilians" at Racak.

Some People Died

It has since turned out, through subsequent investigations by German, French and American correspondents and by human rights and peace groups, including the anti-war International Action Centre and the Liberty Foundation, that the Racak massacre seems an enormous, albeit effective, hoax perpetrated by the Kosovo Liberation Army to persuade the U.S. and NATO to attack the Serbs. The goal was independence for Kosovo, possibly leading to the dream of a Greater Albania.

We now have a far better idea of what really happened at Racak - a pre-crisis town of 2,000 and a stronghold of KLA agitation. By January, 1999, most of its population had fled to a nearby town, Stimlje, leaving perhaps 400 people behind. When four Serbian policemen were ambushed and murdered in two separate incidents in a week, Serb security forces surrounded Racak and attacked. The Serbs tipped off foreign journalists who came to see. Fighting was savage and brief, not only in town but in the countryside.

Journalists found Racak had few people actually living there.

Some 20 bodies were counted. Serbs and journalists left at dusk. The next day, Jan. 16, the KLA was again in control.

During the night, it seems that all the KLA killed fighting in the area - 45 of them - were dumped in a gully at Racak and journalists and the OSCE investigators invited to see what was described as the "massacre" of unarmed civilians.

Military insignia and/or badges had been removed from clothing, military gear replaced by civilian clothing. No weapons were in sight. The hoax was on. William Walker was first on the scene and believed what he saw and was told. The international press relayed his outrage to the world.

Forensic evidence showed - as the Finnish team has since confirmed - that most of the 45 Racak dead had been shot at long range, not execution-style. Corpses tested positive with residue of gunpowder on their hands, indicating they had been firing weapons. No ammunition or shell casings were found near the bodies, where they had supposedly been massacred, nor were there pools of blood.

Bodies Moved

Pathologists also found the 45 dead men had all been shot in different parts of the body, from different directions, indicating a battle somewhere else, the dead dumped together for effect.

Until recently, no one was interested in the truth. "Whether or not it´s a massacre, nobody wants to know any more," wrote Austria´s Die Welt newspaper. Autopsy findings were delayed while the thirst for war echoed in the halls of allied power.

The German newspaper Berliner Zeitung got access to the Finnish forensic findings, and sent a team of reporters to investigate and concluded: "In all probability, there was no Racak massacre at all ... "

French journalist Renaud Girard of Le Figaro was in Racak and was puzzled that reports failed to mention it was a "fortified village with a lot of trenches" - a KLA stronghold. Although he wrote an initial massacre story, he later had doubts: "I felt something was wrong."

Christophe Chatelet of Le Monde was in Racak the day of the Serb attack, and found one dead and four wounded when he left at dusk. The next day the KLA showed bodies from a massacre that hadn´t been there before. "I can´t solve that mystery," he said. (At the time, KLA commander-in-chief Hashim Thaci told the BBC: "We had a key unit in the region and had a fierce fight. Regrettably, we had many casualties, but so did the Serbs.")

Further investigation shows that two TV journalists for Associated Press and two teams of OSCE observers also saw the fight for Racak from a hill, entered when Serb security forces did and left when they left. The AP crew filmed a deserted village. It was overnight that the KLA returned and gathered their dead from the fighting. Next day, Walker told the world how adults and children had been "executed," some as they tried to flee. CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour, wife of U.S. State Department spokesman James Rubin, showed little skepticism in reporting on the "massacre of civilians."

Read it all.

There is a reason why Milosevic's trial faded from public view and wasn't brought to light until his death:

Milosevic's death probably marks only the second or third time most people have heard anything about the so-called "Second Nuremberg" trial in the four years it has been proceeding. That's because it wasn't going too well - for the prosecution, which Milosevic embarrassed on a daily basis. Journalists were snickering at the prosecution's flimsy evidence and flaccid performance. That’s right: journalists--those people who built their careers in the 1990s as co-belligerents against the Serbs in the Balkan wars.

Though Milosevic's conviction was a foregone conclusion (we wouldn't want any more rampaging Muslims than there already are in Europe), he was creaming the Court (the Court and the prosecution are essentially one) to such a degree that six months ago prosecutor Geoffrey Nice admitted (transcript) that he was no longer sure what, exactly, the case against the former strongman was. Why four years to try someone who was the undisputed "Butcher of Belgrade"? The answer is that there's been an unintended benefit to the otherwise bad idea of an international court: the historical record was being set straight. 

Read the rest.
In the Muslim world, "Peace" is not the cessation of war, it is the elimination of enemies. In this case, Muslims convinced their enemies to do the job for them. We better wake to the fact were, and continue to be, manipulated by Muslims. Our suvival depends to a fast education and realization that our enemy has had centuries to develop and perfect strategies of deception.

The Nobel Prize Committee Is Controlled by the Jews - Obviously!

We have come to learn of the problems Muslims have with intellectual achievement. We have come to learn that Islam's the greatest fear of all is that some Muslim, somewhere, sometime, will ask some pesky questions that might possibly result in (gasp!) CHANGE. We have learned that since the Koran is is literal, dictated Word of Allah, it is perfect, and therefore cannot be changed. By Allah, when the Koran says that Muslims have one intestine and the infidel has seven, that's that! Questions? Of course not! After all, as they say in Islam, any knowledge worth knowing is already in the Koran, and since that knowledge is from Allah himself, to change it would be a sin.

Here are some everyday examples of ways the Islamic prohibition against thinking, knowledge, and change affects the everyday lives and opportunities for achievement among Muslims:

1) In the Arab world, the illiteracy rate, depending on your source, is between 50% and 80%.

2) In Europe, the number of books per person is ten times greater than the number of books per person in the Muslim Middle East and Africa combined.

3) The number of books translated into Arabic in the last ONE THOUSAND (1000) years is equal to the number of books translated into Spanish alone in ONE (1) year.

4) Between 1980 and 1999, the number of patents from Arab countries registered in the United States was 370. During that same time period, the number of patents from South Korea alone was 16,328.

5) At Google headquarters in Silicon Valley, there is a large world map with lights that shows the number of searches going on at any particular moment. The whole world is bright, except for the region stretching from Morocco to the border of India, where it is almost completely dark (well - throw in North Korea for good measure).

6) In the Arab world, the number of computers per 1000 people is 18; the number of computers per person world wide, including poor nations, is 78 per 1000.

7) When the "outsourcing" of hi-tech jobs was discussed at a meeting in Davos, Switzerland, countries as diverse as India, China, Mexico, and Ireland were discussed. Countries in the Arab world are not considered at all, because they don't have the infrastructure or the educational level to support such work.

In short, Islam, with its pronounced fear of, and antipathy for, change, is the most profoundly, ferociously, and viciously anti-intellectual, anti-knowledge philosophy in the world. As a result, the minds of its followers are in a high-security prison. They can't think, ask questions, or pursue insights, for fear of being declared "immoral" and punished as such.

Most of them, in their most human of hearts and minds, would love to be more like the rest of the world, but that would require fundamental changes in Islam itself, changes so profound that we would no longer recognize it as the same entity. No one has ever accused the Arabs of being dumb. It's their system, Islam, not their brains, that causes their problems.

We know that Muslims, with their primitive Bedouin sense of what passes for self-esteem, suffer greatly when they look at the rest of the world and see the achievements of the intellect going on "out there." That's one of the reasons for their temper tantrums.

In order to try to compensate for what they are forbidden by Islam to achieve intellectually, they reach back to a period of intellectual achievement that was there before Islam even existed, and try to try to lay claim to the credit for accomplishments that had their origin 700 years earlier. These accomplishments were the products of the students of the Greek philosophers who came to the still pagan Arabs in the footsteps of Alexander the Great.

When Mohammed struck, a few Muslims, who were not yet dedicated followers of the format ofIslam we see today, rode for a while on the coattails of the Greek philosophers; they made some significant contributions, and then were quickly and completely stamped out by the mullahs. Islam did not have a "Golden Age," as it so fraudulantly claims, but was, in fact, responsible for the demise of what was left of a previously-existing brilliant scholarly community when it took over those territories.

From that time on, the freedom to think, and to achieve intellectually, began a rapid decline towards death.

A few nights ago, I had consumed my Starbuck's a little too late in the day; while I was waiting for the caffeine to wear off so I could get some sleep, I was wandering around the Blogosphere, and somewhere, I ran into a list that compared the number of Muslim Nobel Prize winners to the number of Jewish Nobel Prize winners. I got sleepy just about then, and didn't save it, and my efforts to find it notwithstanding, I couldn't find it again; with gratitude to Jason, though, I am able to present it here for your edification and entertainment, to say nothing of Muslim "humiliation."

Here it is, in its entirety:

INTELLECTUAL OUTPUT FROM THE [ARAB] MUSLIM WORLD

ARAB / ISLAMIC NOBEL WINNERS

From a pool of 1.4 BILLION Muslims, 20% of World's Population (2 out of every 10 people) :

Literature
Najib Mahfooz 1988*.

Peace
1978 Anwar El-Sadat
1994 Yasser Arafat... A Joke!!! **
2003 - Shirin Ebadi
2005 - Mohamed ElBaradei

Chemistry
1999 - Ahmed Zewail

Physics
Abdus Salam

* Najib was stabbed in the back by Egyptian Moslem fundamentalists in 1997 because he supported the Peace Process between the Arabs ("Palestinians") and Israelis. Najib was partially paralyzed as a result.

**The Norwegians played an ugly joke on the world by pretending Arafat was a Man of Peace.

Note: Elias James Corey (Chemistry 1990), Peter Brian Medawar (Medicine 1960) and Ferid Mourad (Medicine 1998) are Nobel Prize winners but are Arab-Christians, not Muslims.

Kaare Kristiansen was a member of the Nobel Committee. He resigned in 1994 to protest the awarding of a Nobel "Peace Prize" to Yasser Arafat, whom he correctly labeled a "terrorist."

JEWISH NOBEL WINNERS

From a pool of 12 million Jews, 0.2% of the World's Population (2 out of every 1,000 people) :

Literature
1910 - Paul Heyse
1927 - Henri Bergson
1958 - Boris Pasternak
1966 - Shmuel Yosef Agnon
1966 - Nelly Sachs
1976 - Saul Bellow
1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer
1981 - Elias Canetti
1987 - Joseph Brodsky
1991 - Nadine Gordimer
2002 - Imre Kertesz
2005 - Harold PinterWorld Peace
1911 - Alfred Fried
1911 - Tobias Asser
1968 - Rene Cassin
1973 - Henry Kissinger
1978 - Menachem Begin
1986 - Elie Wiesel
1994 - Shimon Peres
1994 - Yitzhak Rabin
1995 - Joseph RotblatChemistry
1905 - Adolph Von Baeyer
1906 - Henri Moissan
1910 - Otto Wallach
1915 - Richard Willstaetter
1918 - Fritz Haber
1943 - George Charles de Hevesy
1961 - Melvin Calvin
1962 - Max Ferdinand Perutz
1972 - William Howard Stein
1972 - C.B. Anfinsen
1977 - Ilya Prigogine
1979 - Herbert Charles Brown
1980 - Paul Berg
1980 - Walter Gilbert
1981 - Ronald Hoffmann
1982 - Aaron Klug
1985 - Herbert A. Hauptman
1985 - Jerome Karle
1986 - Dudley R. Herschbach
1988 - Robert Huber
1989 - Sidney Altman
1992 - Rudolph Marcus
1998 - Walter Kohn
2000 - Alan J. Heeger
2004 - Irwin Rose
2004 - Avram Hershko
2004 - Aaron Ciechanover

Economics
1970 - Paul Anthony Samuelson
1971 - Simon Kuznets
1972 - Kenneth Joseph Arrow
1973 - Wassily Leontief
1975 - Leonid Kantorovich
1976 - Milton Friedman
1978 - Herbert A. Simon
1980 - Lawrence Robert Klein
1985 - Franco Modigliani
1987 - Robert M. Solow
1990 - Harry Markowitz
1990 - Merton Miller
1992 - Gary Becker
1993 Rober Fogel
1994 - John Harsanyi
1994 - Reinhard Selten
1997 - Robert Merton
1997 - Myron Scholes
2001 - George Akerlof
2001 - Joseph Stiglitz
2002 - Daniel Kahneman
2005 - Robert J. AumannMedicine
1908 - Elie Metchnikoff
1908 - Paul Erlich
1914 - Robert Barany
1922 - Otto Meyerhof
1930 - Karl Landsteiner
1931 - Otto Warburg
1936 - Otto Loewi
1944 - Joseph Erlanger
1944 - Herbert Spencer Gasser
1945 - Ernst Boris Chain
1946 - Hermann Joseph Muller
1950 - Tadeus Reichstein
1952 - Selman Abraham Waksman
1953 - Hans Krebs
1953 - Fritz Albert Lipmann
1958 - Joshua Lederberg
1959 - Arthur Kornberg
1964 - Konrad Bloch
1965 - Francois Jacob
1965 - Andre Lwoff
1967 - George Wald
1968 - Marshall W. Nirenberg
1969 - Salvador Luria
1970 - Julius Axelrod
1970 - Sir Bernard Katz
1972 - Gerald Maurice Edelman
1975 - David Baltimore
1975 - Howard Martin Temin
1976 - Baruch S. Blumberg
1977 - Rosalyn Sussman Yalow
1977 - Andrew V. Schally
1978 - Daniel Nathans
1980 - Baruj Benacerraf
1984 - Cesar Milstein
1985 - Michael Stuart Brown
1985 - Joseph L. Goldstein
1986 - Stanley Cohen [& Rita Levi-Montalcini]
1988 - Gertrude Elion
1989 - Harold Varmus
1991 - Erwin Neher
1991 - Bert Sakmann
1993 - Richard J. Roberts
1993 - Phillip Sharp
1994 - Alfred Gilman
1994 - Martin Rodbell
1995 - Edward B. Lewis
1997 - Stanley B. Prusiner
1998 - Robert F. Furchgott
2000 - Eric R. Kandel
2002 - Sydney Brenner
2002 - Robert H. Horvitz

Physics
1907 - Albert Abraham Michelson
1908 - Gabriel Lippmann
1921 - Albert Einstein
1922 - Niels Bohr
1925 - James Franck
1925 - Gustav Hertz
1943 - Gustav Stern
1944 - Isidor Issac Rabi
1945 - Wolfgang Pauli
1952 - Felix Bloch
1954 - Max Born
1958 - Igor Tamm
1958 - Il'ja Mikhailovich
1958 - Igor Yevgenyevich
1959 - Emilio Segre
1960 - Donald A. Glaser
1961 - Robert Hofstadter
1962 - Lev Davidovich Landau
1963 - Eugene P. Wigner
1965 - Richard Phillips Feynman
1965 - Julian Schwinger
1967 - Hans Albrecht Bethe
1969 - Murray Gell-Mann
1971 - Dennis Gabor
1972 - Leon N. Cooper
1973 - Brian David Josephson
1975 - Benjamin Mottleson
1976 - Burton Richter
1978 - Arno Allan Penzias
1978 - Peter L Kapitza
1979 - Stephen Weinberg
1979 - Sheldon Glashow
1988 - Leon Lederman
1988 - Melvin Schwartz
1988 - Jack Steinberger
1990 - Jerome Friedman
1992 - Georges Charpak
1995 - Martin Perl
1995 - Frederick Reines
1996 - David M. Lee
1996 - Douglas D. Osheroff
1997 - Claude Cohen-Tannoudji
2000 - Zhores I. Alferov
2003 - Vitaly Ginsburg
2003 - Alexei Abrikosov
2004 - David Gross
2004 - H. David Politzer
2005 - Roy Glauber


There are a mere 12 Million Jews in the entire world, yet they have received 169 Nobel Prizes.The Muslims number 1.4 Billion (with a very big "B")... or 117 times the number of Jews! Based upon this 117:1 Muslim-to-Jewish ratio, one might expect the Muslims to have 22,260 Nobel Laureates.They have SEVEN! and one of them [Arafat] is a murderer (Allahu Akbar, indeed!).

Unless the Swedes and Norwegians start awarding Nobel Prizes for plane hijackings, pizza shop bombings, civilian bus attacks, Jihad suicides/homicides, drive-by shootings, throat-slittings, embassy attacks and other such acts of barbarism, the embarrassingly low level of contributions to the welfare of Civilization and Mankind by the [Arab] Muslim world will continue. The Jewish People, meanwhile, will continue being the Lights Unto All Nations.

*************

Cubed here: If we add to the spectacular numbers of Jewish Nobel Laureates the Nobel Prizes awarded to other Infidels, then the dearth of Muslim Nobel Prize winners is even more embarrassing to our Muslim friends.

From a similar list of Jewish Nobel Laureates from another site , there is this comment nicely summing up some other, equally embarrassing differences between Jews and Muslims:

"The Jews are not demonstrating with their dead on the streets, yelling and chanting and asking for revenge, the Jews are not promoting brain washing the children in military training camps, teaching them how to blow themselves up and cause maximum deaths of Jews and other non Muslims.

"The Jews don't highjack planes, nor kill athletes at the Olympics, the Jews don't traffic slaves, nor have leaders calling for Jihad and death to all the Infidels.

"The Jews don't have the economical strength of the Petroleum, nor the possibilities to force the world's media to see "their side" of the question. Perhaps if the world's Muslims could invest more in normal education and less in blaming the Jews for all their problems, we could all live in a better world."

What Is Al-Qaeda?

Af this point, if you still don't understand, read an explanation at FrontPagte.

Al Qaeda, an Arabic word meaning "the Base," was founded in approximately 1988 by Osama bin Laden and Muhammad Atef, the latter a native Egyptian and a onetime member of the terrorist group Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Al Qaeda grew out of the Services Office, a clearinghouse for the international Muslim brigade that opposed the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In the 1980s, under the leadership of bin Laden and the Palestinian religious scholar Abdullah Azzam, the Services Office recruited, trained, and financed thousands of foreign mujahideen, or "holy warriors," from more than fifty countries. Seeking to extend the Islamic jihad, or "holy war," beyond the borders of Afghanistan even after the March 1988 Soviet pledge to withdraw its forces, bin Laden created al Qaeda. The organization today supports Muslim fighters in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya, Tajikistan, Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, and Kosovo. It also trains members of terrorist organizations from the Philippines, Algeria, and Eritrea.

To prepare his recruits to wage jihad, bin Laden established training camps in various places, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Kenya, and Sudan. He also set up a series of businesses - including two investment companies, an agricultural company, a construction business, and a transportation company - to generate income for al Qaeda and to provide cover for the group's activities.

Could this be the reason for the American Government's seemingly obsessive and "Islamophobic" pursuit of Muslim charities and businesses?
Set up to expel foreigners and apostates from the Arabian Peninsula, bin Laden has set sights to a grander ideal: to bring back the fallen Caliphate, restore Islamic rule and law, Sha'ria, and extend Islamic influence and the reign of Muslims over the entire world:

The U.S. government characterizes al Qaeda, whose worldwide presence consists of at least several thousand members and associates from perhaps 100 countries, as "an international terrorist group . . . dedicated to opposing non-Islamic governments with force and violence." Law enforcement has broken up al Qaeda cells in the United Kingdom, the United States, Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Albania, Uganda, and elsewhere...
Al Qaeda's objectives, motives, and strategies are further detailed in an Al Qaeda Training Manual designed to instruct aspiring terrorists in the art of murdering "infidels." The manual was discovered by England's Manchester Metropolitan Police during a search of an al Qaeda member's home. "Islamic governments have never and will never be established through peaceful solutions and cooperative councils," states this publication. "They are established as they [always] have been by pen and gun, by word and bullet, by tongue and teeth." The manual further exhorts jihadists to "pledge . . . to make their [the infidels'] women widows and their children orphans . . . to slaughter them like lambs and let the Nile, al-Asi, and Euphrates rivers flow with their blood . . . to be a pick of destruction for every godless and apostate regime."

In addition, the manual enumerates what it calls "Missions Required of the Military Organization." Among these are: "Assassinating enemy personnel as well as foreign tourists; . . . Spreading rumors and writing statements that instigate people against the enemy; Blasting and destroying the places of amusement, immorality, and sin; Blasting and destroying the embassies and attacking vital economic centers; Blasting and destroying bridges leading into and out of the cities."

Finally, the manual explicitly declares that among al Qaeda's "long-term goals" is "the establishment of an Islamic state." But an "Islamic government would never be established except by the bomb and rifle," the manual informs. "Islam does not coincide or make a truce with unbelief, but rather confronts it. The confrontation that Islam calls for with these godless and apostate regimes, does not know Socratic debates, Platonic ideals nor Aristotelian diplomacy. But it knows the dialogue of bullets, the ideals of assassination, bombing, and destruction, and the diplomacy of the cannon and machine-gun."

Read it all. This page includes internal links and a generous number of sidebar articles.





Rice: U.S. Wants to Give Palestinians Aid???????

Surfing through Jihad Watch this morning, I found this article:

Rice: U.S. Wants to Give Palestinians Aid - Yahoo! News, by ANNE GEARAN, AP Diplomatic Writer, Sun Mar 12, 1:12

The United States hopes to find a way to increase humanitarian donations to the Palestinians following Hamas' election victory, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Sunday. "We are looking at ways to even increase our humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian people during this period of time," Rice said.

Rice was not specific. But her comments suggested that the United States intends to replace money it once gave directly to the current moderate and secular Palestinian government with grants for charity work or other projects that are independent of the new government. [How is this metaphysically possible??????] U.S. officials have nearly finished an extensive review of aid to the Palestinians that was intended to ensure that future aid does not flow to Hamas.

Hamas, which refuses to renounce violence and has claimed responsibility for dozens of suicide bombings against Israel, is listed as a terrorist organization by both the United States and the European Union.

U.S. diplomats are concerned both about the effect an aid cut would have on a poor and underemployed population, and about the perception among Muslims that the U.S. is cutting aid as punishment for selection of leaders it does not like.

The Palestinian Authority is effectively broke, with a monthly deficit in the tens of millions of dollars. In 2005, the first year the authority was not headed by Yasser Arafat, overseas donors contributed about $1 billion of the authority's approximately $1.9 billion. U.S. direct aid is a small part of that — $70 million last year. Separately, the U.S. spent $225 million for humanitarian projects through the U.S. Agency for International Development last year, and gave $88 million for refugee assistance.

Rice said the United States will go on promoting democracy in the Middle East, the wider Muslim world and elsewhere, even when it has unintended consequences. Rice said the demonstrations prove her point about the value of democracy. "What that shows is that Indonesia [Islamic state] is a vibrant democracy and people can protest and people can speak their minds," Rice said.

"We don't believe that people should protest only when they have a pro-American or a pro-U.S. administration message. They have that right." [Do we have to use taxpayers' dollars to finance hate against us???????????]

(All emphases are mine.)

Does this woman grasp reality? She has become Colin Powell in drag. It is hard to believe that Dr. Rice, who is both brilliant and highly educated, is such a conservative nitwit.

Her comments ought to unnerve anyone who thinks of himself or herself as "conservative" or "right wing." (If that someone also thinks he or she is "Republican" as well, he or she may be beyond salvage).

The Right in America is fully as dangerous as the Left, and both Right and Left are converging on the same point in space and time. That point I can jazz up with a name like "Point Doom." That is the point where America falls apart inside and becomes ripe for the takeover from the outside. The thinking of Dr. Rice and those who think like her, the neocons, the "compassionate conservatives," and most of the "right wing," have become no more than the other side of the same coin, with the liberals-Left on one face, and the conservatives-Right on the other.

Both advocate the same saccharine-tasting poison of sacrificial ethics (altruism), i.e., our duty is to act against our self-interest and solely to sacrifice the blood and treasure of America for others in the world, any others, particularly those who hate us and want to destroy us:

The Left want to "help the poor and downtrodden." The Right want to "promote democracy, give humanitarian assistance, and be concerned with "the perception among Muslims that the U.S. is cutting aid as punishment for selection of leaders it does not like." This is just sloppy-seconds liberalism.

These Hamas people are near collapse, as was the Lenin Soviet regime until we stepped in to ensure its survival, as was the Khomeini regime until we ensured its survival, and as we are doing now to Islamia which could not survive without our largess. Let them collapse. Make "Palestinians" turn on Hamasians and kill them all. Don't provide a single dollar to keep Hamas living their lies.

The Muslim world needs the "perception" that we will kick them into oblivion if they harm anyone or anything of ours. They need the "perception" that we will not tolerate regimes like Hamas and Iran, among others. They need the "perception" they do not get another dollar or any materiel until they do things compatible with the life, livelihood, and principles of the Constitution of the USA. Where do they get these "perceptions"? From our proud, assertive, selfish assertion of our principles of America.

Punish them for selecting leaders we don't like? How does our not giving charity constitute "punishment." But if that is what Dr. Rice, et al, want to call reason and reality, then so be it: punishment it is.

If the overwhelming response from the Right about the Dubai Ports World caper has not turned anyone off on the Right, then this kind of self-destructive blather from Dr. Rice, who is speaking for THE Compassionate Conservative himself, ought to produce a sense of profound and impending danger--the kind the Left gives us.

The entire Bush administration and most of the Right have become "unintended consequences."

Mexico Has World's Third Richest Man

Readers probably wonder why I harp so much about migrants from Mexico that are displacing Americans. We are led to believe that Mexico is without resources and talented politicians and businessmen. Nothing could farther from the truth.

In reality, Mexico is a resource and talent-rich country that has 10 billionaires who don't want to pay taxes, improve their country, or support the peasants they refuse to educate or employ. Mexico can well afford to invest in people and infrastructure. The elite prefer that American employers and taxpayers foot the bill.

Talk about being smart. I don't know about you, but I'm tired of being taken for a chump. The Mexican elite should shell out and create opportunities at home rather than using the United States as a safety valve. Apparently there are forces here in the U.S. that are raking in enormous profits. Why else would they so blatantly sell us out?

Understanding Slobodan Milosevic: Between the cold war and Iraq

An interesting and informative analysis including a variety of internal links:

Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of Serbia and Yugoslavia found dead in his cell in The Hague on 11 March 2006, was an unscrupulous opportunist whose brazen defiance of western democratic states and the United Nations in the 1990s ended in only a narrow defeat. He showed how precarious and shallow was the peace following the long cold war, even in the heart of Europe. He recognised the weakness of the democratic world, its complacency and even moral abdication in the face of the flagrant manipulation of nationalism, and its unwillingness to take risks to defend the Bosnian state and its largest group, the Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) from massacre and ethnic cleansing.

The Bosniaks' abandonment in turn envenomed Islamist radicals, who were driven (as their testimonies, and studies like that of Evan Kohlmann, confirm) to take revenge by their attacks in the United States on 9/11.


But the politicians who chose at last to defy rather than succour Milosevic at the end of the 1990s, not least Tony Blair, derived the wrong lessons from their ultimate success. If their predecessors (principally Britain's Conservative government under John Major and Douglas Hurd, and the French socialists under Francois Mitterrand and Roland Dumas) had indulged the Belgrade tyrant and overestimated the difficulties in any confrontation with him, Blair vastly underestimated the scale of the challenge that followed Milosevic's subjugation: "regime change" in Baghdad. The resulting mess has divided and demoralised the west, and emboldened a series of Milosevic-clones the world over.

Read it all.

Pre-emptive Counterstrike Against "Islamophobia"

Gates of Vienna has issued an interesting graphic in response to the charge of Islamophobia:

The term “Islamophobe” is fast joining “racist”, “homophobe”, et al., as a reliable tool of politically-correct argument, a way of silencing the Left’s opponents and consigning dissenters to the phobic outer darkness beyond the pale of polite discourse.

Object to Hamas? You must be Islamophobic!

Want to scrutinize speakers of Farsi or Arabic more carefully at the airport? Islamophobe!

Objection to an ideology that demands accommodation with the stated goal of overcoming an changing using any means possible is not a phobia, it's common sense and self-defense.

Another Reason Why Muslims and Westerners Can't Mix

Poster "jsla" at JihadWatchmakes the following observation:

Some posters here have mentioned the staggering costs associated with having Muslims in America and Europe -- costs which would not be necessary if they were not present - -including intelligence gathering, surveillance, police actions, security measures throughout our entire system to guard against their atrocities and their plotting --

Now we can safely add the costs of legal proceedings to dislodge cancerous Muslims from positions they have infiltrated, and the inevitable lawsuits and equally inevitable huge payouts Muslims will demand and receive once they are found to be plotting against the West and are dislodged.


So once again we can see how Muslims will use our freedom(s) of speech privileges against us, our functioning economic system against us (to have jobs to fund Jihad, online banking to fund their Jihad), our legal system tied up with endless trials and appeals for terrorists, endless lawsuits, in addition to all the usual technologies we place at their feet so they can continue their efforts to destroy us -- the internet, the computers, the cell phones, the SUVs, the airplanes, the educational system in our splendid Western institutions (also known as non-Sharia education)...

Rather than tedious and boring, having "Muslims among us" is exciting and interesting, as in the Ancient Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times."

Al-Jazeera aims to go global - in English

Hattip: LGF

"We try to be the first with breaking news," Nasir says. "But Al Jazeera will affect us because it's coming from an Islamic country, not like BBC or CNN."

Initially Al Jazeera may be less concerned with dramatic scoops. Instead its priority will be to prove that, despite being funded by an Arab dictator, it is a reliable and impartial broadcaster.

Yeah, right!

The Muslims of Invention

Referring to an article published in The Independent,, TigerHawk gets around to quoting Oriana Fallaci on Ibn Rushd Averros, an Andalusan Arab who translated Aristotle and proposed the compatibility of Aristotelian philosophy, the foundation of Western scientific achievement, and Islam. He "singularly informed" Thomas Aquinas so that Aquinas referred to Averroes as "The Commentator":

Getting around to Oriana:

Islam has always persecuted and silenced its intelligent men. I remind you of Averroes who for his distinction between Faith and Reason was accused of heterodoxy by the caliphs and forced to flee. Then, imprisoned like a criminal. Then, confined to his home and humiliated to such a degree that when rehabilitated he no longer had any desire to live and died within a few months. Not without good reason, in his famous lecture held in 1883 at the Sorbonne, Ernest Renan said that attributed the merits of Averroes to Islam would be like attributing the merits of Galileo to the Inquisition.

TigerHawk:

The dirty little secret of the Renaissance is that it and all that followed might not have happened without Muslim scholars such as Averroes. The much dirtier secret of Islam is that it never learned to reconcile faith and reason. It persecuted its geniuses. Christianity did too, but the Inquisition was a losing rearguard action against the Age of Reason, which had already been ratified by Saint Thomas Aquinas and other theologians. Islam's own inquisition persists to this day.

Islam in France: Did You Know...?

Accommodation of immigrants (or migrants) is particularly egregious when the immigrants are Muslim who, rather than conforming to the host population, demand that host population change in accordance to their mores and traditions.

Did you know that young Muslim girls demand to be exempted from Sports and Biology classes, without being penalized at the exams? (Source: Le Nouvel Observateur)

Did you know that Muslim women require and get special schedules that are exclusively reserved for her in public swimming pools? (Source: Revue Politique)

Did you know that Muslim female students require and get to be escorted by their husband and to be judged by a woman to their exams? (Source: Le Nouvel Observateur)

Did you know that a Muslim association (‘Unir’ at the Paris XIII university) question the right for “western culture” professor to judge the work of a Muslim student? (Source: l’Express)

Did you know that Muslims demand and obtain the suppression of the Christmas celebration in schools?

Did you know that Muslims, abusing of the laic public schools, demand and obtain the removal of Christmas trees? (Source: Le Parisien)

Did you know that Muslims demand and obtain the prohibition of pork and of non hallal (preparation of food according to Islamic law) meat in the French schools where they are in majority?

Did you know that in the government administration, Muslims demand additional days off for their Islamic celebrations?

Did you know that Muslims demand praying rooms in our schools, high schools and universities?

Did you know that Muslims demand arranged schedules for their 5 daily prayers to schools, high schools, universities and companies?

Did you know that Muslims demand a revision of our history books to integrate the history of their country and religion? (Source: Le Nouvel Observateur)

Did you know that in order not to “irritate” Muslims, all references to Charles Martel, Jeanne D’Arc and many mores… will be removed from our scholar books?

Did you know that Muslims females require their Islamic veils to work in public jobs (government administration, hospitals, schools…)?
Did you know that Muslim female students in medicine require to work only with female patients? (Source: Le Monde, Le Figaro)

Did you know that doctors were violently beaten because they had healed women without the assent of their Muslim husbands? (Source: Le Monde, Le Figaro)

Did you know that many French high schools with a North African majority have “Death to the Jews”, “Death to the Christians” and “Support Ben Laden” inscriptions on their walls?

Did you know that most of far left and Muslim associations claiming themselves as “anti racists” (www.oumma.com) militate for the disappearing if Israel and of the Jews?

Did you know that during the manifestation against the war in Iraq, some Muslim “pacifists” and “anti racists” were exhibiting portraits of Ben Laden or Saddam Hussein? (Source: Les 4 Vérités)

Did you know that a savage named Djamel who burnd a young girl alive, Sohane, was acclaimed in his Val de Marne ‘cité’ (Muslim suburbs) when he came to the fact reconstitution? (Source: France 3)

Did you know that the young blacks and Muslims who burned a white supermarket vigil alive (in 2002 at Nantes) feels no remorse and are proud of themselves? (Source: the lawyer)

Did you know that a “book of good behavior” ‘The licit and illicit in Islam’, sold in France for more than 10 years, explains how a good Muslim have to beat his wife: “with hands”, “with neither a whip nor a piece of wood”, “and avoiding her face”? (Source: l’Express)

Did you know that in Belgium, Islamic militias patrol in the streets to “control the bad and racists white cops” and to apply their own rules? (Source: Libération)

Did you know that new laws will force the Police, the Army, and general public jobs to hire with priority people coming from immigration, and that 35 companies (France TV, Peugeot, Casino) have signed a foreign preference contract for staff recruitment? (Source: Government)

Did you know that in high school, Muslims students put on their coat before going to the blackboard “in order not to cause any covetousness”, that in schools Muslim fathers refuse to leave their daughters in a class with a male teachers, and that a school had to organize a SAS without windows to recognize the mothers, veiled from their foot to their head, before returning them their Children? (Source: Le Monde)

Did you know that in schools some students instituted the separate usage of 2 taps in the toilettes, one reserved for the “Muslims”, the other to the “French”, or that a local responsible of the Muslim cult demanded separate cloakrooms because “a circumcised can not undress next to an impur”? (Source: Le Monde)

Did you know that to the question “in case of a conflict would you defend the nation?”, of 10 people coming from immigration 7 answered no, 2 were laughing, and just 1 is willing to fight for France? (Source: Le Point)

Of course this couldn't happen in the United States. Right! Ironically various immigrant groups are demanding that their language, culture and history take precedence and even supplant that of mainstream U.S. culture. How do we and they expect assimilation to occur under these conditions.

The examples in France provided above should caution as to what happens when multiculturalism and P.C. mentality is employed without a modicum of common sense.

Folks, Don't Forget This, and Pass It Around!

Folks,

It's "Push-Back Time" for Western Civilization! We have put up with ad hominems, lies, threats, con-jobs, intimidation, mayhem, and murder long enough!

There is a meeting coming up in Washington, D.C. that is the first of it's kind. It has a remarkable line-up of speakers and opportunities to mingle with the experts.

If you can go, please do. The cost is modest, particularly given its opportunity and importance, and if it succeeds (how can it not?) it will have a snowball effect, gathering the speed and size we so desperately need - it's not too much to hope that if we little people grab our pitchforks and torches, we might even be able to get the attention of those in policy-making positions who just don't seem to "get it."

For those who may have missed it, here's the announcement I got this morning:


America’s Truth Forum is hosting a symposium titled:

The Underlying Roots of Terrorism:Terrorism’s Threat to World Peace and National Security

This day-long event is scheduled to take place on Saturday, April 29th, 2006 in the Greater Washington DC Area. Tickets at $119.00 per person (lunch included). Ticketing must be done in advance due to security protocol.

Featured speakers include:

Dr. Andrew Bostom
David Horowitz
Dr. Harvey Kushner
Daniel Pipes
Robert Spencer
Dr. Paul Williams
Brigitte Gabriel
Joseph Kaufman
Laura Mansfield
Whalid Shoebat
Dr. Bruce Tefft
And more…

Topics to be discussed:

▪ The mindset of Islamic terrorism from a
reformed PLO terrorist

▪ Al Qaeda’s plans for future attacks against
Americans on US soil including an “American
Hiroshima”

▪ “Dhimmitude” and the uniquely Islamic
institution of jihad

▪ Terrorist recruitment in the United States

▪ A detailed look at the charges and trial of Florida
Prof. and terror suspect Sami al Arian

▪ An in-depth look at ties between the radical left
and the enemies of the state.
▪ Understanding the threat posed

▪ Effective counter-terrorism

▪ The threat posed to world peace and national
security by the ideology of radical Islam

▪ The West’s misidentification of the challenges
faced from the global jihad

▪ A critique of the government’s performance on
its prosecution of the War on Terror

▪ A first hand account of a slaughter committed
against innocents.

▪ Terrorist indoctrination on the campuses of US
Universities


VIP Pre-Symposium Reception

In addition, America’s Truth Forum is hosting a pre-symposium VIP reception scheduled for Friday evening, April 28th, 2006. Those in attendance will be provided with a unique opportunity to personally interact with our speakers and other "prominent" guests including former CIA Director James Woolsey and author of Losing bin Laden, Shadow War and Disinformation: 22 Media Myths That Undermine the War on Terror, Richard Miniter. Tickets for the VIP Pre-Symposium Reception are $100 per person. Reservations need to be made in advance due to security protocol.

For Details and Information

Contact Jeff Epstein, President of America’s Truth Forum, at (866) 709-3474 or by logging on to http://www.americastruthforum.com/

Anarchy In Chicago - My Kind of Town

Read it all including the internal links.

Pusillanimous Parenting and Unrealistic Bureacracies

Pusillanimous Parenting and Unrealistic Bureacracies

Hattip for In government schools, much of the problem IS the parents: A neighbor and colleague who prefers to remain anonymous

"America is being told we have lousy parents, bad kids and we can't do anything without the help of government.." That's right, lousy parent who fail to step up to the bat to be...parents. Instead they masquerade as their children's friends, or allies, or roommates, or even providers , and ignoring the obvious, the known-for-generations characteristics of childhood and children, they throw up their hands as they go off persuing their own dreams while their little nuisance, as did Uncle Tom's Cabin's who "just growd" without supervision or direction. No wonder America's children and America's schools are in disarray.

For thousands of years parents took particular care with their children: what they ate, what they wore, where they went, with whom they associated, and what they learned, knowing that unformed children need a strict, but balanced hand for the proper formation of their bodies, minds and character. They kept their children at home or in small groups they supervised and instructed themselves.

Does today's busy life require a different arrangement? The world is a "busy, dangerous place." Children need "to be with their peers" and "learn a set curriculum" in order to be successful in this fast-paced, troublesome world? Abandoning children to only the supervision of the school is an abrogation of parental authority as parents hand off their children with the "wish" that they learn and a "prayer" that they don't return either as traumatized or tormentor, or that they have positive rather than negative experience.

Parents set their children up everyday to do one or the other and teachers are often saddled with "regulations and bureaucracy intended to address the fact that parents aren't being parents, and so teachers, "unfairly I say, "are forced to be parents."

And when I say that "parents aren't being parents," I mean in the most basic sense: children come to school not properly fed; their clothes aren't clean; no one makes them do their homework or go to bed at a decent hour each night; there is no discipline or organization (and children desperately need both).  And that is not even counting the number of parents who indulge their children with material items to make up for the time they don't spend with them.  Or the parents whose nightlives (read what you want into that) send a very clear message about insecurity and promiscuity - not to mention priorities. Oh, and did we mention the parents with substance abuse problems?  Or those in and out of jail?
The children of these parents are needy, angry, resentful, depressed, enraged, aggressive and difficult if not impossible to control.  And they are present in ever-increasing numbers in schools each year.  What are teachers supposed to do in these situations?

Private and sectarian schools will go back to the parents and demand accountability, because they can.  Government schools, on the other hand, have a top-down management model that believes - as Zoller intimates - that higher taxes and more regulations will enable government to parent - if not better than, then at least as well as - the parents themselves.

Parents are all to blame as they are responsible for their children's welfare.

Schools where these hopeful parents send off their children everyday also have a measure of responsibility in debacle of modern American childhood. Under the watchful eye and regulation of a top-down bureaucracy, schools in combination with irresponsible parents and unrealistic education departments at the local, state, and federal level, combined with theorists and bureaucrats to create a laboratory, i.e. school, where problems fester, education decays, teachers are set up to fail, and all children - perhaps especially those without emotional, psychological or developmental problems - suffer, problems often caused by conditions created by those same parents.

For the sake of the children and for the sake of America, schools have been forced to take up the slack in areas that were previously reserved for parents since the beginning of time. The problem, it seems, is not new.
Education was a haphazard affair in America's early history. Few children received a full, quality education while the majority received an education that was sparse, poorly-funded, and short.

Are today's children any better off? They are sent off to be held captive in centers of learning while their parents eke out a living or pursue their own dreams. Since the beginning of time, education has always been a local affair, as local as the parents' on parlor, barn, workshop, or cave need be. Organized education changed the educational experience as organized religion changed the nature of the spiritual experience.

America subscribed to "natural law" in the Declaration of Independence which stated that "parents should have the final word on the education of children." What happened?

While the idea of a “department of education” dates back to the 1860s, Congress feared that the department would have too much power over local schools and kept it small until 1980.  Until the Lyndon Johnson administration, Congress made clear its intention that the secretary of education and other officials be prohibited from exercising direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, instructional programs, administration, or personnel of any educational institution. Such matters were and should be the responsibility of states, localities, and private institutions. 

The Johnson administration began adding many programs designed to help educate the poor, however the report, “A Nation At Risk” put out by the Department of Education (made a cabinet level position in 1980), led Congress to the conclusion that schools needed more involvement from the federal government. The fact of the matter is that the more the federal government has been involved, the worse schools have gotten.  And with more involvement of the federal government, there has been more alienation of the parent from the school system. This is not a reflection on No Child Left Behind, which is actually helping the students it was designed to help—those left behind by the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” But, the one size fits all approach of NCLB has made schools doing well before NCLB be so bogged down in bureaucracy that teachers are unhappy. 

Instead of an improved system that affords each child a program to develop his abilities, NCLB (No Child Left Behind) has become a failing bureaucratic monster of standardization that overlooks the natural idiosyncratic differences among all learners. There is no one way to learn nor is there only way to verify learning. Forcing teachers to limit their teaching practices to the "flavor of the year" does a disservice to them as well as the students. Requiring all students to conform to a standardized test to verify learning is for the convenience of bureaucrats rather than to determine what a students actually has learned.

The students of neglectful parents in a stultifying bureaucratic environment where teachers' hands are metaphorically tied by bureaucracy and the custom of progressives who have morphed schools into sociological experiments are "needy, angry, resentful, depressed, enraged, aggressive and difficult if not impossible to control." And I would add that they are often bored and ready to use their natural talents to create a stimulating, but usually anti-social environment for no one has bothered to convince that socially acceptable behavior leads to anything that they value as now that the confusing concept of permanent life-defining values in a the post-modern relativistic world of multiculturalism and political correctness.

The obvious best answer would be to overturn bureaucracy and return responsibility for the upbringing of children to caring and competent parents. Schools evolved because many parents aren't caring, are incompetent, and are just absent. Thus the alternative answer would be to evolve or even devolve the school into a form that better meets the needs of real children rather than those of the regulatory bureaucracies created for varied political reasons why any bureaucracy exists. The layers in the various education bureaucracies have become an entities for self-perpetuation rather than agencies that real good for the human beings for which they are responsible: children, their parents, and teachers.

Something to Think About from the New York Times

Defenders of the Faith - New York Times

Op-Ed Contributor, by SLAVOJ ZIZEK, Published: March 12, 2006, London

FOR centuries, we have been told that without religion we are no more than egotistic animals fighting for our share, our only morality that of a pack of wolves; only religion, it is said, can elevate us to a higher spiritual level. Today, when religion is emerging as the wellspring of murderous violence around the world, assurances that Christian or Muslim or Hindu fundamentalists are only abusing and perverting the noble spiritual messages of their creeds ring increasingly hollow. What about restoring the dignity of atheism, one of Europe's greatest legacies and perhaps our only chance for peace?

More than a century ago, in "The Brothers Karamazov" and other works, Dostoyevsky warned against the dangers of godless moral nihilism, arguing in essence that if God doesn't exist, then everything is permitted. The French philosopher André Glucksmann even applied Dostoyevsky's critique of godless nihilism to 9/11, as the title of his book, "Dostoyevsky in Manhattan," suggests.

This argument couldn't have been more wrong: the lesson of today's terrorism is that if God exists, then everything, including blowing up thousands of innocent bystanders, is permitted — at least to those who claim to act directly on behalf of God, since, clearly, a direct link to God justifies the violation of any merely human constraints and considerations. In short, fundamentalists have become no different than the "godless" Stalinist Communists, to whom everything was permitted since they perceived themselves as direct instruments of their divinity, the Historical Necessity of Progress Toward Communism.

During the Seventh Crusade, led by St. Louis, Yves le Breton reported how he once encountered an old woman who wandered down the street with a dish full of fire in her right hand and a bowl full of water in her left hand. Asked why she carried the two bowls, she answered that with the fire she would burn up Paradise until nothing remained of it, and with the water she would put out the fires of Hell until nothing remained of them: "Because I want no one to do good in order to receive the reward of Paradise, or from fear of Hell; but solely out of love for God." Today, this properly Christian ethical stance survives mostly in atheism.

Fundamentalists do what they perceive as good deeds in order to fulfill God's will and to earn salvation; atheists do them simply because it is the right thing to do. Is this also not our most elementary experience of morality? When I do a good deed, I do so not with an eye toward gaining God's favor; I do it because if I did not, I could not look at myself in the mirror. A moral deed is by definition its own reward. David Hume, a believer, made this point in a very poignant way, when he wrote that the only way to show true respect for God is to act morally while ignoring God's existence.

Two years ago, Europeans were debating whether the preamble of the European Constitution should mention Christianity as a key component of the European legacy. As usual, a compromise was worked out, a reference in general terms to the "religious inheritance" of Europe. But where was modern Europe's most precious legacy, that of atheism? What makes modern Europe unique is that it is the first and only civilization in which atheism is a fully legitimate option, not an obstacle to any public post.

Atheism is a European legacy worth fighting for, not least because it creates a safe public space for believers. Consider the debate that raged in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, my home country, as the constitutional controversy simmered: should Muslims (mostly immigrant workers from the old Yugoslav republics) be allowed to build a mosque? While conservatives opposed the mosque for cultural, political and even architectural reasons, the liberal weekly journal Mladina was consistently outspoken in its support for the mosque, in keeping with its concern for the rights of those from other former Yugoslav republics.

Not surprisingly, given its liberal attitudes, Mladina was also one of the few Slovenian publications to reprint the infamous caricatures of Muhammad. And, conversely, those who displayed the greatest "understanding" for the violent Muslim protests those cartoons caused were also the ones who regularly expressed their concern for the fate of Christianity in Europe.

These weird alliances confront Europe's Muslims with a difficult choice: the only political force that does not reduce them to second-class citizens and allows them the space to express their religious identity are the "godless" atheist liberals, while those closest to their religious social practice, their Christian mirror-image, are their greatest political enemies. The paradox is that Muslims' only real allies are not those who first published the caricatures for shock value, but those who, in support of the ideal of freedom of expression, reprinted them.

While a true atheist has no need to boost his own stance by provoking believers with blasphemy, he also refuses to reduce the problem of the Muhammad caricatures to one of respect for other's beliefs. Respect for other's beliefs as the highest value can mean only one of two things: either we treat the other in a patronizing way and avoid hurting him in order not to ruin his illusions, or we adopt the relativist stance of multiple "regimes of truth," disqualifying as violent imposition any clear insistence on truth.

What, however, about submitting Islam — together with all other religions — to a respectful, but for that reason no less ruthless, critical analysis? This, and only this, is the way to show a true respect for Muslims: to treat them as serious adults responsible for their beliefs.

Slavoj Zizek, the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, is the author, most recently, of "The Parallax View."

Modern Education' s Return to Virtue, Honesty, and Justice

Can the problems with today's education system be traced back to the educational philosophy of 19th century educator, John Dewey?

What is Dewey’s troubling legacy? Dewey’s philosophy was much larger in its focus than merely education. Education was just a “microcosm of social life.” The schoolhouse was considered “society on a small scale, then the socialization, not the mere education, of the pupil becomes the primary task of the educator. Education is no longer simply academic or even moral—it is the first step of an experiment in social change.”

At first blush, this may not seem so problematic, if it were not for the nihilistic paradigm of Dewey that drove his educational policies.

Dewey believed that everything was social, even values and virtues. As such, standards for behavior were malleable, and things such as traditional moral and religious education were a waste of time, because the different traits that such moral education sought to cultivate weren’t really objectively fixed good things. He criticized traditional educational methods for treating children “like animals” who needed to be trained, instead of the active agents of unlimited possibility that they truly were.

In his own words: “The typical strategy of rewarding students for success and punishing them for failure—the old ‘carrot-and-stick’ approach—does not really encourage moral growth or learning. Indeed, once freed from such counterproductive supervision, the student learns automatically and autonomously.”

This reaction against moral education is perhaps one of the more defining hallmarks of Deweyan philosophy. The problem is that Dewey depreciates the human will, and as a result, children do not learn to appreciate fully the value of making good choices. The devaluing of character-molding education has obviously had a tremendous impact on American education, as the classroom has been transformed into a legal battlefield, with two sides warring over what kinds of things can be taught, said, and done within the walls of public schools...

The biggest error of Dewey and his intellectual descendants is believing that there is a way to create a morally neutral educational system or an objectively empirical method.

Dewey’s god was scientific empiricism, and thus his classrooms were effectively turned into laboratories, not arenas for instruction. Despite his attacks on traditional moral education for treating children like untrained animals, his educational system treated them like lab rats. The problem with removing any notion of the transcendent or absolute is that it renders any measure of progress and growth as subjective and unreliable. Dewey removed any “end” to education; progress existed for more progress, and growth for more growth, but they’re just ends in themselves, with no true goal in sight.
Perhaps the biggest clue that his unfounded, wishful theories of empirical education were not effective is the fact that he himself was a bad teacher and had trouble maintaining discipline. His theories might have sounded compelling, but they were divorced from reality—and bad ideas cannot bear the weight of reality for too long. His unproven theories would become subject matter for the classroom, often with undesired consequences...

Dewey’s legacy is unfortunately our public education system’s heritage...(a system of) “progressive educational” tactics which are constantly suggesting “new, better, and improved” educational ideas that are unsubstantiated and subject our children to attending school in laboratory-like conditions.

Each year, returning classroom teachers are required adapt to the "theory of the year," even though they might know from experience that these methods are just that: theories, tested on sample populations or, in some cases, as real time pilot programs.

No process will be effective with all students. An example is today's "Whole Language Reading Program." Many school districts required teachers to abandon the tried and true to implement this program, leaving by the wayside spelling and basic grammar conventions. The idea was the "natural" writing process. Spelling and punctuation interfered with the student's creativity. The result was predictable: students that can neither spell nor punctuate. Once learned, such patterns are very difficult to correct. Although Dewey didn't invent nor advocate Whole Language and the claptrap theories to which educators and students are subjected, but his philosophy is responsible.

Yet Another Bounty on 12 Cartoonists' Heads

This is getting, really, really boring!!!

Pakistan: Bounty for killing Muhammed Cartoonists
March 12, 2006 13.28 Foreign News

The men behind the Danish Muhammed cartoons are today faced with another bounty on their heads from Pakistan.
It is the Bar Association who are calling for the murder of the 12 Jyllands-Posten cartoonists.
“I offer the reward of 10 Million Rupees (1 Million DKK, 120000US$) for anyone who kills one of the Cartoonists,” says Syes Athar Bukhari, the President of the Bar Association.

Bukhari is supported by the Jamaat-i-Islami party, the second-largest part of the Pakistani coalition government. The local leader, Rao Zafar Iqbal, says that the mebers of the party are willing to die for this sacred cause.

During the demonstration in the city of Multan Danish, Norwegian, Italian, Israeli and American flag were burned, and shouts of “Death to Denmark” were heard.

"Chicken Kiev," poster at LGF says it all : "I remember those fun summers I spent backpacking around Europe, so many years ago. If someone told me then -- on the sunny happy streets of Copenhagen -- that this would happen someday, I would have thought that person was a crazy drug addict."

When are we going to put a stop to this?

Hattip on article Another Bounty on 12 Cartoonists' Heads: LGF

Study Warns of Lapses at U.S. Ports

Smugglers have known this for years. Attempts to prevent lapses in the security of the chain of goods should begin in the point of origin: production where goods are placed into boxes and loaded onto trucks.

(Jeff Parker Political Cartoon)

U.S. custom officials operating in other countries have instituted a new security program, but there are too many opportunities to guarantee even minimal security. Products can be tampered with during manufacturing, in warehouses. Trucks can be diverted, uploading onto ships and planes can go wrong, doors on containers removed after sealing, manifests switched, and so on.

The previously undisclosed results from the study found that cargo containers can be opened secretly during shipment to add or remove items without alerting U.S. authorities, according to government documents marked "sensitive security information" and obtained by The Associated Press.

The lapses are serious:

The study found serious lapses by private companies at foreign and American ports, aboard ships, and on trucks and trains "that would enable unmanifested materials or weapons of mass destruction to be introduced into the supply chain."

The study, expected to be completed this fall, used satellites and experimental monitors to trace roughly 20,000 cargo containers out of the millions arriving each year from Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Most containers are sealed with mechanical bolts that can be cut and replaced or have doors that can be removed by dismantling hinges.
The risks from smuggled weapons are especially worrisome because U.S. authorities largely decide which cargo containers to inspect based on shipping records of what is thought to be inside.

Among the study's findings:

_Safety problems were not limited to overseas ports. A warehouse in Maine was graded less secure than any in Pakistan, Turkey or Brazil. "There is a perception that U.S. facilities benefit from superior security protection measures," the study said. "This mind set may contribute to a misplaced sense of confidence in American business practices."

_No records were kept of "cursory" inspections in Guatemala for containers filled with Starbucks Corp. coffee beans shipped to the West Coast. "Coffee beans were accessible to anyone entering the facility," the study said. It found significant mistakes on manifests and other paperwork. In a statement to the AP, Starbucks said it was reviewing its security procedures.

_Truck drivers in Brazil were permitted to take cargo containers home overnight and park along public streets. Trains in the U.S. stopped in rail yards that did not have fences and were in high-crime areas. A shipping industry adage reflects unease over such practices: "A container at rest is a container at risk."

_Practices at Turkey's Port of Izmir were "totally inadequate by U.S. standards." But, the study noted, "It has been done that way for decades in Turkey."

_Containers could be opened aboard some ships during weekslong voyages to America. "Due to the time involved in transit (and) the fact that most vessel crew members are foreigners with limited credentialing and vetting, the containers are vulnerable to intrusion during the ocean voyage," the study said.

_Some governments will not help tighten security because they view terrorism as an American problem. The U.S. said "certain countries," which were not identified, would not cooperate in its security study — "a tangible example of the lack of urgency with which these issues are regarded."

_Security was good at two terminals in Seattle and nearby Tacoma, Wash. The operator in Seattle, SSA Marine, uses cameras and software to track visitors and workers. "We consider ourselves playing an important role in security," said the company's vice president, Bob Waters.

In theory, some nuclear materials inside cargo containers can be detected with special monitors. But such devices have frustrated port officials in New Jersey because bananas, kitty litter and fire detectors — which all emit natural radiation — set off the same alarms more than 100 times every day.

The study applauded efforts to install radiation monitors overseas. "While there is clearly value in nuclear detection at a U.S. port, that is precisely the concern — it is already on U.S. soil," it said.

Finding biological and chemical weapons inside cargo containers is less likely. The study said tests were "labor intensive, time-consuming and costly to use" and produced too many false alarms. "No silver bullet has emerged to render terrorists incapable of introducing WMD into containers," it said.

What is being done?

1. Part of the study tested new tamper-evident locks on containers and tracking devices.

2. The study, called "Operation Safe Commerce," undercuts arguments that port security in America is an exclusive province of the Coast Guard and U.S. Customs and Border Protection and is not managed by companies operating shipping terminals.

The theme was an important element in the Bush administration's forceful defense of the deal it originally approved to allow Dubai-owned DP World to handle significant operations at ports in New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia.

According to AP, some of what the study revealed:

Parts of the U.S. study examined the safety of containers sent to the same cargo terminal in New Jersey that DP World would have managed jointly and operated with its Denmark-based rival, Maersk Sealand.

Hundreds of pages of study documents obtained by the AP do not list specific security lapses at the New Jersey terminal. The final two cargo containers being tracked under the study were expected to arrive there this week from the Middle East.
But the study broadly described problems in warehouses and other storage areas that raised doubts about the safety of containers brought to New Jersey's port. It cited problems with protective fences and gates, surveillance cameras and emergency plans.

The lengthy study has been beset by problems. Japan refused to allow officials to attach tracking devices to containers destined for the United States. Other tracking devices sometimes failed. Many shipping companies refused to disclose information for competitive reasons.

Some containers in the study were aboard a ship the Coast Guard held 11 miles off New Jersey's coast for security reasons in August 2004. An anonymous e-mail had claimed a container filled with tons of lemons was deliberately contaminated with a biological agent. The lemons were fumigated and burned, but no trace of poison was ever found; the containers also were destroyed.

Parts of the study could not be finished at all. U.S. officials went to Pakistan to inspect how workers in Karachi handle cargo containers. But they canceled plans for a return inspection because of an outbreak of terrorist attacks there.

Illegal Aliens Protest in Chicago

Hattip: MichelleMalkin


Do you notice the Mexican flags? All those millions of unsupervised and undocumented aliens should make everyone nervous. America needs immigrants, but we need immigrants that are loyal only to the United States.

The Mexican government has been openly telling Mexicans who have become naturalized Americans that they can also retain their citizenship and loyalty to Mexico. The U.S. oath of citizenship makes that a moral and legal impossibility. Yet, on March 20, 1998, Mexico passed a law that purports to reinstate Mexican nationality for Mexican-Americans who have become naturalized U.S. citizens. Mexico has since issued tens of thousands of documents to naturalized Americans who came from Mexico.

Hattip: FreedomFolks via Michelle Malkin

They want justice. "¡Sí, se puede ! Yes we can WHAT, one wonders?"

Yes we can...make demands of the government, even though we're here illegally? Yes we can...break your laws then demand to not only not be penalized, but to be rewarded for it? Yes we can...take taxpayer-funded services like education and healthcare, and in exchange we'll drive down wages and refuse to assimilate? Yes we can...shout loud enough about our civil rights that the politicians will forget that civil rights are, by definition, for citizens?

Where did they get the idea? From the meddling Mexican government that encourages dual citizenship and is playing the remittance game.

Postscript: Look at these employment figures and then decide if we need all those that work for less.

Dubai - From Someone Who Knows

With gratitude and a hattip to the Avenging Apostate and The Pedestrian Infidel, a most interesting and revealing comment:


Here in Dubai there is an area called Knowledge Village—it’s a compound that houses about 25 universities and colleges. I frequent the food court there and sit with my friends, sipping coffee and discussing the news. Our gatherings are multinational and multicultural, which is exactly the image the UAE wants to show to the world. I’m of Pakistani descent, and my circle of friends includes a couple of friends from India, one Canadian and a Sri Lankan; the Indians are, of course, Hindus. The Canadian and Sri Lankan are Moslems—so it’s a diverse crowd.

As is our routine, we usually start our talks on something political. One recent morning, the big news up for discussion was about a bomb blast in Iraq at a revered Shiite shrine. Who was our group blaming for it? The usual suspects for all of the world’s evils: America and Israel, of course. The group’s sentiments were, for all intents and purposes, an exact replica of what one would always hear in the Iranian government’s virulent anti-American propaganda, or anything else in the Middle East’s mainstream media. You are probably wondering why Hindus would be anti-American and talk just like Moslems do. Well, come to UAE, and you will stop wondering.

America, over the years, has had many allies that were allies in name only. The UAE is one of those allies. The UAE is the first to condemn the American actions against terrorism, but it condones what the terrorists do, saying they're fighting for freedom and in fact it’s all America's fault anyway. Whatever the UAE government says about the UAE being America’s friend actually doesn’t matter, because in the end they end up not acting on it. How could it be otherwise? I would safely estimate that 99% of the UAE’s population is strongly anti American. The same also can be said for Pakistan (having lived there also, I will discuss Pakistan in a future post). Just one day on the street here, in any coffee outlet, in any restaurant or in any club, will expose what the UAE actually stands for. Political discussions are a common occurrence here and even if you aren’t a part of that discussion, you can overhear what they’re saying. And what they say here in Dubai is in fact no different from what the Iranians, Pakistanis, or Taliban, for that matter, are constantly saying.

The young generation of the UAE population might seem to not care much about what goes on around the world. But when it comes to responding to the ‘appalling’ cartoons published in a Danish newspaper, they’re the first to go out on the streets along with the ‘peaceful’ women chanting ‘death to Denmark, death to America’. This, my friends, is the true nature of our so-called allies that we have in the Middle East. I distinctly remember, right after 9/11 when America released a list of 20 countries that supported terrorism, the UAE was included in that list. But then mysteriously, it disappeared.It is not a hidden fact that the ruler of Dubai, the prime minister of the UAE, Sheik Mohammed supports and protects Dawood Ibrahim, a wanted terrorist by the Indian government who is responsible for almost every bombing in Kashmir and numerous other atrocities in various Indian cities. So it is no surprise that this man, with connections to mobsters all over the world, including the Russian mafia, is the richest man in the UAE with assets worth over $20 billion. It is this man who owns almost all the businesses in Dubai and is also the owner of DP World, the company that (until just recently) was about to take over six major ports in the United States.The Moslems here felt proud when the DP World deal was struck--‘we are in America now…’ said many.

Not just this deal, but every project in Dubai in particular and in the UAE in general is planned with the west in mind, sort of a huge game of “one-upsmanship”. Burj Dubai, the project slated to be the world’s tallest building (currently under construction) is hailed all over the UAE and the Moslem world in general, because now, Islam is able to stand face to face with the west. All such mega-projects are designed and overseen by western Dhimmis (for example, the lead contractor on Burj Dubai is Samsung) and are as high-quality as anything in the West. The West is being used here too and they don’t even know it.What is the reason for all this? Not that the rents will go down if there were more apartments, because right now Dubai is one of the most expensive places on earth to live—a room, which is smaller than what my dog would get in Pakistan, rents for anywhere from $500-$800 per month. And that’s for rent in the slums. But they build tall buildings to take the west on, for Islam.

A country that portrays itself as the most liberal Moslem country on the planet houses a population that is one of the most anti-American, anti-western in the world. When talking to anyone who has been here for a year or so, regardless of their religion, all you hear is cursing against the Great Satan. ‘America wants oil; America was responsible for Iran-Iraq war; America brought Israel into the Middle East; America needs to be destroyed…’ This is all you hear on the streets. There is so much anti-American, anti-western sentiment that the feeble learn to hate as well. Under such an onslaught, virtually everyone comes to believe just as they do, namely, that Islam is right and the infidels are wrong. Always.

In the mosques you don’t hear much anti-Americanism but sometimes you do hear prayers for ‘people fighting for their freedom’. Who are they talking about? By ‘freedom fighters’, they are talking about the terrorists who are trying to destroy America and its (genuine) allies. Yes, we have allies who want to destroy us (the UAE) and our real allies (Israel, Australia).In UAE prisons, whoever converts to Islam is automatically forgiven his sentence and those who don’t, rot in it and then are deported. Arabs are favored over foreigners and in their pride they crush anyone who doesn’t resemble them. ‘Islam will take the world over…’ chants every Arab here.

Just as Mohammed’s followers followed his command to do whatever is necessary to carry the orders of Allah, these Moslems still follow that command to this very day.In short, in the UAE, whoever talks against the Jews and the Americans is loved, and is dear to everyone, but whoever is anti Islamic is thrown in jail and (if a foreigner) deported. Anti Americanism is bred here, it’s in the very air. They just don’t advertise it so openly, because the UAE is waiting, getting stronger and biding its time. Waiting for when the time is right.

A multicultural society where hatred of non-Moslems is obvious, where the non Moslems start saying ‘prophet Mohammed’ even though they don’t believe he is a prophet, makes me think that there’s something fishy. No one here has ever talked against the Iranian nuclear program; they don’t condemn terrorists—civilians and the government alike. By not condemning it, they condone, in silent whispers, the heinous acts of Islamic barbarism.‘Today we have decided we will give them a chance, we are handing our ports to them’. Tomorrow, who knows? An Iranian nuke might someday get past the security and make 9-11 look like a minor skirmish. Who will be held responsible then? The Muslims want us dead anyway, be it through our own stupidity or at the hands of terrorists whom they fully support--whom they call martyrs when they die.

How can we consider handing over control of our ports to someone who has sworn to support the annihilation of Israel? After all, no one holding the Israeli passport can enter the UAE. Mr. Bush? Answer that for me.President Bush, former President Clinton, and the rest can be as blind as they want, but I hope the citizens of the United States open their eyes. Remember the Korean War? China backstabbed the US then. Now, the UAE and the rest of the Moslem world are sharpening their knives.

CAIR Chairman Elected to Board of ACLU-Florida

Hattip: Stop the ACLU

“American Muslims view the protection of civil liberties as one of the most important issues facing our nation today,” said Ahmed. “By working with the ACLU in Florida, I hope to strengthen constitutional rights and help balance those rights with legitimate national security concerns.” Ahmed is a resident of Jacksonville, Fla.
The ACLU of Florida, with headquarters in Miami, is the local affiliate of the national organization. It has 16 staff members, 16 chapters and more than 22,000 members and supporters across Florida.

A shock to see in print,but not a total surprise.

Centuries-Old Traditional European Festivals "Tread Lightly" as Artists Try Not to Offend Muslims

This is getting boring:

An annual festival of satire in Valencia has fallen foul of censorship after more than four centuries following the furore over Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.

In the Fallas festival, giant sculptures of the high and mighty are placed in the streets for the public to mock before being destroyed in an orgy of gunpowder and flames. It has survived attacks by the Roman Catholic church, various puritanical rulers and the Franco dictatorship.

This year's figures will include President George W Bush, several of the Spanish prime minister, José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, and the Prince of Wales dancing, in Highland dress, with the Duchess of Cornwall. But self-censorship has seen Muslim and Arab figures modified to avoid offence.

The Fallas season is now underway until March 19 but as it approached, Valencians watched global protests against newspaper cartoons of Mohammed with growing alarm. Last month, the mayor, Rita Barberá, urged artists to "temper freedom with a sense of responsibility" when referring to religious subjects.

At least one well known local Fallas artist admitted to removing elements from his display of comic sculptures.
He had sculpted three life-size figures of illegal Arab immigrants storming the Spanish border, in a reference to last year's crisis in Ceuta and Melilla, Spain's enclaves in North Africa, involving thousands of migrants. The artist has now removed details that identified them as Arabs.

The artist asked not to be named, partly for fear of reprisals, partly because he did not feel proud of such "self-censorship". But this year was "different", he said. Radical Muslim leaders appeared to be looking for excuses to cause trouble...

In the countryside near Valencia, many villages have their own festivals, involving mock battles between "Moors and Christians", in an ancient recreation of the Catholic reconquest of Spain from Arab rule.

There have been subtle changes this year, which no locals would discuss, the Spanish newspaper ABC recently reported. In Bocairent, villagers refrained from burning life-size mannequins of the "Mahoma", a traditional figure presumed to be based on Mohammed.

Let's face it, people are afraid; who can blame them. Why are Muslims running the show? After all, blasphemy is in the eye of the beholder. Christians are not causing mayhem: burning, killing, rioting and so on even though some Muslim beliefs and practices are considered blasphemous.

What's the difference? Christianity has moved beyond violence in the name of religion and Islam has not. Invoking discrimination and racism, Muslims don't believe in the Golden Rule. Instead, they take for themselves a position that they don't grant non-Muslims even though the behaviors are happening their own non-Muslim countries. What hypocrisy.

Review: Bernstein’s The Capitalist Manifesto

Do you get worn out with all the crap coming at you from newspapers, radio, and television news? Want a breath of free air? In the interest of accentuating the positive, we offer you the opportunity to read about a very uplifting book, one that will doubtless open your eyes to uncritically absorbed errors, ones stuffed into your head from cultural and school sources. This is the best book we have read in 2006, thus far.

~~~~~

Why do America and the West have so much wealth (“the goods and services necessary for human survival and prosperity,” p. 334, The Capitalist Manifesto)? The answer may as well be a state secret, given how few people know it, but the answer is: capitalism. Even though the “capitalism” we have today is merely a degraded remnant of the original, but look how powerful its influence is--despite being degraded by the influx of socialism into our commerce and freedom. That is not all.

Capitalism is not just an economic system. It is a full social system, as we will explain. Prior to capitalism, famine, disease, and abysmal poverty, with short, miserable lives characterized the West. Nowadays, in the countries influenced by capitalism, famine and slavery have been wiped out, and people live three to four times longer in extraordinary luxury when compared to all human history prior to the Industrial Revolution. Capitalism, coming to us from the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution beginning in the mid-18th century, caused the change. Capitalism may be the greatest of all human achievements.

However, nothing has gotten a worse press or more bashing for more than a century and a half than has capitalism. Anti-capitalism has dominated the “intelligentsia” through all of the 20th century, as the ungrateful capitalism-bashers, along with the rest of us, grew steadily wealthier and healthier, because of capitalism.

Clearly, capitalism needs a fair hearing. People need to learn about it, and to learn the truth, free from unremitting anti-capitalist propaganda passing itself off as the truth. The history, economics, and the philosophical ideas that make capitalism what it is need to be brought to the court of public knowledge.

Andrew Bernstein has done just that with his new book, The Capitalist Manifesto [University Press of America, Inc., Maryland; 2005; ISBN 0-7618-3221-1]. The full title of the book is The Capitalist Manifesto: The Historic, Economic, and Philosophic Case for Laissez-Faire. We will abbreviate the title to “TCM,” for convenience, but the full title identifies the scope of the book. As for calling it The Capitalist Manifesto, the author clearly sticks his finger in the eye of Karl Marx, who wrote capitalism’s antithesis entitled The Communist Manifesto.

Dr. Bernstein is a professor of philosophy and a profound advocate of reason. He wrote in TCM a book that was hard to put down until the last page. TCM sustains high interest and good readability because it reflects very clear thinking.

“The book is written for the rational mind anywhere and anytime, whether the reader is a professional intellectual or an intelligent nonprofessional. It seeks to make the case for individual rights and freedom in terms intelligible for all rational men.”

Did he succeed? To answer that, we will take the long way around, so to speak, by first examining the structure and content of TCM.

The book presents the case for capitalism in four parts, with an important historical appendix (“Robber Barons or Productive Geniuses”). Part one tells the authentic history of capitalism. Part two covers the philosophy, part three the polemics, and finally, in part four, the economics. It also presents an extensive “Annotated Bibliography of Liberty.” The importance of the philosophy sections cannot be stressed enough; it is precisely this kind of information that is lacking, resulting in so much harm to humanity.

Part one gives the real history of capitalism. It serves as a welcome antidote to the myriad lies spread from its beginnings in the 18th century, as a product of the Enlightenment, to the present. The details of this rich history will surprise many people because so many know so little about the nature and history of capitalism. What they think they “know” is really a sordid collection of lies told repeatedly as though they were established truths--for example, capitalism causes poverty, wars, racism, and slavery.

One of the most egregious of the anti-capitalist lies is that capitalism, in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, forced extensive abusive child labor in factories. Ignorant and usually hostile teachers and pupils alike repeat these lies endlessly; thus, they persist in the culture as though they are axioms beyond challenge. Not a one, however, is true and never has been. Dr. Bernstein presents the facts, along with extensive references and notes, along with faulty thinking that have permitted anti-capitalists to perpetuate their lies.

The lie about the child labor is as widespread as it is wrong. The truth is that prior to the factories in England, where the Industrial Revolution began, children lived in a grinding poverty, disease, and starvation completely unknown to us in the West any longer. Capitalism inherited these conditions—and in time, it ended them. Factories hired children, along with adult family members, giving them incomes never before possible. Yes, kids worked long hours, and, by today’s standards, they had it hard, but they survived, whereas before, many would have died. One thinking fallacy made repetitively by anti-capitalists is their ripping history from its context. To judge early factory days, one must judge by the context of that period, when capitalism was just beginning, not by that of today, after almost two hundred years of capitalist growth. However, as wealth increased because of the Industrial Revolution, children worked less and less; in a few decades, hiring children was neither necessary nor desirable. Capitalism progressively liberated children from starvation and abysmal poverty. In an amazingly short time, even clothes were made so inexpensively that children, as well as adults, could experience new, clean clothes along with much more food and concomitant decrease of disease.

The second section deals with the philosophy underlying capitalism. Dr. Bernstein acknowledges his debt to the philosophical genius of Ayn Rand for providing the first complete epistemological, moral, and political philosophical foundations of capitalism. Capitalism was never defended properly until the mid-20th century. That is when Ayn Rand took the ideas of the Enlightenment, which gave birth to the Industrial Revolution, corrected the contradictions imposed onto capitalism, and provided the full rationale for capitalism. She defined capitalism as “a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned” [From title essay, “What is capitalism?” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal; Signet Books, New York; 1967; ISBN 0-451-14795-2]. Dr. Bernstein walks the reader down a well-presented intellectual pathway, presenting the moral and political philosophical system of capitalism. For those unfamiliar with Objectivist ethics, Dr. Bernstein provides a particularly good introduction to it.

Capitalism is the only system of, by, and for free human beings. While most people think of it as just an economic system, it is much more. The social and economic aspects of capitalism derive from its political principles defining how free people should live together: They should live free from the initiation of force against each other, and delegate to government the sole, legal use of force, for the protection of the individual rights of its citizens but nothing else. These principles derive from the concept of rights, surely one of the least understood of all ideas, particularly today in our schools, the Supreme Court, law schools, and U. S. Senate. The fundamental rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness define the freedoms of actions necessary for people to pursue their happiness, through producing their own basic support and sustenance, and beyond.

Social and economic factors flow from these principles. Politics is the application of ethics to social behavior; political principles come from moral principles, specifically from human nature’s requirement for each person to pursue values on behalf of himself. Human nature requires egoism, which, like rights, is a widely misunderstood moral concept. Egoism describes the morality needed for a person to take fundamental responsibility for his own welfare, without forcing others to provide for him. In no way is egoism some rapacious narcissism, as alleged by egoism’s detractors. Egoism derives from the epistemological principle of reason, the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided the human mind by its senses. The ultimate (metaphysical) requirement for reason is complete freedom for each human, to be free from force applied to the body and the mind by others, to live by means of his unique and sole means of survival—his rational faculty.

We cannot give the subject just due here, but TCM provides it.

Part three covers polemics. In this section, Dr. Bernstein addresses anti-capitalist arguments that include the lies that capitalism causes war, imperialism, and slavery. History and logic destroy these “arguments.” No one can read this section with an open mind and come away still accepting these old anti-capitalist bromides as “truths.”

Part four, as the author states, “is devoted to explaining the essential reason that capitalism is economically superior to any form of socialism or statism more broadly.” Additional history of capitalism enriches this section. Part four stresses one fundamental point, namely the specific economic forms in which only capitalism fully liberates creativity. Most importantly, part four integrates the material from foregoing sections and shows that “capitalism is the economic system of the mind.”

Among other valuable contributions in this section, Dr. Bernstein correctly presents the proper relationship between production and consumption. Far too many of capitalism’s apologists have focused solely on the values of consumption, which are many, but minimize the requirements and proper justification for production. Production requires full egoism, and apologists have usually feared bucking the prevailing morality in the anti-capitalist culture of self-sacrifice and selfless service to others. As a result, capitalism has too often been justified as a system groveling slavishly to provide service to consumers only, while the needs and conditions of producers and production have gone unaddressed. Production is clearly the antecedent to consumption, and is thus the more important component, although both production and consumption exist in obvious relationship to each other. Producers need the fullest expression of freedom, reason, rights, and full separation of economics and state, just as we have separation of church and state.

Finally, the author refutes the economic charges against capitalism of creating deleterious monopolies, unemployment, inflation, and depressions. Once again, all of these charges are nothing more but entrenched lies perpetrated by anti-capitalists.

For example, monopolies are one of the least understood phenomena by ordinary citizens and anti-capitalists alike. There are two types of monopolies, and the key to understanding those lies in knowing how and why each can dominate markets.

One type of monopoly exists when one or a few producers forcibly keep others from entering “their” market because of the protection and permission of government. When government establishes and controls who can compete, when, and where, then producers can call on that force to exclude competitors. This situation is the meaning most people give to the term “monopoly.” However, the proper name is “coercive monopoly.” This is the bad kind of monopoly because only force from government can stifle competition. Laws and regulations interfere with the free operations of the market. Vast numbers of people have been taught that the coercive monopoly originates from “business,” particularly “big business.” Yet, no one in business--it seems to escape the anti-capitalists--has the legal concentration of power to keep out competition; the point people miss is that it is only when a law restraining some businesses and favoring others that they can legally walk all over people. Cable television and power companies as well as the U. S. Post Office are among many illustrations of coercive monopolies because laws keep competitors from competing, and more laws then throttle the rates of the cable and telephone companies. Nothing, however, can make them provide the good service provided by free competition. Public schools are particularly pernicious, since citizens cannot avoid having their personal wealth taken under threat of force in the form of taxes to support government schools, even though they provide the most inferior education available today. In today’s mixed economy, mixing freedom and controls, coercive monopolies spawned by governmental intervention dominate the culture.

The only way that competitors can be kept out of a market in a free society is when the producer keeps customer satisfaction so high that no one can match it. This is the benign “productive monopoly,” which contrasts markedly with coercive monopolies, and this is the good kind of “monopoly.” Under laissez-faire capitalism, force cannot be initiated by businesses or anyone else to exclude competitors without drawing the proper retaliatory response by a proper government; crime may exist, but it does not pay. A very good example of a productive monopoly is provided by Microsoft, which has some 90% of the operating system market for computers. Microsoft got that market dominance by providing value to buyers. Microsoft has been accused of being a coercive monopoly. However, Microsoft does not and cannot use the force of government to control its market. Microsoft is an example of a productive monopoly. Even Microsoft—it must be stressed—cannot and does not, in fact, keep others from competing. It simply out-competes most of them.

TCM presents numerous key concepts and principles that make the arguments for capitalism clear. No review can possibly provide the proper exposition of all of these key concepts and principles. Therefore, we will select just two for illustration.

1. Every reader needs to be very clear about three political-social-economic systems: capitalism, statism, and mixed economies.

Pure capitalism, also known as “laissez-faire capitalism” has never existed, although America came close. In a system of laissez-faire capitalism, government is servant to the individual citizen. The period spanning from the end of the Civil War to the turn of the 20th century in America was the period of nearly pure capitalism, and this era has taken much abuse by anti-capitalists. Anti-capitalists call it the “Gilded Age,” and have tried to characterize the period as full of “robber baron” predators gouging the citizenry while living in a state of embarrassing ostentation. Dr. Bernstein deals with these lies completely, and he gives the era a proper name: the “Inventive Age.” Coercive monopolies, such as the Central Pacific Railroad, became notorious, but they resulted from improper governmental intervention into the economy. The government of California gave legal exclusivity to this railroad, thus enabling the abuses that were mis-ascribed to capitalism per se. The Central Pacific Railroad was a typical coercive monopoly. By contrast, government-free railroads (some of which were productive monopolies), always out-competed the coercive monopolistic railroads with ease; all users of the free railroads benefited greatly. The owners of the free railroads got very wealthy the old-fashioned way: by earning it. To repeat the definition of true capitalism, that is, laissez-faire capitalism, it is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.

The opposite of capitalism is “statism.” Statism is a political-social-economic system as well, but one that does not recognize or protect individual rights, including property rights. The state is supreme over citizens, who have value only in their capacity to serve the state. Statism is a broad term that includes many manifestations, from monarchies, the ancien regime, and socialism in all its variants (including fascism and communism), dictatorships, tribes, theocracies, and so on. The state regards its citizens as its servants. Most of human history has been the history of statism and people striving to free themselves from those who force them against their will to serve whatever represents the supreme concentration of physical power or force. Not surprisingly, the term “command economies” applies here.
“Mixed economies” are modern phenomena and literally mix elements of capitalism with statism. Even the freest countries today are mixed economies, mixing freedom with controls. Mixed economies are in motion, moving either toward greater freedoms and fewer controls, or toward greater controls and fewer freedoms. Most tend to end up as statist regimes. To the extent that producers can utilize capitalist principles, citizens enjoy some consumer benefits.

America of today is a typical mixed economy, drifting by default toward statism. Mixed economies can be reversed by the efforts of individual citizens who adopt pro-freedom principles and begin eliminating the principles that promote the growth of anti-freedom controls. This becomes very difficult where the state controls the schools, along with the content of the curriculum. What America is not today is a capitalist country. Calling America “capitalistic” seriously misapplies the term “capitalism” and whitewashes the forces and processes at war with capitalist principles.

A word of caution is in order here about assuming that today’s business people are capitalists. Some are. Most are not. Business people of today are not a uniform lot anywhere in the world. Most are abysmally ignorant about the history, philosophy, and economics of capitalism, as ignorant as the general population. Many are mixed economy business people. As such, they seek and accept government favors, grants, and protections, which they consider“normal” business practices. Collusions, bribes, and a host of criminal activities become part of “normal business” practices for some. “Enron’s” thrive in the mixed economy, but cannot under laissez-faire capitalism. Such mixed economy businesspersons oppose any freeing of markets from governmental interference because their businesses are dependent on these “politics of pull” and influence. They are terribly threatened by free and open competitiveness. Do not call most of them “capitalists,” but rejoice in and encourage the real capitalists you find.

2. One of the greatest glories resulting from capitalism is philosophical. An intensely practical philosophy affects every citizen. Lenin, noting the chronic, recurring failures of his statist communist system, said (page 298), “Our program was right in theory, but impractible.” This statement has been echoed in various forms in the popular culture. For example, actor Ed Asner said on a conservative talk radio show a year or so ago that communism is right in theory but has failed because it has not been “practiced correctly.”

This split, the moral versus the practical, has ancient origins. Its greatest exponent was Plato, who popularized all sorts of adversarial forms, which include: theory versus practice, mind versus body, material versus spiritual, and so on.
However, the split is just another lie. It does not exist in reality—but only in the faulty thinking of people. A theory that is greatly valued but actually bears no relation to the facts defies reality. Yet, many people say, “great in theory, but it just doesn’t work in practice.” The truth is that if something is “good in theory” but impractical, then it is not good in theory. The theory is all wrong. Good in theory is good in practice.

Lenin’s “theory” was not “right.” It worked out poorly because it had to; it could have no other result. Reality always wins in the end, and the theories of socialism-communism-fascism produce the same dismal results every time they are tried, never meeting the allegedly “high” goals of advocates’ flawed expectations. “Command economies” always produce poverty, scarcity, even famine, slavery, and so on, quite the opposite of the expectations, but always consonant with their theory. Reality will out.

Capitalism is right in theory and in practice gives the abundance promised by its theory.” Capitalism is morally valid, and, as a result, it is fully practical. That is the best-kept secret about capitalism: Capitalism abolishes any split between the moral and the practical; it is the full integration of the moral and the practical.

Now to return to the question we asked at the beginning of this review: Does Dr. Bernstein succeed in making “the case for individual rights and freedom in terms intelligible for all rational men”? The answer very clearly is YES! TCM belongs in your library, and it ought to be a textbook for schools.

In 1967, Ayn Rand published her seminal collection Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, so named because of how little so many of capitalism’s beneficiaries understood or appreciated its nature and life force. The Capitalist Manifesto powerfully contributes to the New Enlightenment coming, one in which capitalism will be the known ideal.

Group Suicides Increasing in Japan

Internet suicide pacts have occurred since at least the late 1990s and have been reported everywhere from Guam to the Netherlands. But in Japan, where the suicide rate is among the industrialized world's highest, officials are worried about a recent spate of such deaths.

A record 91 people died in 34 Internet-linked suicide cases in Japan in 2005, up from 55 people in 19 cases in 2004, the National Police Agency reported last month. The number of Internet suicide pacts has almost tripled from 2003, when the agency began keeping records.

The upsurge is being blamed on the breakdown of traditional Japanese family and communal activities: sharing a bath, eating together, etc., creating a isolation: today is "all about the individual."

Suicide, though, is not seen in the same negative light as in the West: "Suicide has also long been a venerated act in Japanese culture. In feudal Japan, the ritual was considered an honorable death under the samurai warrior ethic, and contemporary movies and sitcoms(Paranoia Agent, Happy Family Planning, Jisatsu Circle) still abound with characters who take their own lives."

A record high number of suicide deaths is occurring within the Japanese military:

Also Friday, the Defense Agency said suicides among Japanese troops have hit a record high. The agency said 94 members of the 255,000 Self-Defense Force killed themselves in the year ending March 31, 2005, up 25 percent from the previous year and the highest number on record.
This works out to nearly 37 suicides per 100,000 soldiers, by far exceeding the national average of 24 suicides per 100,000 Japanese civilians.

By comparison, rates in the West are much lower:

By comparison, the suicide rate in the United States was 10.7 per 100,000 people in 2001, according to the
World Health Organization, while it was 13.5 in Germany. It was 6.9 per 100,000 in the United Kingdom in 2002 and 20.6 in Finland in 2003, according to WHO-complied statistics.

Internet-related suicides can occur in any country. They represent a small percentage of suicides in Japan. The suicide pact phenomenon is occurring many other countries: Hong Kong (China), South Korea, Germany, Australia, Norway, UK, Canada, United States, and Sweden. According to the Wikepedia, "internet suicide pacts have a common characteristic: clinical depression."

Why the Dubai Ports Issue Missed the Point

Everyone agree that America's ports are vulnerable, but where exactly does the vulnerability begin?

The stakes for not securing the ports are enormous. An attack "could well spawn a global recession -- or worse."

In short the stakes are enormous. But there are four factors associated with the scenario that I just laid out that usefully informs the focus of this hearing. First, the threat is not so much tied to seaports as it is global supply chains that now large operate largely on an honor system because the standards are so nominal and the capacity for agencies like the Coast Guard and customs is negligible. Second, no container terminal operator within the United States or abroad really know what are in the containers that pass through their facilities. They are in the business of receiving and discharging them from and to ships, trucks, and trains that converge at their terminals as quickly, reliably, and at the lowest cost possible. Third, as the engagement of John Meredith and Gary Gilbert of HPH on this issue reflects (HPH has no terminals inside the United States) global terminal operators are deeply concerned about the terrorist threat involving or directed at the supply chain because their billions of dollars of investment tied up in worldwide infrastructure are at risk. Four, the scenario I just laid out involved Vancouver as the offload port in North America, highlighting that the challenge of managing this threat is far greater than bolstering the physical security measures of U.S. seaports.

This story also highlights that there can be no solution unless U.S. authorities work directly with overseas terminal operators in enlisting their help to manage the problem. This is the case I posited in a February 28, 2006 New York Times op-ed article with Admiral James Loy, the former Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security and former Administrator of the Transportation Security Administration, and the former Commandant of the Coast Guard. We point out that ports are the on- and offramps to global markets, and they belong to a worldwide system operated by many different private and public entities. A MAJOR STEP in that direction would be to construct a comprehensive global container inspection system that scans the contents of every single container destined for America’s waterfront before it leaves a loading port—rather than scanning just the tiny percentage we do now, after they have already arrived within a seaport.

Is there a solution? The author proposes the "Hong Kong Model," a program that would scrutinize and assure the security of every container regardless of its destination:

The model for this recommendation is a pilot project that has been underway in the Port of Hong Kong since January 2005. There every container entering the truck gates of two of the world’s busiest container terminals has passed through scanning and radiation detection devices. Images of the containers’ contents are then stored on computers so that they could be scrutinized remotely by American or other customs authorities almost in real time. Customs inspectors can then issue orders not to load a container that worries them. Since this system involves scanning every container and not just those destined for the United States, it would help to support international counter-proliferation efforts as well.

Major companies such as Hutchinson Port Holdings, PSA Singapore Terminals, and, ironically, Dubai World, are either considering or have already implemented Hong-Kong-style container security.

At the end of the day, America’s port security challenge is not about who is operating on our waterfront. The real issue is that we are relying on commercial companies largely to police themselves with nominal standards and very limited oversight. Both Congress and the White House should embrace a framework of "trust but verify," in President Ronald Reagan’s phrase, based on real standards and real oversight. When it comes to the flow of goods around the planet, we need to know what’s in the box more than we need to know who is moving them around a container yard.

The bottom line is that if at the end of this controversy, the only thing that happens is that the Dubai Port World deal is approved or denied, the American people will have been deprived of a real opportunity to have advanced a qualitative improvement in port and container security. Congress and the White House should work together to convert the current political maelstrom into doing something meaningful to bolster our national security and economic security.

A "qualitative improvement in port and container security" is a the top of my priority list. However, I don't think that foreign governments should be operating facilities at our ports.

The Human Mind is the Most Awesome Weapon Ever Conceived

Wretchard at The Belmont Club mentions the efforts to "deprogramme" JIhadists in Indonesia, Pakistan, and the UK. Using PsycOps against the enemy is nothing new. In chilling detail he describes the application during the WWII and the Cold War. The result: those willing to be the most brutal won, a lesson that we may he re-learn in order to survive the Jihadist and demographic predicament in which we now find ourselves.

Why Don't They See the Cultural War in Which We Are Now Embroiled?

The West's "War on Terror" avoids acknowledging the fact that we are essentially at war with an ideology that is intent upon our destruction. This destruction may come about through a transformation precipitated by violence or nuclear blackmail, or through the chaos caused by a radical change in lifestyle as what would happen if we were suddenly deprived of our source of energy: petroleum.

More than likely the changes will come about as a result of the propaganda war that is being waged within the United States and without. We are not winning this cultural war. I am not the only one of this opinion. It's all a matter of perception instilled by "Big Lies that have increasing gained a foothold at our most prestigious universities and in our media."

The Palestinians have become the darlings of the media, the cause celebre of Leftists within the West and Islamists throughout the Muslim world and in the West.

The Palestinianization of the western academy and media began in earnest in the late 1960s or early 1970s. Initially ground breaking views about gender and racial inequalities became increasingly influenced by Marxist views against capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, and organized religion and gradually came to constitute what is now known as the "postcolonial" and postmodern academy. Race replaced both class and gender as a primary concern. Over time, even feminists became more obsessed with the "occupation" of Palestine than with the world-wide occupation of women's bodies. By the late 1990s, Palestinians, not Tibetans, Kurds, Bosnians, or Rwandans, came to be viewed as the symbolic victims of the world by those academics who considered themselves anti-racists, anti-violence and anti-misogynists.
 
Such highly propagandized views (organized by Soviet Russia, the Arab League and the Palestinian Authority), were systematically circulated throughout the world and disseminated both by the United Nations and by a network of well-funded "peace," human rights and academic organizations in classrooms and at conferences.
 
In an Orwellian world of doublespeak and groupthink, Palestinians became the new black South Africans and Israel became the new white Afrikaner Apartheid regime. Politically correct western academics and activists romanticized Palestinians, including terrorists, whose methods they viewed as a justified response to oppression.
 
Psychologically, Palestinians came to occupy the vacuum left by the Black Panthers and Weather Underground in the armchair-revolutionary academic's imagination. Despite all their pro-peace rhetoric, the western academy's true heroes were not really Nelson Mandela or Mahatma Gandhi, but Che Guevara and Fidel Castro.
 
Paradoxically, tragically, these same western academics viewed only two nations as dangerous "terrorist" entities: Israel and America. The atrocities committed by China, Soviet Russia, Cuba, Korea, and Iran never viscerally outraged them in quite the same way.
 
"Politically correct" western academics did not view their Palestinian victim-heroes as serial killers. The Palestinian and Arab terrorists who had been hijacking planes, slaughtering Israeli athletes, blowing up civilians, especially in Israel, and torching synagogues and Jewish centers around the world were not viewed as Nazis; their Jewish and Israeli victims were. 
 
The fact that terrorist-jihadists also opposed modernity, democracy and human rights did not seem to matter to the self-proclaimed arbiters of human rights in the West.

Ordinary thugs and murders, actually serial murders, have been elevated in an Orwellian style to the status of martyrs and freedom fighters. Political correctness has cancelled commonsense and multiculturalism has become the new nationalism and intellectualism.

Thus, American academics came to share the opinions of both Islamists and European intellectuals. They all expected Israel and America to pay for Europe's past colonial and racist crimes; Islamists were expected to continue Europe's war against the Jews by turning Israel into a pariah state--into the Jew of the world....

Brainwashed people are usually not amenable to facts or to multiple and competing interpretations of those facts. Those academics who don't want to hear about why anti-Americanism is wrong are deluded and self-destructive-- they do not attend lectures that might set the record straight. Those who do don't want to hear that the new anti-Semitism is anti-Zionism and that anti-Zionism is today a form of racism simply don't attend lectures or read articles which express such views.  When they do attend such lectures, they often come en masse to object and attack. The debate is uncivilized and is often characterized by interruptions, accusations, curses, intimidation, threats and group walk-outs. The lecturer is sometimes utterly silenced, publicly shamed, or forced to exit the premise for his or her own safety...

In the war of civilizations that is upon us: Dare to argue for military as well as humanitarian and educational intervention and you will be slandered as a "racist," even when you are arguing for the lives and dignity of brown, black and olive-skinned people. Such cultural relativism is perhaps the greatest failing of the western academic and media establishments.

Meanwhile the struggle is gaining steam in the Muslim world. The Jihad is Islam's crusade against the West and the Islamists have convinced their counterparts in the West that their cause is just and correct as did Pope Urban II when he denounced the many offenses of Islam against Christendom.

The Cartoon Riots, rampaging French "Youths," the Australian Beach Incidents, the London Bombings, the canceling of traditional fairs and celebrations in Europe, the calls for removal of books, artwork, closing of plays, exhibitions, punishment of editors, threats against artists, authors, and the burning of embassies, destruction of churches, non-Muslim religious icons, Belsan, and 9/11 are only the open salvoes of this "crusade" against the West being carried out by proxies and vanguard pioneers that have come with their families to displace and occupy.

Since When Is the Publication of Cartoons a Violation of Human Rights?

Muslims hpocritically are looking to limit the rights of the rest of us using any means possible:

The European Court of Human Rights said Thursday that it had received a request by a French Muslim body to condemn the publication of cartoons of Prophet Mohammed in French newspapers.

The Regional Council for the Muslim Religion (CRCM) in the Champagne Ardenne region said in a statement that the publication of the controversial cartoons in French newspapers constituted a discrimination between Muslims and non-Muslims contrary to the European Convention of Human Rights.

"Muslims consider all images of the prophet to be blasphemy." A limitation on the freedom of speech would be a violation of human rights.

Descrimination? Blasphemy? Most Christians believe that Muslim denial of the divinity of Jesus Christ is blasphemy. Thus Muslims are demanding an application of human rights to a practice that they themselves impose upon other religions. Blasphemy is in the eye of the beholder and cannot be a human right. A limitation on freedom of speech in the name of blasphemy is a violation of human rights. One hopes that the French Court will not accept this case.

Stealth Change Going On @ NY Times?

The editorial page of the New York Times has become conspicuous with a new style of editorial, one geared to reality and reason. In fact, there are whiffles of patriotism in these editorial plants. If the Times is trying to sneak back into its former reputation of being a good newspaper, we can only say "Hoorah!"

Here is a sample from today:

Facing Facts on Iran - New York Times, March 9, 2006

If reality bent to tough talk, Iran would have been forced to stop its uranium enrichment program a long time ago. The Bush administration sounded very stern this week in swatting down a tentative Russian attempt to work out a compromise with Tehran. Unfortunately, the depressing truth is that the United States has very few other options when it comes to making Iran stop working on projects that could lead to nuclear weapons, and Iran knows it... [From Jimmy Carter to this very day, we have allowed the Iranian monster to thrive, a la Nazi Germany.]

[T]he United States, which snubbed the United Nations when it came to Iraq, now wants the Security Council to solve the Iran problem by denouncing Tehran and, if that doesn't work, by perhaps imposing sanctions. The trouble is that other Council members are considered extremely unlikely to agree to sanctions, given, among other things, the dependence of some of those members on Iranian oil...But a look at the alternatives currently available makes anything that would delay that process seem worth pursuing. And a strong, unified international accord behind such a deal could send a message to Iran that the world community is prepared to work to frustrate the worst of Tehran's nuclear ambitions...

[P]erhaps the following bears repeating once again:


...¶American policies in the Middle East have made Iran incalculably more powerful than it was before the invasion of Iraq, while virtually eliminating any room for maneuvering when it comes to deploying the U.S. military. [Iran may force us to war with them.]

¶Until the United States makes a serious attempt to cut down on its domestic use of oil, there will be no way for it to lecture any of its allies for wanting to maintain good relations with an oil supplier like Iran.

(Emphases mine)

These editorials are not "there" yet, but they are inching along, stealthily.

Laugh Your Head Off: Site and Contest

Lately, we have had the unique pleasure of becoming aware of several new web and blog sites joining the war against Islam. We will feature and plug all. Today, we have the pleasure of letting readers know about Laugh Your Head Off.

We in the USA and West have been pitifully short of derisive humor about Islam. Laugh Your Head Off and The Ultimate Insult are just two sites stepping into to carry the water.

Laugh Your Head Off is sponsoring a poetry contest, and we reprint its press release.

Now, let's see.

There once was a pedophile named Mo'
Who lusted a small girl to and fro...

Here is the press release:

Poetry Contest @
1st Cartoon Contest Release @
Why an Islamic Cartoon Contest? @
See Cartoons @


For Immediate Release February 7th, AD 2006

Laughyourheadoff.org Announces the
Asma b' Marwan Poetry Prize
Calls for Poets to Support Danish Cartoonists


(Undisclosed location, USA) -- In support of the 12 Danish cartoonists whose families are now living in hiding under the threat of death from Islamic radicals, laughyourheadoff.org is announcing the Asma b'Marwan Poetry Prize as part of its ongoing International Islamic Cartoon Contest.

"We're launching this literary contest to bring attention to the plight of Danish cartoonists who live in hiding for fear for their lives because they exercised their freedom of expression, and we’re calling for poets and artists to speak out for intellectual freedom," said Charles Martel, the contest's organizer.

"Most people don't realize that Mohammed ordered the murder of a poet who poked fun at him and then sanctioned the stabbing of Asma b'Marwan because she dared to criticize such crimes with her own poetry," said Martel.

"Just like Mohammed praised the assassin who butchered Asma one night while her 5 children watched, there are fanatical Muslims who agree with the call for death against the 12 Danish cartoonist because of so-called "blasphemy" against their prophet,” he said.

The contest announcement with entry details can be found at www.laughyourheadoff.org/POprize.html

The poetry contest follows the declaration last week of the Manifesto Against Terror, which was signed by well-known European artists and intellectuals, some of whom are also in hiding because of Islamic death threats. The Manifesto, which is gaining signers worldwide, declared:


"We reject ‘cultural relativism’, which consists in accepting that men and women of Muslim culture should be deprived of the right to equality, freedom and secular values in the name of respect for cultures and traditions. We refuse to renounce our critical spirit out of fear of being accused of "Islamophobia", an unfortunate concept which confuses criticism of Islam as a religion with stigmatisation of its believers.'

It was Dutch Parliamentarian, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who gave laughyourheadoff.org the idea of a poetry contest, said Martel, when she applauded the group for the ongoing Islamic Cartoon Contest.

"We are hoping to get some excellent quality poetry, just as we have received some controversial and quality cartoons, but if newspapers keep self-censoring news of this contest we can't get the word out," he said.

There are already nearly 40 entries from Holland and Europe.

"In the current context of self-censorship and of growing Islamic threats around the globe,” points out Martel, “The Islamic traditions about the murder of the poet Asma b' Marwan are very, very troubling.”

It is said that "the day after Bint Marwan was killed the men of B. Khatma became Muslims because they feared for their lives."
"It is very possible that the future of our press and artistic freedoms are at stake in this cultural battle of Tours," said Martel. "Unless we speak freely and fight back against Islamofascist intolerance now we all may wake up some decade to see an Arabic-speaking Europe run by people who think Adolf Hitler was the good guy in World War II."

Newspapers and websites in several European nations and in Russia have actually been shut down and silenced by government authorities recently because they exercised their liberty to print the caricatures of Mohammed, and a half-dozen journalists or editors in the Middle East face prison or worse for daring to show their reading public one or more of the images.

A recent poll in Norway showed that 70% of the journalists would NOT have printed the cartoons because they feared for their lives, and there have been numerous examples of US editors choosing not to run the cartoons because they either feared a violent reaction or the stigma of being "insensitive" to Islamic concerns.

"When the hell is the free press in the West going to start being sensitive to the threats against our liberty that Islamofascist ideology poses?” says Martel. “By the silence of self-censorship the press is cooperating with the placement of its own muzzle.”

“Our own cartoon entrants might be in jail in Europe because they have dared to portray the Koran, or Islam, in a critical light,” he pointed out, referring to the cartoon of Koranic toilet paper that someone submitted to laughyourheadoff.org.

“How many Americans have been told by their local editors that a German man was sentenced to jail because he dared to put some sarcastic images of the Koran on toilet paper?” he asked. “We cannot let free speech be criminalized as “hate speech” by nervous or power-hungry elites."

"Just like in Mohammed’s day, poetry can be a very effective political weapon and it is one we can peacefully weild to defend our liberties.” said Martel.

See Details for Poetry and Cartoon Entries at:
http://www.laughyourheadoff.org/rules.html

END


Other Related Contests:


http://www.muhammad-cartoon.com/

Jihad for Kids and Youth

hattip: JihadWatch

Get them by the age of seven and they are yours forever.

A new, attractive website for children was recently launched on the net. The site features animated figures and stories that young children could easily relate to. However, unlike ordinary sites catering for children, this particular one is operated by Hamas and its main objective is to advocate suicide and self sacrifice on behalf of Allah. According to Israel's leading newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, the site, whose name means "The Victor," glorifies death and suicide for God.
In one instance, a caption that appears next to a picture of an animated girl throwing stones at IDF soldiers, reads: "Death for Allah is victory, the victory of the glorified heroes whose names will forever remain in the hearts of millions of Muslims across the world."

The animated figure calls on children surfing the web to enter the site and learn about the lives of "shahids" (martyrs) who "died a hero's death," after massacring Jews.

Another section of the site is dedicated to suicide bombers. Each day the site presents the picture and biography of a different "shahid." A special page on "The Victor" focuses on the story of Hamas' "brave shahid" Nazim Jabary, who carried out a suicide bombing aboard a Be'er Sheva bus in 2004, killing 16 people, including children.

The Islamic Fun! CD-ROM teaches Muslim children about a

...smorgasboard of Islamic. On the surface, bright and breezy, with skillfully executed graphics, offering games constructed to appeal to children. But nestled among the happy tigers, bears and kitty cats is a game called 'The Resistance'... The game's object: 'You are a farmer in South Lebanon who has joined the Islamic Resistance to defend your land and family from the invading zionists.' Players do so by blowing up Israeli tanks.

Zionists aren't the only only targets:

IA principal aim of Islamic Fun! seems to be to instill ancient Islamic resentments in today's youth. As the tiger cavorts among the trees in "Tree Hop," the game asks its players to identify the Mosque of Cordoba from among three inset photos. The accompanying question: "Ignoring the hand over agreement, the Christians turned the beautiful Mosque of Cordoba, in Muslim Spain, into a Cathedral (1238). Which one is it?"

As one might expect, the creators of Islamic Fun! are also zealous for the purity of their religion. Another question takes aim at Turkey, the lodestar of moderate Islam. Picturing three mosques, it asks: "Mustafa Kemal, the hater of Islam, forbade the use of Arabic in Turkey, banned the hijab [head scarf] and closed down the Aya Sofya Mosque in Istanbul. Which is it?"

These ideals are reinforced among the young through games and music CDs of the same ilk are not new and have been widely circulated throughout the Middle East and are for sale in Muslim areas of the West.

Jihad has been defined as a struggle and, there is a struggle among Muslims to struggle to improve one's inner self or as warriors against non-Muslims. The struggle itself is not new:

Osama bin Laden, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the rest are by no means innovators in this "abuse." Islamic warriors, struggling against Christendom for ten centuries, fought under the banner of jihad. Today, the word has been trumpeted by radical Islamic terror groups from Spain to Indonesia - and from within the United States itself. One of the most notorious Palestinian terrorist groups calls itself Islamic Jihad. Its Indonesian counterpart is Laskar Jihad. The extremist Muslim Brotherhood group, which operates clandestinely in Egypt, recently held a demonstration at Cairo's venerable Al-Azhar University in which eight masked men showed off martial arts techniques while wearing headbands proclaiming, "Jihad is our way."

One only has to look at the map generated at theBloody Borders Project to understand which side is winning.

Another (and excellent) take on the Driving of Mr. Reza

This date, we published "Driving While Muslim" on Sixth Column. Fortunately, Mr. Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch published an excellent article about the same Iranian Muslim in Front Page Magazine, which follows:

FrontPage Magazine.com :: Tarheel Jihad by Robert Spencer, March 8, 2006

Last Friday afternoon, a twenty-two-year-old Iranian student named Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar drove an SUV onto the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, deliberately trying to kill people and succeeding in injuring nine. After the incident, he seemed singularly pleased with himself, smiling and waving to crowds after a court appearance on Monday, at which he explained that he was “thankful for the opportunity to spread the will of Allah.”

In a 911 call he made to turn himself in, Taheri-azar said that he wanted to kill people on the UNC campus in order to “punish the government of the United States for their actions around the world.” Specifically, he wanted to “avenge the deaths of Muslims around the world.” According to some who know him Taheri-azar recently gave up his heavy marijuana and alcohol use and became more religiously observant.

Controversy over the incident has so far revolved around the reluctance of officials to label it “terrorism.” On Monday the UNC College Republicans, Americans for an informed Democracy and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies held a demonstration against this at The Pit, the campus gathering area where Taheri-azar ran down students on Friday. Jillian Bandes of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies declared: “This is innocent people being attacked by an SUV, driven by a man who was doing it for retaliation for treatment of Muslims around the world. To me, that spells terrorism.”

Those who shy away from that classification point to the apparent facts that Taheri-azar acted alone, and that he had no ties to any terrorist groups. He doesn’t even seem to have been a member of the local chapter of the Muslim Students Association, which said that he was not a member and added in a statement: “Regardless of what his intentions prove to be, we wholeheartedly deplore this action, and trust that our fellow classmates will be able to dissociate the actions of this one disturbed individual from the beliefs of the Muslim community as a whole.”

Nevertheless, it seems clear from his own words that Islam motivated Taheri-azar. The question of whether or not he was a terrorist hinges on several false assumptions that have led to widespread misconceptions. Many seem to assume that someone who struck alone and has no ties to terror groups is just a lone nut, a John Hinckley, and as such his actions need not be fit into a larger pattern. But in fact, we face today not so much a matter of organized crime, but of ideology. A single individual can act upon that ideology as easily as a group can. Thus it matters less that Taheri-azar was not a member of a terrorist organization than that he at some point came to hold the belief that to kill people would “spread the will of Allah.”

Investigators should be focusing on that ideology as much as they are on other details of the crime. It is not outside the realm of possibility that he heard praise of such actions in a local mosque; after all, on the same day the College Republicans
and their allies were demonstrating in The Pit, the New York Times ran one segment of a laudatory multi-part series profiling Brooklyn imam Reda Shata -- which noted that when the murderous Hamas leader Ahmed Yassin was killed, Shata told Muslims at a memorial service that a “lion of Palestine has been martyred.” He also praised suicide bomber Reem Al-Reyashi. The Times dismisses this as Shata’s zeal for what he believes is a just cause, reassuring its readers that Shata doesn’t hate Jews, and even has friends among New York rabbis. Nonetheless, his support for Yassin, who oversaw and glorified the murders of numerous Israeli civilians, raises nagging questions. If one can justify such attacks in one context, one can in another. If Shata can praise one who sponsored attacks against Israeli civilians because of the alleged enormities of the Israelis, cannot Taheri-azar justify attacks against American civilians because of the alleged enormities of the United States government? And if support for such attacks can be preached and believed in New York, can it not be preached and believed in North Carolina?

Of course, in his mosque in North Carolina Taheri-azar may not have heard anything like what Reda Shata preached in New York. He could have picked up the ideology on his own -- the ideology of Islamic jihad and the permissibility of violence against any and all unbelievers who are considered enemies of Islam. The fact that that ideology has not been identified as the fundamental enemy of the United States and the Western world in general is the single gravest omission and failure of the war on terror up to this point. Law enforcement officials should be calling upon American mosque leaders like Reda Shata to declare their loyalties on this basis. They should be calling upon imams to preach against this ideology -- to conduct seminars for adults and children, ongoing classes, and other organized programs to combat it.

Religious freedom? Not an issue. Muslims should be perfectly free to worship and live as Muslims unless and until they begin to preach or act upon the idea that the United States Constitution should ultimately be replaced by Islamic Sharia. Then they have placed themselves outside the bounds of the legal protection offered by those sworn to uphold that Constitution. Self-proclaimed moderate Muslims should be asked to demonstrate their moderation by initiating and leading an active campaign among Muslims against the jihad ideology in all its forms. This will include inculcating the idea that non-Muslims and Muslims should coexist as equal citizens in society, without any aspiration for Islamic supremacism in the future. It should also include active repudiation of the idea that killing or trying to kill innocent people --or even civilian non-combatants whom one considers to be part of a war machine --does not spread the will of Allah.

It is unlikely that any such programs will ever be implemented in American mosques. There is no impetus from within those mosques to do so, and no one in government or law enforcement is putting any pressure upon Muslim leaders in America to do so. Whether Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar learned the ideology of violent jihad at a mosque or on his own, there is one clear lesson to be learned from American Muslims’ failure to combat that ideology in any effective or meaningful way: before this particular age of jihad draws to a close, there will be many more Mohammed Reza Taheri-azars.

China's Reverse Marshall Plan

Very troubling:

Today, China operates a reverse Marshall Plan. To help sustain its massive exports to the United States, it recycles the resulting dollar inflow in the form of loans and asset purchases. Here, the developing nation lends to the developed: money flows in the reverse direction.

As of last December (2005), Chinese net holdings of US securities were US$810 billion. Huge Chinese trade surpluses with the US are turned into dollar holdings - lent back to consumers and the government to enable the continuation of trade and development. More than half of China's 2005 $200-billion-plus trade surplus with the United States resulted from exports by US-based multinational corporations (MNCs). Leading US firms are interested in maintaining this relationship alongside Chinese business and state authorities. Massive rural to urban migration in China and pressure for employment opportunity is partially absorbed through this channel.

Inside China, industrialization and near or above double-digit GDP growth are greatly assisted by the massive inflows of foreign capital, technology and expertise. In sector after sector, production has moved to China from elsewhere, increasing employment, gross domestic product and political stability. The export revenues of China-based enterprises sustain the wage and profit incomes that generate tax revenues for the Chinese government to recycle into dollars. Chinese dollar loans to the US maintain the dollar exchange rate necessary for the exports to continue.

Observers, inside and outside of China, have expressed concerns about accumulating debt, much as Marshall Plan critics once did. Many focus on China's vulnerability from accumulating such a large amount of US assets; others fret over the extent of US asset sales. The US may not be able to repay fully or in a timely fashion; or it may take actions to reduce the value of the debt that will be costly for China.

Such concerns miss a key point: they repeat the error of those concerned about the repayment of Marshall Plan debt. Whether or not liabilities are ever fully honored, China's reverse Marshall Plan is central to the stunningly fast and broad-based industrialization of select areas of its economy. Increasingly modern industrial infrastructure and productive capacity are catapulting China to the front ranks of the world economy. That achievement is infinitely more important and positive than any unpaid debts that may emerge. US MNCs have also benefited from falling production costs and new competitiveness, as recent levels of Fortune 500 profits make very clear.

The deepening dependence of US enterprise profitability on the Chinese economy has only begun to yield its economic and political dividends for China, which will likely outshine the comparable dividends to the US economy. Labor productivity numbers rise as imported components rise in quality and fall in price. Lower costs allow access to global markets populated by hundreds of millions of people with modest incomes. At the same time, firms producing inside the United States reap greater profits because they can pay their workers relatively lower wages, knowing that those workers can buy cheap goods imported from China - think Wal-Mart.

Thus it follows that the US depends now on China's reverse Marshall Plan much as Europe after the war depended on the original. The future will likely show the great historical importance of China's reverse Marshall Plan.

In economic terms, what exactly is labor? Like oil and capital, labor, or labor productivity is a resource to be exploited:

Since according to monetary economics, market value, which is expressed as price, needs to remain stable to prevent inflation, labor productivity in financial terms can only be increased with declining wages per unit of capital. Further, price competition for market share directly depresses wages. Even if wages can at times rise in monetary terms, the ratio of wages to the market value of production must constantly fall in order for increased labor productivity to be monetized as profit. Thus profits from trade under this flawed definition of productivity ultimately can only be derived from falling wages.

The rise of MNC's, multinational corporations or transnational corporations, has created a situation in which the U.S. worker is now in direct competition with workers in other parts of the world. The leveling effect of labor seems to be the effect.

today's allegedly free market in effect deprives labor of any pricing power over its market value. Since capitalism does not recognize any ceiling for fair profit, always celebrating the tenet of "the more the merrier", it must by implication oppose any floor for fair wages, to validate the opposite tenet of "the lower the merrier". The terms of global trade, then, are based on seeking the lowest wages for the highest profit, rather than fair wages for fair profit. This is the linkage between neo-liberal capitalistic globalization and wage arbitrage, both in the domestic labor market and across national borders. Yet in a consumer-based global market economy, low wages lead directly to overcapacity, because consumer demand depends on high wages. The adverse effect on consumer demand from the quest for maximum profit is the critical internal contradiction of the deregulated capitalistic market economy.

Capital is free to move across the world. What about labor? "...obdurate immobility of workers across national borders continues to be maintained through government restrictions on immigration."

Free-trade advocates, from Adam Smith (1723-90) to David Ricardo (1772-1823), in considering the relationship between capital and labor, treat mobility disparity between capital and labor as a natural state, never entertaining that it is a pure political indiosyncrasy. This 'natural' immobility of labor might have been reality in the 18th century, but is no longer natural in the jet-age global economy of the 21st century in which mobility has become a natural characteristic. Labor immobility deprives labor of pricing power in a global market by preventing workers from going where they are needed most and where market wages are highest, while capital is free to go where it is needed most and return on investment is highest. This econo-polilitical regime against labor mobility, coupled with unrestrained cross-border mobility of capital, maintains a location-bound wage disparity that has created profit opportunities for cross-border wage arbitrage, in a downward spiral for all wages everywhere.

Alan Greenspan said:

Aggregate demand is putting very significant pressures on an ever-decreasing available supply of unemployed labor. The one obvious means that one can use to offset that is expanding the number of people we allow in. Reviewing our immigration laws in the context of the type of economy which we will be enjoying in the decade ahead is clearly on the table, in my judgment.

Could this be a reason why the U.S. borders remain wide open and why certain labor policies have been instituted?

Here's down and dirty of the past few decades:

Agricultural growers in the US had hoped to increase the number of immigrant farm workers by attaching a provision in their interest to the highly favored high-technology industry's legislation to increase the number of high-tech immigrant workers. In 2000, high-tech-immigration legislation seemed likely to pass Congress until the administration of president Bill Clinton began attaching legislative riders that would give Latin American refugees legal permanent residency. In addition, the Clinton administration wanted to grant amnesty to a large number of illegal immigrants, most of whom were Hispanics. This political maneuvering stopped the pending high-tech legislation dead in its tracks because Republicans feared that the Democrats were attaching such legislative riders to gain support from the large number of Hispanic voters.

The shortage of high-tech workers forced the industry to move operations overseas, at first not to save money on wages, but to find available workers. The labor unions reacted to immigration with traditional phobia, viewing it as a development that would keep wages low, rather than as a new source for reversing the steady decline in membership. Yet employment data showed that high-tech immigrant workers did not lower wages during the high-tech boom in the US. What eventually did lower high-tech wages in the US was overcapacity resulting from overinvestment caused by excessive debt and inadequate consumer demand resulting from stagnant wages. After its collapse, the US high-tech sector recovered by outsourcing manufacturing jobs to low-wage countries, leaving consumer demand to be sustained by an expanding debt-driven asset bubble.

Be sure to be sitting down when you read the rest of this article and the other three of the series.

Petition for TakeBacktheMemorial.org

Folks,

Most of us have heard about the proposed construction of a memorial at Ground Zero to honor the victims of 9/11.

There are problems, though, and you can help by signing a petitition in support of the Take Back the Memorial effort, first organized by Debra Burlingame, the sister of one of the pilots whose plane was taken over and flown into the Towers.

You may also remember that a George Soros-backed plan for the Memorial site allowed the purpose to shift from simply honoring the victims to one that included a museum of anti-American sentiment where the role of the U.S. in the history of freedom was given a 180 and then attacked - a classic "straw-man" procedure. Any support any of us can give this group is going to a good purpose!

Here's the e-mail I got this morning. I have already signed it, and by the time I completed my comment, about 30 other people had also signed it (over 1500 at the time).

All emphases are mine.


Dear Supporter,

The LMDC has obtained a waiver that makes the construction of the 9/11 Memorial and Memorial Museum exempt from NY City and State fire and building codes in favor of the codes established by the Port Authority.We believe that this exemption has the potential to create a dangerous situation for the millions of visitors to ground zero in the future. We therefore support the following petition to rescind this exemption and force the LMDC to follow state and city building and fire codes at ground zero and we ask that you support this effort as well by signing the petition.

PETITION

To U.S. Congress: Plans are currently underway to begin construction at Ground Zero. These plans include an underground Memorial to be placed in the area that was bombed in 1993. The plans also make the new buildings exempt from NYC Building and Fire codes. The reason for this exemption is that the site is governed by the Port Authority.

The design of the original towers has already proven that Port Authority regulations fall well short of the NYC guidelines. Repeated requests to review the Port Authority codes have gone unanswered. The fact that they have gone from stating that their codes are stricter than the NYC codes to their new position that they will follow the stricter NYC codes goes to prove that we cannot rely on their commitment. Even if they say they will follow the NYC codes because of their exemptions they will not be open to NYC Building or Fire inspections nor will they be liable for any violations.

Being that this is the only United States location to be subject to multiple terrorist attacks (2 in reality or 3 for insurance purposes) we feel that any new construction should be governed by the most stringent building and fire codes. Since the FDNY will be responsible to answer any future call to the site they should be assured that the new construction follows codes with which they are familiar. Since an Act of Congress created the Port Authority an Act of Congress is needed to rectify this situation. We ask that you act immediately to follow the wishes of the 9/11 families, most of the uniformed unions and a majority of Americans to eliminate the Port Authority exemptions at Ground Zero.

We also ask that the current underground location of the memorial be removed from the plan. Besides the safety issues inherent in the underground plan we do not feel that we should have to travel into a cavernous tomb to honor our lost loved ones. The memorial needs to see the light of day and be built with codes that will assure the safety of its occupants.

We call on you to immediately enact legislation to make this a reality.To sign the petition to rescind this exemption from NY State and City fire and building codes, please click here (http://www.petitiononline.com/WTT2006/petition.html).

Sincerely,Take Back the MemorialNOTE: This petition is not put forth or organized by Take Back the Memorial nor any of the members of the 9/11 Family Member Coalition groups. --To unsubscribe from t