The Rule of Reason

"Strike" One

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 03:03:00 +0000

The voluntary “blackout” of Wikipedia and other major Internet sites on January 18th in protest of the proposed SOPA/PIPA legislation in Congress had Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged written all over it. It’s likely that these sites’ owners even disdain Rand and her philosophy of reason and individual rights, but, there it was. They heard the wolf packs baying in the distance and coming closer, and took action. Here’s your world without us or our minds and our services. That was the message of the novel and of the blackout.

Moreover, the blackout had consequences. It forced the sponsors and advocates of the legislation to think twice about passing it. Can you imagine what might have happened if doctors had gone on a one-day strike before ObamaCare was passed? Possibly Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid would have demanded that National Guard SWAT teams be called up to force doctors to return to their hospitals and clinics. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. There was no strike. That would have revealed the true nature of ObamaCare. It could possibly have delayed or aborted passage of that pernicious legislation. And Vice President Joe Biden would have instead exclaimed, “What’s the big *%#!* deal???”

SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act, House Bill 3261), and PIPA (Protect IP Act, Senate Bill 968) were condemned for two main reasons: the congressmen who drew up the legislation revealed a fatal ignorance of how the Internet works and so were proposing to hand government bureaucrats and law enforcement agencies the power to control its content, rendering the legislation ill-conceived and utterly impotent to combat the piracy of movies, music and even copyrighted written content; or because it would indeed empower the government to police the Internet, ostensibly to protect copyrights and intellectual property, but actually to control content and silence opposition to government policies at the behest of whatever lobby, group, or person had influence over Congress.

Some “strikers” and pundits opposed the legislation for technical reasons, citing the confusing language of the legislation. You can’t start a car without a solenoid, they were saying. It’s really very simple. The car can’t be stolen by pirates either if you remove the solenoid. That means the thieves would have to stop and strip or vandalize the car, giving you enough time to call the cops and see them arrested. Or they could bring their own solenoids, usually stolen from an auto parts store. What you’re proposing is that the guy who buys a used car not knowing it was stolen is a party to the theft, and you’d arrest him and let the thieves go free. That’s not really fighting car-theft, is it? – you cretins.

And your rules would crush the whole used-car market, in which the majority of used car sales are legitimate, but no one would want to risk selling or buying a used car because anyone could claim his car was stolen, even though it might have sat on the lot for ages. So, we refuse to be the patsies and fall guys of bureaucrats and other government knowledge “managers.”

An article by Derek Broes in Forbes on January 20th, “Why Should You Fear SOPA and PIPA?” cuts to the chase. After posing the rhetorical question, “What’s so bad about trying to protect movies and music from being pirated?” Broes notes:

The birth of SOPA and PIPA has been established through the efforts of the lobbying arms of the studios and labels The MPAA and RIAA. SOPA or (Stop Online Piracy Act) is in the Senate and PIPA, or (Protect Intellectual Property Act) is in the House [sic]. Both bills are essentially the ‘same wolf in sheep’s clothing’ so there is really no need to try and differentiate.

If passed, SOPA and/or PIPA will give the Justice Department the ability to shut down almost any blog or website at will, PLUS it will also do absolutely nothing to stop those that pirate movies or music.

Today the studios and labels rely on DMCA take down notices to handle piracy on websites such as YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook. The DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) allows the website to take down the content within a specific period of time after receiving a DMCA notice without penalty.

Broes has the venues of the legislation backwards, but adds that in “most cases all of the companies mentioned above do a fantastic job, and thus far have not done too much complaining about the costs of implementing technology and resources for a successful DMCA compliance structure.” He then wades into the complexities of the Internet and how piracy is practiced on it. This article should be read for the “solenoid” details to better understand how piracy is possible and why SOPA and PIPA would not actually stop it.

If the government, and those behind government, didn’t like Huffington Post or Breitbart.com it would now be legally plausible and simple to shut them down. After all, Huffington Post editors at some point in time have posted links to content from CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and other organizations. These networks could now claim that the Huffington Post was infringing upon their copyrights, and that Huffington editors, under SOPA/PIPA, be charged for each offense and go to jail. Yes jail.

“That would never happen” a friend of mine that works at a major studio told me. My response to him was simple. “I have never known a law that gives the government more power that they have not only used but exceeded the law’s intent to gain even more power.”

Broes concludes:

SOPA and PIPA are dangerous, half-baked solutions that will cost millions of jobs, stifle innovation and ultimately do nothing to stop piracy at all. It [sic] could be used as a solution for those in Government that seek to silence their opposition, even if that was never the intention. Hollywood has many large donors that are huge contributors to Obama so, even though Harry Reid postponed a vote on the bill, you can bet that they will try to wait for the frenzy to calm down before voting on a somewhat different version of the bill and most likely have a different name than SOPA or PIPA. After all, those names are as about as unpopular as members of Congress right now.

And who would be the Alpha Male wolf leading the pack? Cass Sunstein, administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) and regulatory “czar.”

Alec Rawls in an article on the “Watts Up With That” anti-climate change site, “Regulatory Czar wants to use copyright protection mechanisms to shut down rumors and conspiracy theories” (January 20th), also gets down to brass tacks and opens with:

As Congress considers vastly expanding the power of copyright holders to shut down fair use of their intellectual property, this is a good time to remember the other activities that Obama’s “regulatory czar” Cass Sunstein wants to shut down using the tools of copyright protection. For a couple of years now, Sunstein has been advocating that the “notice and take down” model from copyright law should be used against rumors and conspiracy theories, “to achieve the optimal chilling effect.”

What kinds of conspiracy theories does Sunstein want to suppress by law? Here’s one:
… that the theory of global warming is a deliberate fraud. [From page 4 of Sunstein's 2008 “Conspiracy Theories” paper.] [Italics Rawls’]

What an odd but cruel metaphor for Sunstein to employ – chilling effect – when advocating the gagging of critics of global warming. Yet Sunstein means it. Rawls poses a real life conundrum:

Suppose you are a simple public-spirited blogger, trying to expose how Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Tom Wigley, and other Team members conspire to suppress the research and destroy the careers of those who challenge their consensus views. If Sunstein gets his way, Team members will only have to issue you a takedown notice, and if you want your post to stay up, you’ll have to go to court and win a judgment that your version of events is correct.

Sunstein is for government information “management” of men, to combat what he cynically deems “rumors and conspiracy theories,” that is, truth or the search for truth. He views men as mere sociological units and passive receptors of sense data which their “bias” translates into subjective interpretations of reality. Nothing that men know, that is, men who are not in power to enforce their own subjectivity, has any validity. Reality is unknowable. The peace and quiet of society must be preserved at all costs, even if it means tearing out the tongues of men or addling their minds with “preferred” or "official" truths.

If men sense that they are being tracked by wolf packs – if they sense that a government or president is preying upon their freedom, their wealth, their livelihoods, their lives – then this is simply a group “bias” or a psychosis that the government must combat with knowledge manipulation. Rawls writes:

The path from Sunstein’s 2008 “Conspiracy Theories”” article to his 2009 On Rumors book is straightforward. According to Sunstein’s 2008 definition, a conspiracy theory is very close to a potentially libelous rumor:

… a conspiracy theory can generally be counted as such if it is an effort to explain some event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role. [Abstract]

At this time, Sunstein’s “main policy idea” was that:

government should engage in cognitive infiltration of the groups that produce conspiracy theories….

… government agents or their allies (acting either virtually or in real space, and either openly or anonymously) will undermine the crippled epistemology of those who subscribe to such theories. ["Conspiracy Theories," pages 14-15] [Italics Rawls']

Sunstein wrote in On Rumors:

“….[R]umors [or conspiracy theories] often arise and gain traction because they fit with, and support, the prior convictions of those who accept them. Some people and some groups are predisposed to accept certain rumors, because those rumors are compatible with what they think they know to be true.” [p. 6]

So, if your conviction is that your life is your own, and you notice that various regulatory “czars” assert otherwise, that you must live for the good of the nation and sacrifice yourself to penury, and defer to elitist society managers before you buy a can of soup or light a cigarette or purchase a pair of shoes, and you conclude, with others who hold and share the same conviction, that the government is encroaching on every little aspect of your life and that this enveloping trend seems to be a conspiracy – well, SOPA or PIPA would allow the government to send in its “infiltrators” to set your mind straight. Or perhaps an ATF or DHS SWAT team for a more visceral persuasion, if you persist in your delusion that the government is intent on enslaving you.

Picture a worst case scenario under SOPA or PIPA: The Council on American-Islamic Relations, or the Islamic Circle of America, or the Muslim Public Affairs Council filing a complaint with the government about “rumors and conspiracy theories” being posted on Jihad Watch or The Middle East Forum, and demanding that these sites be taken down as defamatory and disrespectful and malicious, even though all these sites do is report on the crimes committed in the name of Islam and the stealth jihad conquest of the country. Or imagine Ron Paul wishing to have his weird foreign policy statements expunged from the Internet record so that no one could judge him by those statements.

Imagine the doors to all kinds of knowledge shut in your face because Cass Sunstein has diagnosed you as nuts.

Do not be fooled by the ubiquitous photo of a smiling Cass Sunstein. He is a totalitarian of the first rank. But while he is only one of dozens of such creatures in the current administration, SOPA and/or PIPA would empower him to impose his vision of an ideal society

Another website, “Cloud Tweaks,” carries an article by Jeff Norman on the intricacies of “cloud computing” and the inherent dangers of SOPA and PIPA.

Understandably, many would-be cloud users might be warded off by fear of a federal shakedown. Businesses should also be concerned, since their employees might choose to store important information in cloud sites that might be dismantled and rid of their data.

The SOPA/PIPA affair has not concluded by any means. Both Craigslist and Wikipedia warn their users that the bills will continue to lurk in Congress’ shadows, perhaps to eventually resurface in a revamped and less easily overpowered form.

Let us concretize the peril and the stakes this way: the Internet enabled me to research and write this article in record time – one day – whereas in the past researching and writing such an article may have taken me a week. But all the research capabilities were there, thanks to protected IP’s and the skill and knowledge of those “providers” (too frequently regarded by regulators and a mooching public as “common carriers”). Yes, there are pirates who exploit the Internet, but they need to be combated with objective law, and not by slapdash legislation drawn up by men with faulty and fatal grasps of how and why the Internet works.

Finally, a great lesson is being overlooked even by those who welcome Congress’s second thoughts about SOPA and PIPA. The Internet blackout proved, perhaps more than the Tea Party movement ever put Congress on notice that Americans were tired of its juggernaut to national insolvency and socialism, that power-lusters and their abettors can be stopped cold. On January 23rd, PC World reported:

By the time the week was over, dozens of lawmakers had abandoned the two bills or voiced opposition, and a cloture vote on PIPA scheduled for this Tuesday in the Senate was delayed as lawmakers try to find a compromise. In the House, Representative Lamar Smith, the lead SOPA sponsor and Texas Republican, killed his bill.

And that was “Strike One” against statism. Who will throw the next pitch at Congress and the White House? Who will emulate John Galt? Doctors, or oil companies?

Objectivist Round-Up

noreply@blogger.com (Nicholas Provenzo) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 15:39:00 +0000

Welcome to the January 12th, 2012 edition of the Objectivist Round-Up. This week presents insight and analyses written by authors who are animated by Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand. According to Ayn Rand:

My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

"About the Author," Atlas Shrugged, Appendix.

So without any further delay (and in no particular order), here's this week's round-up:

Keith Weiner presents Inflation: an Expansion of Counterfeit Credit posted at keithweiner's posterous, saying, "One of the most important topics of our era, and the proper concept of "inflation"."
Joseph Kellard presents Book Review: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson posted at The American Individualist, saying, "My review of Walter Isaacson’s biography on Steve Jobs."

Diana Hsieh presents Video: Tenacity in Pursuit of Goals posted at NoodleFood, saying, "In Sunday's webcast, I discussed how to be tenacious in pursuit of your goals. Check out the video!"

Darius Cooper presents US "Entitlement" programs - Impact on debt posted at Practice Good Theory, saying, "I examine Federal liabilities for Social Security and Medicare."

Edward Cline presents Rivals for Your Life: Religious Conservatives vs. Islam posted at The Rule of Reason, saying, "Conflicts between mere beliefs – beliefs without evidence of what is believed, beliefs based on the unknowable, beliefs based on the whim or emotion that “I just want it to be so” – have led and will continue to lead to horrific warfare in which force determines the victor and the outcome without really settling the question of whose God was greater."

Paul Hsieh presents The Truth About RomneyCare posted at We Stand FIRM, saying, "My latest PJMedia OpEd rebuts Romney's deceptive claim that his Massachusetts health plan didn't impose price controls. And what similar price controls under ObamaCare will mean for residents of the other 49 states."

Santiago and Kelly Valenzuela presents Movie Recommendation - The Artist posted at Mother of Exiles, saying, "My brief comments about a wonderful new movie and a link to the trailer."

Kelly Elmore presents Reepicheep's Coracle: Things I Learned on My Travels Aside from the Order of Succession of the Monarchy posted at Reepicheep's Coracle, saying, "This post is a tongue-in-cheek catalog of lessons learned traveling in England, from the value of solo-travel to the uselessness of hotel reviews to complaints about spousal train negotiation."

John Drake presents Tenacity in Goal Pursuit posted at Try Reason!, saying, "Diana Hsieh's excellent Philosoph in Action video about tenacity in the pursuit of goals inspired me with some futher observations. See the video, read my comments, and get cracking on those goals!"

Jenn Casey presents Progress on my Goals posted at Rational Jenn, saying, "Off to a great start in 2012!"

* * *

That concludes this edition of the round-up. Submit your blog article to the next edition of Objectivist round-up using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

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objectivist round up, blog carnival.

Rivals for Your Life: Religious Conservatives vs. Islam

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 21:56:00 +0000

“If you, as a servant of your god, must use one hundred thousand warriors to destroy me, a solitary servant of my God, then you whisper to me, Muhammed Ahmed, who will be remembered from Khartoum: your god or mine?”

— General Charles Gordon to the Mahdi in Khartoum (1966). Writer, Robert Ardey

In April 2009 I noted in a column, “The Irrelevancy of Conservatism,” which was devoted to examining why conservatives and the Left hated novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand, that

Rand herself marked the malaise of conservatism in 1962 in her essay, “Conservatism: An Obituary.” Identifying why conservatism was finished as a distinct political ideology and political force, she wrote:

“If the ‘conservatives’ do not stand for capitalism, they stand for and are nothing; they have no goal, no direction, no political principles, no social ideals, no intellectual values, no leadership to offer anyone. Yet capitalism is what the ‘conservatives’ dare not advocate or defend. They are paralyzed by the profound conflict between capitalism and the moral code which dominates our culture: altruism.”

More importantly, however, the article reveals that conservatives are afraid that men are realizing that Ayn Rand is fundamentally relevant to today’s political, moral and economic crises, and that they, the conservatives, have grown irrelevant. The “transcendent order” of Russell Kirk (1918-1994), cited by [William R.] Hawkins as a source of moral and political wisdom, was based “variously on tradition, divine revelation, or natural law,” but has made way for the “transcendent order” of the brute collectivism of the state, to which Americans are more and more expected to defer.

“What should really agitate the public is not the principle of government intervention to prevent an economic collapse, but how the politicians have seized the opportunity to spend huge sums on non-emergency, special interest programs.”

And what is the wisdom of conservatives? It is the “dean of conservative thinking” Russell Kirk’s, which the reader may sample here, beginning with:

“….Conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order.”

So it is an anti-ideology, or a set of “sentiments” and non-ideas, or a “state of mind” which is supposed to animate anyone to try to dam the advancing, liberty-destroying lava of statism. Hawkins offers his conservative credentials in this outburst:

“The most alarming sign that the anarchists are trying to take over the Tea Party movement is the sudden revival of the amoral and anti-social screeds of the late and unlamented Ayn Rand. Her name has been bantered around far too often on talk radio and by Fox News commentators.”

Hawkins should wonder why her name is so frequently “bantered around,” and not [William F.] Buckley’s or Russell Kirk’s. Perhaps it is because men are searching for answers and ideas, Rand has had them for decades, and answers and ideas are not to be found in conservatism. He should also learn that Rand was neither an anarchist nor a libertarian.

As if to underscore the religious, anti-reason color of conservatism, Hawkins manages to introduce Original Sin as an ingredient of the financial crisis:

“True conservatives know the character of Mankind is ’fallen’ and that there is a dark side to human nature to which bankers and fund managers are just as vulnerable as anyone else. Freedom without responsibility, and rights without duties, leads to license and wrong-doing.”

I ask here, almost three years later: What responsibilities? What duties? Hawkins names none. And why are rights contingent on meeting and fulfilling them? True conservatives, however, speak for themselves. Only they know how far they have “fallen” and are more acquainted with the dark side of their “souls” than they should wish anyone else to be.

Premises have a way of percolating to the top sooner or later. This is the case with conservatism, specifically religious conservatism. There is secular conservatism, which is more a species of pragmatism than it is of principled ideology. Capitalism “works.” A modicum of freedom “works.” (But not “too much” of either.) And there is religious conservatism, which is a marriage of pragmatism and faith, otherwise known as “social conservatism.”

Republican Presidential candidate Rick Santorum gave us an idea of what it means to be a “social conservative.” The Blaze offers the low-down on Santorum and explodes the notion that he is against “big government.”

Today, Santorum tells voters that Medicare is “crushing” the “entire health care system.” In 2003, Santorum voted for the Medicare drug entitlement that costs taxpayers more than $60 billion a year and almost $16 trillion in unfunded liabilities. Santorum voted for the 2005 “bridge to nowhere” bill and was an earmark enthusiast his entire career.

These days, Santorum regularly joins a chorus of voices claiming that he would greatly reduce the role of federal government in local education. When he had a say, he supported No Child Left Behind and expanded the federal control of school systems. In his book, in fact, Santorum advocates dictating a certain curriculum to all schools. The right kind. It’s not the authority of government that irks him, but rather the content of the material Washington is peddling today.[Italics mine.]

There is no reason that candidate Mitt Romney is any different. He’s a social conservative, too. What is it that social conservatives want to “conserve”? “Traditional” values and big government as our shepherd and arbiter of those values. Hardly an ideology.

The fundamental obstacle for conservatives to understanding the pernicious influence of altruism is precisely their altruist premises. They will not question those premises. To question them is to question the role of government as a proactive agent for altruism as an apology for freedom and capitalism. The history of conservatism, especially in the 20th century, bears out the truth of this contention.

The Left allies itself with Islam because of shared totalitarian yearnings and ends.

Religious conservatives, however, oppose Islam basically because it is a rival creed, a “competing faith.” It is not a turn-the-other-cheek creed. It advocates throwing stones, lots of stones, in the form of real rocks and passenger jets and arsonist’s torches. The quotation from Khartoum that precedes this column may be taken as evidence of that fear, although Charlton Heston’s Gordon, speaking with conviction to Laurence Olivier as the Mahdi, doesn’t seem particularly fearful. But after his first fictive meeting with the Mahdi, he confesses to an aide:

"I seem to have suffered the illusion that I have a monopoly on God."

Perhaps that’s why conservatives hate Islam. Let’s look at the “Five Pillars of Islam”:

Allah is the only God and Mohammad his prophet (shahada)
The Haj (or pilgrimage to Mecca)
Prayer five times a day (sala)
The giving of alms (zaka)
Ramadan (saum, month-long fasting)

We are all now familiar with the unnamed “sixth” pillar of Islam: Jihad.

What are the parallel pillars of the Christian faith? The Christian God is the only God. To some Christians, Allah is an apostate, or Satan himself; to others, he’s just another “false idol” with peculiar habits. A one-time trip to Vatican City to hear the Pope give his Easter sermon can be taken as the Christian Haj. I don’t think other Christian denominations have a similar obligatory pilgrimage to make. Prayer five times a day isn’t required of Christians, although I’m certain many pray every day before meals and participating in sports events and the like. Charity is also a major altruistic practice in Christianity; in fact, it’s regarded as a key virtue. Lent is the Christian Ramadan.

Jihad? The only modern equivalents have been the missionary “outreaches” of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and the modern versions. These, however, have never entailed violence against pagans or infidels or native populations. The Spaniards, however, took along priests to convert South American Indians to Christianity as sanctifying baggage in their quest for gold, and there were the religious wars of Europe.

So, the similarities are there. An interesting site, “Theological differences between Islam and Christianity,” features a précis on the doctrinal differences between Christianity, Judaism, and Islam:

The faith of Muslims is based on the works of accomplishing the five pillars of Islam. Christianity, on the contrary, it based on faith that people can be freed from their sin[s] by the blood of Christ Jesus.

Most Arabs are Muslim, but most Muslims are not Arabs. There are millions of followers who are of Persian and Asian descent. Arabs came from the line of Ishmael (the half brother of Isaac - father of the Jews). However, descendants of Ishmael were a nomadic people who intermarried with the Midianites (Judges 8:1, 12, 22, 24) and others, while the Hebrews largely avoided a racial mix. After Islam violently imposed its doctrines on the Arab world, Muslim men were permitted to take wives of any faith in order to raise the children in Islam. (Muslim women were [and still are] obligated to marry only Muslim men.)

Those who practice the "Five Pillars" of Islam worship a god named Allah, who was the chief god of the Quraish tribe that controlled Mecca. This god was selected by Mohammad from among the 300 plus idols honored at the Ka’aba, and Muhammed tried to modify his moon god to become the God of Abraham. The symbol of this moon god, Allah, is known as the crescent symbol of Islam. Conversely, the Christian god revealed Himself to Moses as "Yahweh" (Exodus 3:14-16). In the Torah and in the Koran, Allah and Yahweh speak in the third person plural, yet both Judaism and Islam dogmatically proclaim their god to be singular. ("Hear Oh Israel, the Lord your God is One God" Deut. 6:4) As Christianity branched off of Judaism, they saw this as additional evidence for the Trinity.

All varieties of Christianity are founded on saving one’s soul, or on personal salvation, and the different denominations encourage or prescribe various degrees of ardor to that end. This does not necessarily entail, either, going on a homicidal rampage.

Christianity, on the other hand, follows the Lord God of Israel. Christians believe that God sent His Son to Earth to be the atonement for sin….[A]ll a person needs to do is accept the forgiveness of Jesus Christ. The Great Commission to all Christians states, “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age." Matthew 28:18-20, NKJV.

Personal salvation in Islam, however, is as bloody-minded as one can imagine.

Muhammed specified that God does not have a son. Because of this, there is no redemption from sin in Islam. Salvation comes by works which never carry an assurance of being good enough unless one were to die for Allah as a suicide bomber or die killing infidels in battle. "If you should die or be killed in the cause of Allah, His mercy and forgiveness would surely be better than all they riches they amass. If you should die or be killed, before Him you shall all be gathered" (Sura 3:157-8). "Those who are slain in the way of Allah - he will never let their deeds be lost. Soon will he guide them and improve their condition, and admit them to the Garden, which he has announced for them" (Sura 47:5).

Another religious site, “Yahweh (the God of the Bible) vs. Allah (the god of the Koran),” stresses these differences between Christianity and Islam (comments in brackets are mine):

(A) Allah is distant and unknowable. The God of the Bible is close and personal.
(B) Allah does not love every person; Yahweh [God’s moniker in the Old Testament] does love every person. [Although he did have his temper tantrums and could be maliciously capricious, causing plagues of locusts, deaths of first-borns, turning wives into pillars of salt, the Tower of Babble, and so on. This is the “tough love” of a psychotic, and differs little from Allah’s behavior.]
(C) Allah did not, would not, and will not die for you, nor would he ever send anyone to do so [Allah did not have a son]. But the God of the Bible loves you so much He sent His one and only Son to die for you. And He stands ready to grant you everlasting life if you will receive Him by faith. [Islam, or “submission,” by any other name.]

Both Christian conservatives in America and Islamic fundamentalists seem to hate gays, hold traditionally non-Progressive old school conservative ideologies, demean women, and are guided in their lifestyle and thinking by their basic doctrinal texts, i.e., the Bible and Koran. Which, condensed, means adhering to an old time religion, because it requires nothing more than faith and credulity.

We can understand the animosity held by Islam for Christianity. The Koran is very clear about what to do about the “People of the Book” – slay, subjugate, or convert them if they don’t accept the Koran as God’s final word and Mohammad as the last and most important prophet. Islam is the youngest of the three major faiths and much of its doctrine was cadged from Christian and Jewish scripture – with much tongue-in-cheek inventiveness over the centuries. And Islam does not so much fear Christianity as hates it and intends to eradicate it.

But why do especially Christian conservatives hate and fear Islam? When one reads the comments on the latest Islamic depredation or instance of taqiyya on sites such as Jihad Watch or Atlas Shrugs, a fair percentage of the readers feel obligated to bring God into the discussion. Their ardor is virtually palpable, and any deprecatory remark made by an atheist about Christianity or God usually provokes outrage and posses form. There is a clinical or sociological term for such mob behavior: majority syncing bias.

Because most of Christian doctrine is founded on the life, homilies, and travails of Jesus Christ, possibly that fear and hatred of Islam are based on the secondary status that Islam accords Christ, as a mere prophet, not a “son of God.” Islam claims he was sent to earth by Allah to advance the cause of Islam. In fact, Islam contends that Christ was never crucified, but simply “raised up to Him.”

“Islam and the People of the Book,” by Anwar Shaikh, provides a very simple explanation that supports this contention:

Of course, the Koran treats Jesus as a Prophet of God and confirms that he had been given the power to perform miracles but it defies the Christian fundamentals. For example, it refutes the doctrine of Crucifixion, which holds that God made His Son the Sacrificial Lamb to carry away the people's burdens of sin:

"...for their saying, We slew the Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, the Messenger of God. Yet they did not slay him, neither crucified him, only a likeness of that was shown them... God raised him up to Him..." (IV - Women: 155)

It means that God did not allow Jesus to suffer crucifixion, which is the kernel of the Christian faith. He raised him from the cross, and replaced him with someone, who looked like Jesus. Thus Islam destroys the very foundation of Christianity. Not only that, Islam subordinates Jesus to Muhammad. The Hadith No. 287 of Sahih Muslim, volume one, states: "...the son of Mary will soon descend among you as a just judge. He will break crosses, kill swine and abolish Jizya..."

That is, Christ will return to destroy Christianity at Allah’s behest. Presumably Judaism and Jews will have been exterminated long before Christ reappears. Muslim Brotherhood Legal Expert Yusuf al Qaradawi earnestly wishes it to happen. He’s President Obama’s pick to negotiate a “peace” between the U.S. and the Taliban. In 2009, on Al-Jazeera, he implored:

“Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them–even though they exaggerated this issue–he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers.”

It’s all part of Allah’s plan, you know. Christ, however, is noted for wanting to be kind to animals. Would the Islamic Christ approve of halal, and really go about killing swine? And dogs? And apes?

And Christianity and Islam both have their unique versions of the “end of days.” The sun will rise in the West, billions of corpses will come back to life, stars will go out or fall to earth, the Horsehead Nebula will neigh, the Crab Nebula will sidle up to Orion, almost knocking over the Pillars of Creation, there will be earthquakes and pestilence, water running up hill, and everyone queuing up in an infinite line to be judged by one or the other deity (you can make this stuff up; the Bible, the Koran, the Torah, and other religious documents prove it). St. Peter and God are on one side of this vast celestial arena, the Angel Gabriel and Allah on the other, ready with their naughty-nice lists. Satan and his legions of minions are waiting and fuming (literally, they’re from Hades) outside the arena, impatient to collect kindling for the hellfire as Allah or God casts souls into it.

What a premise for an opera bouffe!

There are no serious or fundamental conflicts between men of reason. Reason is their guide. If there are conflicts or differences between them, the most consistent man will be proven right. Knowable reality will govern the outcome. But conflicts between mere beliefs – beliefs without evidence of what is believed, beliefs based on the unknowable, beliefs based on the whim or emotion that “I just want it to be so” – have led and will continue to lead to horrific warfare in which force determines the victor and the outcome without really settling the question of whose God was greater.

God, after all, has always been on the side of enemy combatants.

Islam is not only a major rival religion to Christianity, but it also has an aura of greater potency which Christian conservatives must envy. It sanctions violence and deceit as Christianity does not, and flouts practically all of the Ten Commandments. Violence and deceit are great time-savers when one is trying to collect souls and extort jizya from the greatest number for the greater God in the shortest time. Thus, failing persuasion or dawa, Islam can just barge into societies and cultures and nations with sword and club and impose its will, committing murder, coveting and taking wives and property, lying from ear to ear, cursing, taking the name of the other guy’s God in vain, sparing those who recognize Allah, and so on.

Of course, in Islam, everything a person does is “written,” predestined to happen by Allah. So the average Muslim is but an automaton. He’s only doing what Allah intended him to do. Still, if he slays unbelievers and other infidels and is killed “in action,” as a “martyr,” he will be guaranteed Paradise. So, Islamic justice is hard to reconcile with reason. One may as well pat one’s coffee-maker on the head for, well, making coffee, and tie a bright red ribbon around it.

But then Christian ethics is little better. Without going into the issue of the contradictory attributes of omniscience and omnipotence – some Christian doctrines allege that God also knew everything that one will do eons before one’s Stone Age great-great-grandparents were conceived – one encounters the minimal role of volition as the key to one’s salvation. It also renders the deed-doer selfless, as well, because no good deed is supposed to be performed with the expectation of reward – not even personal, “spiritual” satisfaction – but only for its own sake as a Kantian maxim. Instead of performing the deed in the name of Allah, it is done in the name of the deed. The least quantum of self-interest in performing a good deed leaves the deed tainted with selfishness or with greed for absolution or a place in Heaven.

Of course, this puts the receiver or beneficiary of a good deed in a moral quandary. It is his happiness and well-being that is supposed to be one’s motive. But shouldn’t the same maxim apply to the beneficiary? If his life is saved by a selfless benefactor, how can he not feel selfishly grateful? Ideally, he should feel just as selflessly disinterested in the preservation of his life as the benefactor was supposed to have been in having saved it.

The consistent altruist would be dead from a brief career of selfless service to others. And the consistent beneficiary would be dead from refusal to accept any alms, for they would only make him happy.

So, “social conservatives” find a comfortable medium between altruism and staying alive. The policy explains their practiced compartmentalization of Christian morality, their hypocrisies and inconsistencies, and their politics.

“Ay, there’s the rub,” mused Hamlet. Christians consider it nobler to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous illogic rather than acknowledge it.

Logical conundrums, however, do not weigh upon the minds of devout Muslims. Islam does not paint itself into such ethical corners. It is not concerned with contradictions, moral absurdities, or syllogistic traps. It is brutally frank in its means and ends. Convert or die, or cough up the protection money. Nice cheek, infidel Christian. Can you turn the other one? Thanks for tolerating me. Now, get out of my way.

Perhaps that is why Islam is feared – and envied – by its rival religionists.

Review: Fascism and Theater

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 02:20:00 +0000

The first time I watched a political convention to nominate and select presidential and vice-presidential candidates – I forget whether it was a Democratic or Republican one, it hardly mattered then, and does not matter now – I was astounded and not a little appalled by the sheer mindlessness of the event. There they were, hundreds of party delegates from all the states, a great slobbering mass worked up into consecutive bouts of noisy, frenzied rapture over supposedly charismatic nonentities whose platforms and speeches were measures of carefully crafted banality and skillfully inserted buzz words.

There they were, hundreds of adults of both sexes and various ages and sizes, wearing buttons and masks and funny hats and other goofy party paraphernalia, shouting and cheering themselves hoarse on cue in unison, forming conga lines and waving flags and signs, behaving as though they had all checked their brains, dignity and self-respect at the door. Which they evidently had. It was politics as a football game, it was a life-and-death matter of “our team” versus “their team” – all ideational content abandoned and replaced by raw emotion triggered by faces associated with particular sounds emptied of meaning.

The capacity for abandoning one’s mind and for taking orders from delegate leaders has always seemed to be an important qualification for being a convention delegate. On the convention floor a delegate was and is still expected to surrender his “autonomous inner man” or individuality and merge into a smothering, communal gestalt with his party colleagues.

It is well known that television game show guests and contestants are selected for their quotient of enthusiasm and ability to communicate it to and with an audience. By this measure, a political convention has any game show beat by a factor of a thousand. And the prize is not a fancy car or living room set or a Caribbean cruise or $100,000, but the White House and “our guy” sitting in the Oval Office. In such escapist moments, when delegates seem to undergo a kind of mass “out of body” experience, the candidate is reduced to a mere symbolic image, regardless of character or qualification. He is “it.” They become human counterparts of Pavlov’s dogs, able to bark and drool and froth at the mouth on command and at the slightest autosuggestion by an overbearing delegate whip.

This is “democracy” in action. It was and still is stage-managed theater. It has not changed at all from the first time I saw a convention on black and white television. Being caught in the middle of such a phenomenon would be as scary to me as being surrounded by a mob of Muslims carrying signs that read “Behead those who insult Islam.” One would be tempted to strike out at the maddened, sweating fools on the convention floor, only at the risk of being pummeled to death by delegates from Wisconsin and Idaho and Massachusetts and California. They would all plead temporary insanity, and get away with it.

After all, you had insulted their candidate, their Mahdi, their Thirteenth Imam. Their Savior. You deserved to die.

The religious hysteria, as an element of the phenomenon, is not coincidental, or an anomaly, or a fluke. It is part and parcel of modern convention behavior. It clearly was not a governing factor of the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Then, delegates brought their brains with them, they brought their principles and rectitude. Can you imagine the Founders wearing funny hats and chanting slogans and forming conga lines to press a point of Constitutional law? No? Is the contrast too ludicrous and obscene to contemplate? Yes. Each and every one of those men, even the villains and fence-sitters, was an exemplar of intellectual and moral decorum. Then look at the baboons and halfwits who are charged with selecting an individual whom they want to “run the country.” Their choices over the last half century or more are reflections of what transpires on convention floors.

Today, the catalyst for the hysteria is not an invisible deity, but a flesh-and-blood human being. With calculated “behavioral” conditioning (à la B.F. Skinner), and a willingness to submerge one’s identity in the collective, the sight and sound of a candidate can reduce these delegates to quivering masses of raw emotion. One almost expects them to fall to the convention floor, wreathing and shrieking in deliverance, and speaking in tongues like any Holy Roller. Call it Political Pentecostalism.

Reading Fascism and Theatre: Comparative Studies on Aesthetics and Politics of Performance in Europe, 1925-1945*, I was not surprised to find in this collection of essays similarities between the methods employed by Nazis, Fascists and Communists to create and sustain support for their régimes, and the methods by which the Democrats and Republicans recruit and maintain their hard core, registered voters, activists and especially their convention delegates, the ones charged with nominating their parties’ candidates – that is, the people responsible for foisting onto this country for the last half century or more a succession of fork-tongued demagogues and empty suits.

There are eighteen chapters in Fascism and Theatre, but only a few can be highlighted here. Some deal with the subject more successfully than others, but all discuss the role of “theater” in fascism. The term fascism is used generically in the essays to stand for Mussolini’s Italian Fascism, Hitler’s Nazism, and, to a lesser extent, General Francisco Franco’s Falangist or Nationalist régime, which was a tepid admixture of Fascism and Nazism. (Although Spain remained “neutral” during World War II, Franco approved of sending approximately 19,000 Spanish volunteers to serve in a special division of the German army, to fight exclusively the “Bolsheviks” on the Eastern Front, but not the forces of Western armies. Spanish troops fought with the SS during the Soviet taking of Berlin.)

The term theater as used in the essays means either extravagant mass events such as the annual Nuremberg rallies or the political subornation of high and popular culture, from operas to plays to folk festivals to suit or conform to fascist aims and purposes.

One indisputable characteristic of fascism is that its theater borrowed heavily from Christian and especially Catholic practices and rituals, selectively exploiting the emotional nature of religion. Roger Griffin, in “Staging the Nation’s Rebirth,” introduces this idea which is elaborated on in most of the other essays:

…[F]ascism, if it can seize power, is able to remain true to its core myth and legitimate itself only by generating an elaborate civic liturgy (or a ‘civic,’ or ‘political’ religion) based on the myth of imminent national rebirth. In the two cases where it managed to conquer the State, it rapidly developed characteristic rites and ceremonial, its own iconography and symbology, its own semiotic discourse, aping (but only aping) any established Church. [p. 25]

For Hitler and Germany, “rebirth” meant the resurrection of a Teutonic or Aryan state superior to all, and to rise from the ashes of the Versailles Treaty and the failed Weimar Republic; for Mussolini and Italy, it meant reviving the imperial grandeur of ancient Rome. Hitler and Mussolini, however, had first to concoct and propagate “myths” about the lost greatness of their countries, and then pose as saviors or messiahs who alone had the power to reclaim the greatness and lead their nations to glory. Propaganda ministries and bureaucracies were created in both countries to establish and enforce official party lines about a nation’s past, present and future the subjects of art or in plays, national holidays, and even in opera.

Much of editor Günter Berghaus’s contribution to the collection of essays, “The Ritual Core of Fascist Theatre: An Anthropological Perspective,” is flawed by psycho-babble and sociological semiotics, but much of it also is lucid and on-point. To wit:

Fascist parties rose to positions of power by gaining mass support and winning democratic elections. Millions of people were inspired by Mussolini and Hitler and developed a genuine enthusiasm for their politics, because they promised an answer to a need that was widely felt in different sections of the population. People were fascinated by what fascism proposed in response to a crisis that affected the economic, social and cultural spheres of their lives. Political promises played a role in this, but the emotional appeal of the leaders and their programs was probably stronger. Fascist leaders avoided the rational rhetorics typical of bourgeois politicians, and instead employed performative language that had a captivating force unequalled by traditional means of propaganda. {pp. 39-40. Italics mine.]

Sound familiar? Does that passage hark back to the 2008 presidential campaign and election? Does it not describe the method by which the current occupant of the White House rose to power? However, Berghaus correctly dwells on the relationship between the religious and secular elements of fascism.

This grafting of the Christian redeemer and savior image onto a historical person was a post-figuration technique often employed in the Christian drama of the Baroque period and was ultimately derived from medieval theology. Both Hitler and Mussolini were well versed in the literary traditions of Christian religion and were fully capable of adopting their conventions. Hitler helped the transformation of his own person into the archetypal, divine redeemer figure through his mythological biography, Mein Kampf. [p. 62]

Berghaus quotes Hitler on the purpose of the Party rallies held in Nuremberg and other German cities. From Mein Kampf:

Mass meetings are a necessity because the individual (…) who feels isolated and easily succumbs to the fear of loneliness, is given here an idea of a greater community. (…) When he as a seeker is swept along by the mighty effect of the ecstasy and enthusiasm of three to four thousand others, when the visible success and agreement of thousands confirm to him the rightness of the new doctrine (…), then he will submit to the magic spell of what we call “mass suggestiveness.” The will, the longing, as well as the power of thousands of people are accumulated in every individual. The man who entered such a meeting doubting and wavering leaves it with an inner conviction: he has become a member of a community. [p. 60]

One could also say that this was no less true for Hitler, that he was literally nothing if not the leader of such a community. Without all those chanted “Sieg Heils” and tens of thousands looking up at him on a high rostrum with adoration and worship, he was a vacuum, an isolated and fearful nonentity who assumed an identity only in the presence and eyes of disciplined and attentive mobs.

Many uninvolved contemporary observers were struck by the fact that the public rituals of fascist régimes were “more than a gorgeous show; [they] also had something of the mysticism and religious fervor of an Easter or Christmas mass in a great cathedral.” “Is this a dream or reality?” asked one of the visitors to the Reichsparteitag 1936 after the spectacle on the Zeppelinwiese and concluded: “It is like a majestic church service (Andacht) where we have congregated to find new strength…”

[Albert] Speer said that Hitler canonized the formations, processions and celebrations so that “they were almost like rites of the founding of a Church.” Once he had worked out the right forms, he wanted to fix them as “unalterable rites” that gave him the status of a “founder of a religion.” [p. 53]

Mussolini was of a like mind concerning the religious “experience” possible in the Italian version.

Mussolini stated in 1923 that “Fascism is a religious phenomenon of vast historical proportions” and that fascism was “a civic and political belief, but also a religion, a militia, a spiritual discipline, which has had – like Christianity – its confessors, its testifying witnesses, its saints.” The Fascist Party was often described as “a new Church (La nuova chiesa is the title, for example, of a play by [Virgilio] Caselli) or as a “religious or military order.” [pp. 53-54]

For example, from 1933 on, from Hitler’s assumption of the chancellorship through the next eleven or so years, German playwrights (those who prostituted their talents to the Party) wrote plays that portrayed the past struggle of the German people to assume their “rightful” place in the world. If this meant fudging history or ascribing to past historical persons presaging yearnings for Nazi or Fascist domination and identity, such hacks were perfectly willing to falsify history, submit their work to Party censors and make the requisite changes. As Berghaus notes:

Consequently, fascist playwrights evoked a large number of situations that indicated a return to a united people. They propagated a new ethics that was aimed at overcoming egotism, uniting one individual with other individuals, creating a firm bond between them, making them identify with the aims of the fascist State and submit to the orders of a leader….The conduct of this leader was modeled, of course, on the historical examples given by the Führer, Duce, and Caudillo. Or rather, one should say, on the way those historical figures were mythisised, legendised and sanctified in fascist hagiography. [p. 61. Italics mine.]

Neither Hitler nor Mussolini was ever portrayed in these plays. Some species of false but more likely fearful fastidiousness in Party censors prohibited it; no actor could have been trusted to faultlessly impersonate Hitler or Mussolini, even had a hack written a play that featured them, and probably no actor would have wished to risk the role, either. Hitler and Mussolini were instead substituted with stand-ins or proxies, such as Frederick the Great or Bismarck or Garibaldi or some two-dimensional fictional character, always ready to sacrifice himself for the greater good in the most cavalierly selfless manner, which was the unity of the German or Italian people. Acceptable plays were set in the past, to convey a false historical overture to Nazism or Fascism – or the alleged inexorable inevitability of Nazism and Fascism, which a mere individual was helpless to oppose and whose only recourse was to submit to it.

Barbara Panse, in her essay, “Censorship in Nazi Germany: The Influence of the Reich’s Ministry of Propaganda on German Theater and Drama, 1933-1945,” discusses several of these plays, and cites how one playwright even perverted the American Revolution:

In Hanns Johst’s play [Thomas Paine], Thomas Paine is the ideological Führer of the American War of Independence. He, too, upholds the notions of colonialism and conquest. With the propagandistic slogan, “America needs land,” he seeks to mobilize the exhausted and hungry insurgent army so that they venture to take the path into the unknown, to victory or death. His appeal to faith and comradeship forges the “racially worthy citizens” (volkisch wertvollen Glieder) of America into a nation. In this play, the life of the Führer character also ends tragically, but his mission is fulfilled: the ‘national idea’ has come to fruition. [p. 149]

Johst wrote this play in 1927. He was a career anti-Semite who wrote a play, Schlageter, which extolled Nazi ideology, to celebrate Hitler’s victory and birthday in 1933. It is interesting to note also that Howard Fast, a steadfast member of the American Communist Party, also appropriated the American Revolution as a means to advance the “people’s struggle” narrative (à la Howard Zinn) on the origins of the United States. Citizen Tom Paine (1943) is one of a number of novels he wrote set in that period.

No discussion of the theatrics of fascism would be complete without mentioning Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary, Triumph of the Will. This task fell to contributor Hans-Ulrich Thamer and his essay, “The Orchestration of the National Community: The Nuremberg Party Rallies of the NSDAP.” Writing about the purpose and style of the rallies, Thamer observes about the 1934 Nazi Party Congress:

The heroic style and dramaturgy of the event were fixed on celluloid by Leni Riefenstahl in her film Triumph of the Will (1934). Much more than simply a documentary, this film foregrounded the symbolism and liturgy of the ceremonies and established their pattern for the years to come. At the same time, the film disseminated the mass spectacle of Nuremberg throughout Germany. It was a “production of a production” and thereby a reduplication of the “mass appeal” of National Socialist political aesthetics. Triumph of the Will turned the military parade of the National Socialist movement into a platform for the Führer-cult. [p. 175]

Thamer then takes the reader on a tour of the typical succeeding rallies, all based on what Riefenstahl had recorded in 1934, which acted as a template, and then were expanded in scope and in the number of participants. These rallies lasted for days. Thamer follows Hitler from elevated rostrum to a ceremony of flags and banners when he rubbed shoulders and pressed flesh with rank-and-file, to a ritual of consecration of the “martyrs” that was much like a glorified mass of the dead. Hitler was the focal point of every important event. But, it was all a manufactured show.

Nothing was left to chance in the stage-management of the Nuremberg rallies. Every stylistic device had a purpose. The flags were determined in number, size and position; shortcomings in the urban development and gaps in the old town fortifications were covered up by scenery. Everything was subjected to the meticulous plans of the bureaucratic and technical apparatus. The men in charge of the cult were cool-headed technicians, sons of a rational era. Yet they were also theatrical wizards who knew intuitively how to exploit age-old cultic practices for their political aims. It was exactly this link between atavistic ideology, mystical ceremony and the modern age, which helped to eliminate all critical reasoning in both audience and participants. [p. 186. Italics mine.]

Before the entire length of Triumph of the Will was removed from YouTube for copyright infringement (the full version now can be watched with ads), I watched it twice, and I can attest to the effectiveness of the stage management described by Thamer. I distinctly remember Jimmy Carter’s appearance at the conclusion of the 1976 Democratic Convention, when he and his wife Rosalind appeared on stage before a brilliant blue background. That was calculation.

The typical American political convention is also planned and laid out in meticulous detail, from the flags and bunting, to the timed applause and cheers, to the demonstrations of dancing and chanting, to the bands and choreography and lighting, all the way to the climax of the acceptance speeches. Little during these cattle calls could be called spontaneous, except for the essential emotional character of the proceedings that verges on a mass revival meeting. But the spontaneity is also cued and calculated to advance or obstruct a point of order or dissension. For the typical delegate, a convention is a vacation from reality, from the facts of political and economic life.

I doubt that many delegates, upon returning home from a Grand Gestalt, pause long enough to acknowledge just how much they have degraded themselves and regret having let loose a monster. And the ensuing political campaigns have become more and more shallow and meaningless popularity contests, with candidates stooping to the level of rock stars repeating the most popular lyrics and buzz words. Thamer concludes his essay with:

The Führer-myth as the propagandist core of the rally distracted from the political reality of Party as well as everyday life and became the most important means of stabilizing the rule of the Nazi Party. The dream world conjured up by the events manipulated consciousness and created a second reality, which of course could not change the outside world, but could counteract and control it. [p. 188.]

The Obama/McCain campaigns of 2008 were also products of such dream worlds, the one more masterfully managed and staged than the other. And then the winner encountered the “outside world” and, like King Canute, as the legend goes, he attempted to command its tides to cease. In fact, Canute was making a point for his supporters, that he was only a king and not a miracle worker. Perhaps Obama will be imbued with the same wisdom.

The Republicans, however, seem determined to offer their own Æthelred the Unready to oppose him. Election year 2012 is going to be interesting.

*Providence/Oxford: Berghahn Books: 1996. Edited by Günter Berghaus.

Washington’s Rocket Bombs

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 01:43:00 +0000

Think what you will about George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. After all, you might say, it was written by a lapsed Communist and veteran of the Spanish Civil War (fighting on the Communist-dominated Republican side) and author of the Trotskyite parable, Animal Farm, an apologia for Communism. All of which is true.

But I do believe that had he not died of tuberculosis (1949), he would have become one of the first neo-conservative intellectuals and writers in the West. He had been creeping in that direction ever since the Spanish Civil War, driven by his growing and articulate animus for totalitarianism (born during WWII, during which he saw elements of it in British government domestic wartime policies). This direction could only have ultimately led him to renounce collectivism, but probably have not motivated him to advocate capitalism or found a fresh new political philosophy (as Ayn Rand did, but from a philosophical perspective, and not from a solely political one). In that respect, he was not a profound thinker or philosophical innovator. But he was a first-class and honest observer.

I have always enjoyed reading Orwell’s prose, whether or not I agreed with him on any specific topic. He was such a consciously fine writer, which explains his deceptively effortless style. My favorite essay of his is “Politics and the English Language” (1946).

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.

Orwell is one of the very, very few writers of the liberal/left who actually respected his readers’ minds and adopted an appropriate policy of writing clearly and stated his intentions and meanings without obfuscation or equivocation.

Humbug, however, is the subject here, and while reading something else, Peter Carl’s six-part essay in The Brussels Journal, “Surviving Islam…and Right/Left Politics: Churchill’s Principle,” caused me to recall the whole “war on terror” coupled with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s hosting of a meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in Washington this week. That was the subject of Clare Lopez’s “Criticism of Islam Could Soon be a Crime in America” on Family Security Matters. This in turn caused me to recall something from Nineteen Eighty-Four, the role of rocket bombs that fell on London. From Part 2, Chapter 5:

The proles, normally apathetic about the war, were being lashed into one of their periodical frenzies of patriotism. As though to harmonize with the general mood, the rocket bombs had been killing larger numbers of people than usual. One fell on a crowded film theatre in Stepney, burying several hundred victims among the ruins. The whole population of the neighborhood turned out for a long, trailing funeral which went on for hours and was in effect an indignation meeting. Another bomb fell on a piece of waste ground which was used as a playground and several dozen children were blown to pieces. There were further angry demonstrations, Goldstein was burned in effigy, hundreds of copies of the poster of the Eurasian soldier were torn down and added to the flames, and a number of shops were looted in the turmoil….

In some ways she [Julia, Winston’s lover] was far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible to Party propaganda. Once when he happened in some connection to mention the war against Eurasia, she startled him by saying casually that in her opinion the war was not happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, 'just to keep people frightened'.

The mind works in not entirely mysterious ways.

“Just to keep people frightened.” How appropriate an observation to make about our own government. What have Americans seen since 9/11 but attempts to keep them frightened and pacified? The Department of Homeland Security, the “war on terror” now graduated from hunting down the kamikaze soldiers of Islamic jihad to include anyone who questions government policy (re the National Defense Authorization Act, discussed in a previous commentary, “Portrait of a Police State”), the appeal to snitch on one’s neighbors and friends, the completely useless but very expensive, intrusive, and arrogant TSA, Obamacare and other socialist legislation, the campaign to govern one’s diet and light bulbs, the government’s push to take over the Internet, the campaign to demonize freedom of speech in regards to Islam, the excising of all references to Islam, Muslims and Jihad from official documents and training materials (With whom are we at war? Eurasia or East Asia? Who knows? Terrorists just materialize from a parallel universe, not all the time from Islam, but often on blog sites and newspaper columns and not always about terrorism) – all calculated to keep the public dumbed down, diverted, quiet, misinformed, and in a constant state of semi-fright and anxiety.

They are all Orwellian rocket bombs.

Here is another rocket bomb: U.N. Resolution 16/18, which would “criminalize” any and all kinds of criticism of Islam, whether they are cogent essays or cartoons, will be an effort to utilize “techniques of peer pressure and shaming,” and is endorsed without reservation by Secretary of State Clinton. (These same remarks were repeated virtually verbatim by Daniel Baer, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, which also concerns itself with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender issues, among other earth-shaking matters, at the Compass to Compassion Conference), and a career bureaucrat whose academic curriculum vita includes degrees in every woozy, humanitarian subject imaginable.) After a mountain of fluffy and venal rhetoric, Clinton noted on July 15th of this year, during a meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation:

The Human Rights Council [of the U.N.] has given us a comprehensive framework for addressing this issue on the international level. But at the same time, we each have to work to do more to promote respect for religious differences in our own countries. In the United States, I will admit, there are people who still feel vulnerable or marginalized as a result of their religious beliefs. And we have seen how the incendiary actions of just a very few people, a handful in a country of nearly 300 million, can create wide ripples of intolerance. We also understand that, for 235 years, freedom of expression has been a universal right at the core of our democracy. So we are focused on promoting interfaith education and collaboration, enforcing antidiscrimination laws, protecting the rights of all people to worship as they choose, and to use some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel that they have the support to do what we abhor.

There is an instance of what Orwell would call the “gumming together of long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.”

By the U.N. resolution, and through “peer pressure and shaming” advocated by our Secretary of State, “Islamophobia” will include these “criminal offenses”: Religious profiling, defamation, vilification, fear-mongering, discriminatory speech, hate speech, intolerance…ad nauseum. The resolution clumps together the antics of Terry Jones of the Dove Outreach Church and his Koran burning with authoritative essays and books by Robert Spencer, Steve Emerson, Ali Hirsi, Ibn Warraq, Pamela Geller, Melanie Phillips, Walid Shoebat, and many other experts on Islam.

The irony is that Islam that is guilty of everything its defenders charge others with. Call it “Westphobia,” or “Speechaphobia,” or “Reasonophobia.” As Pamela Geller put it, truth is the new “hate speech.” That the OIC and the U.N. would go to such lengths to oppose freedom of speech should cause one to ask: What have the Islamists to hide, that they wish to suppress the truth? What don’t they wish others to know? What truths do they not want identified, exposed and spoken and written about?

What they and their companion organizations, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, the Islamic Circle of America, and other such “civic” outfits, wish to hide is the fact that Islam is antithetical to every rational political concept in the West, that it is totalitarian in nature and in practice, that it is anti-man, anti-life, and anti-value. That it is essentially and incontrovertibly nihilist in theory and in implementation. And that Muslims who are devoted to it are essentially “dead souls,” living ballast in the form of 1.3 billion manqués on which to establish Sharia law and a global caliphate. All those dead souls: Allah owns them – this they know, for the Koran tells them so – to paraphrase Anna Bartlett Warner’s hymn, and they don’t mind.

The OIC gathering in Washington is merely one rocket bomb among others launched by our own government to keep us worried and distracted and always ducking for cover.

As Winston Smith did Part 1, Chapter 8, when a rocket bomb suddenly strikes.

Winston clasped his forearms above his head. There was a roar that seemed to make the pavement heave; a shower of light objects pattered on to his back. When he stood up he found that he was covered with fragments of glass from the nearest window.
He walked on. The bomb had demolished a group of houses 200 meters up the street. A black plume of smoke hung in the sky, and below it a cloud of plaster dust in which a crowd was already forming around the ruins. There was a little pile of plaster lying on the pavement ahead of him, and in the middle of it he could see a bright red streak. When he got up to it he saw that it was a human hand severed at the wrist….

If the government launches this particular rocket bomb, and agrees with the OIC and the U.N. to enforce a ban on “hate speech” in America by statute or by “peer-pressure and shaming,” we will not see anything as prosaic as a severed wrist, but the heads of the champions of freedom of speech, severed at the neck. For the purpose of this particular rocket bomb is not to cause physical destruction and death, but to destroy the mind and establish a reign of living death.

Portrait of a Police State

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 00:03:00 +0000

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”
Portion of Emma Lazarus’s poem, “A New Colossus,” for the Statue of Liberty

The chief thrust of this article is that none of this would occur, or even be thought “necessary,” if we had eliminated states that sponsor terrorism after 9/11. But when one reads the text of Senate Bill 1867, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), one gets the impression that many in positions of power and influence, particularly Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona and Democrat Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, have a vested interest in sustaining an indefinite “war” against terrorism. This would entail establishing, or laying the groundwork for, a police state in which citizens would be lawfully accountable to the state, and not the other way around.

Fundamentally, they have a vested interest in waging a war against America and individual rights. Many sections of the bill are overtures to establish a permanent police state or an authoritarian government. As with many instances of legislation in the past, the bill is chiefly a finance bill, but contains riders, amendments, and sections that have little to do with finance but whose inclusion requires that their authors and sponsors resort to contemptible subterfuge.

One of the consequences of not having properly defended this country from attacks by our enemies – and Islam is certainly an enemy, the strenuous denials of George W. Bush and President Barack Obama to the contrary notwithstanding – is that to defend the country against “terrorism” without taking effective and final action against those enemies, the government must establish a “Fortress America,” or policies which not so much ensure our protection as ensure the survival of the government. What happened to our liberties? They take a back seat. Eventually, they must be thrown from the vehicle of statism.

The Library of Congress inexplicably removed the links I found to the two versions of Senate Bill 1867 (my search was “timed out” and the links no longer work), but I found another one that contains the text of the bill. I have also included separate links to the texts of the notorious Sections 1031 and 1032, which discuss detention of U.S. citizens. These two sections were opposed by some Senators without success. Senators McCain and Levin sponsored the bill and were its principal architects, drafted in secret with not much to-do and only now making its debut. It almost makes one sigh with relief that McCain lost the 2008 election (Was the alternative any better?) The heading of Section 1031 reads:

Sec. 1031. Affirmation of authority of the Armed Forces of the United States to detain covered persons pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force.

Despite assurances in the bill of Constitutional guarantees, the Secretary of Defense and the director of national intelligence may "waive" the inapplicability of Sections 1031 and 1032 to U.S. citizens after leave from Congress to do so. The assurances are merely devious lip service to a document that has been all but gutted of meaning, and to a political philosophy that began to expire with the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. (Some would argue that it began to expire with the first imposition of the draft and income tax under President Abraham Lincoln, but that’s another story.) A paragraph of Section 1032 reads, in relation to the status of American citizens who may or may not be detained by the military:

32. (4) WAIVER FOR NATIONAL SECURITY.—The Secretary of Defense may, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Director of National Intelligence, waive the requirement of paragraph (1) if the Secretary submits to Congress a certification in writing that such a waiver is in the national security interests of the United States.

From the McCain-Levin bill:

ACT OF TERRORISM- The term `act of terrorism' means an act of terrorism as that term is defined in section 101(15) of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 (6 U.S.C. 101(15)).

The term "terrorism" means any activity that - (A) involves an act that - (i) is dangerous to human life or potentially destructive of critical infrastructure or key resources; and (ii) is a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State or other subdivision of the United States; and (B) appears to be intended - (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping. (16)(A)

The left is up in arms over the bill because Sections 1031 and 1032 do specify that captured or apprehended enemy combatants or agents who happen to be U.S. citizens or legal alien residents, and who have taken “hostile” actions against the U.S., may be detained without trial. The Left is more concerned with that than with the power of waiver granted to the government. Terrorists, apparently, have rights, but not their victims. But terrorists – the homegrown or foreign kind – have forfeited all rights by attacking the government and country that upholds individual rights with the purpose of destroying it and imposing totalitarian rule – whether that rule is Nazi, Communist, Fascist – or Islamic.

Lindsey Graham and other defenders of the bill’s controversial riders referred to the United States as inclusive in a global “battlefield.” On a battlefield, however, there are no rules of combat or engagement. One kills, wounds, or captures as many of the enemy as possible, with all means available. A battlefield is the stage of focused, controlled violence. Graham’s remark was inappropriate, but reveals his estimate of his country and its citizens. His “battlefield” analogy is reminiscent of the propaganda of Nazi Germany, Communist Russia and Fascist Italy, where citizens were constantly reminded that the “battlefield” was their homes, their jobs, their families, their leisure, their churches, their friends, and the enemy anyone who opposed, resisted or questioned the respective ideology.

Not covered by either McCain’s bill or the Homeland Security Act is the subject of war. What is an “act of war” but what is covered in the definition of “terrorism” cited above? Why has our attention been diverted from ‘acts of war” to “acts of terrorism”?

(4) the term “act of war” means any act occurring in the course of —
(A) declared war;
(B ) armed conflict, whether or not war has been declared, between two or more nations; or
C) armed conflict between military forces of any origin;

War would mean armed conflict with the advocates and enablers of another ideology. War means open, armed hostility, not necessarily for the enemy nation’s cultural sum, but for its political ideology. A “war on terrorism,” however, discards the ideology and focuses on the enablers (plotters, foot soldiers, etc.) as though they come from some generic template, and does not declare war on what motivates the plotters, soldiers, and so on. Neglecting to oppose and refute the enemy’s ideology while focusing only on its carriers, propagators and advocates, is futile.

One could say that one cannot be at war with Islam, because Islam, as an ideology, seems to be “stateless.” But, is it? No. Islam is what governs Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt and all of the North African states. Islam is not some disembodied entity that infects individuals and causes them to fly planes into buildings or attempt to suppress freedom of speech. Islam is not the common cold. It isn’t even typhus, or influenza. It is the bubonic plague of the mind.

If Islam declares war on freedom of speech, then it has declared war on an ideology, that is, on the political philosophy that professes and upholds the universality of individual rights. Why is it deemed inappropriate to declare war on Islam? Because it is also a theology? Because it propagates and perpetuates the belief in a supreme being or all-knowing and omnipotent deity? Christianity does that, as well, but Christian doctrine has been boxed in and stripped of the power to enforce its doctrine on all. One may believe in God or not; belief in a deity is immaterial in a society governed by secular law. There are those, of course, who assert that God is the source of all individual rights, but such a position ignores reality; it defies the law of identity and the evidence of the senses, as well.

Islam, however, cannot be boxed in or delimited in its political ambition. Its politics and theology are cut from the same cloth, which is belief without reservation, question, or doubt.

Ayn Rand posited a handy and eminently appropriate characterization of the dichotomy that can be applied to Islam: the Witch Doctor and Attila. The Witch Doctor depends on Attila to impose his mysticism; Attila depends on the Witch Doctor to sanction his reign of force. The Witch Doctor stands for the mystics of the mind – don’t question, doubt, or think, just believe – while Attila is the mystic of muscle – force is the solution to all problems. The Witch Doctor is any imam or mullah or ayatollah or sheik; Mohammad is their ideal Attila. (While Allah, as portrayed by Islamic scholars, is the perfect symbol of the mystics of mind and muscle, a being governed by whims and who is not governed by reality or morality).

It is noteworthy that while the government, on one hand, is bowing to the complaints of Islamic activists (the Council on American-Islamic Relations and its Muslim Brotherhood affiliates) and is culling all references to Islam and Muslims from defense documents and training materials and courses for counter-terrorism, on the other, Senators McCain and Levin do mention Al-Quada and the Taliban in their bill (Section D, 1031). But Al-Quada and the Taliban are nothing if not Islamic organizations, from their burqa tops to the hems of their thawbs.

Put one way, the organizations charged with defending the country against terrorist attacks – the CIA, the FBI, and state and local law enforcement entities – are expected to conduct the “war on terrorism” blindfolded, dizzy from being turned around dozens of times by contradictory orders and criteria, and armed with a stick with which to strike at an empty piñata, which is moved away from them every time CAIR or some other Islamic front organization cries “victim” or “Islamophobia.”

Representative Justin Amash (R-MI) wrote today on his Facebook page that S. 1867 is “one of the most anti-liberty pieces of legislation of our lifetime.” Moreover, Amash maintains that the bill capitalizes on misleading semantics; regarding section 1032 , he says “‘The requirement to detain a person in military custody under this section does not extend to citizens of the United States.’ This language appears carefully crafted to mislead the public. Note that it does not preclude U.S. citizens from being detained indefinitely, without charge or trial, it simply makes such detention discretionary.”

But, who is defined as a U.S. citizen? And if a U.S. citizen wages war against his own country, should he not be charged with treason? And if he is charged with treason, is he not entitled to the full protection of the Constitution he wished to obviate?

Does the bill genuinely define a belligerent as an individual or “person,” whether or not he is a U.S. citizen, who has taken up arms against the U.S., or has taken actions within its jurisdiction with the purpose of subverting or overthrowing the government or harming its citizens or “infrastructure”? Does it specifically exclude newspaper columnists, writers, satirists, or Internet bloggers, or anyone else who questions the wisdom or morality of government policies?

The six-hundred-plus pages of Senate bill 1867 do not answer these questions. This bill is the kind of legislation that is knocked together in the purgatory of non-objective law and fuzzy, evasive, non-objective thinking.

Another part of the bill, Section 584, “Report on the Achievement of Diversity Goals for the Leadership of the Armed Forces,” is particularly onerous. It does not even define the term “diversity,” but since the term was sired by multiculturalism, one presumes that it means not excluding Muslims from command and advisory roles. There are several “prohibitions” or limitations in the bill, but who or what is to enforce them when the bill grants the executive branch, Congress, and bureaucrats the discretionary power to designate who may or may not be an “enemy of the state”?

The U.S. would not be a “battlefield” had we eliminated states that sponsor terrorism over a decade ago. But the Senate bill underscores the fact that our policies do not now and never will identify the specific enemy. This is the deadly neurosis of a nation that has convinced itself that it is not worthy of self-preservation as a free country, but as just another “unexceptional” country which must turn on its own citizens to preserve the state and not the rights and liberties America was once famous for.

The police state proposed in S. 1867 needs and requires Americans to be tired, poor, and huddled, but not yearning to be free. Like "The Picture of Dorian Gray," that “beauteous” welfare and regulatory state established early in the 20th century and welcomed by so many, is turning very, very ugly.

Ambidextrous Statism

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 15:18:00 +0000

The standard Left-Right yardstick of political identity places President Barack Obama on the Far Left, which means Communism and the total state. On the Far Right? Newt Gingrich, Michelle Bachmann, Glenn Beck and others, according to the received wisdom. The Far Right is synonymous with fascism, racism, anti-Semitism, and autocracy, with some religion mixed in.

But another measure takes into account the actual implementation of his political agenda and would place Obama on the Far Right. Indeed, political cartoons that emulate Nazi and Communist propaganda posters from the past have depicted Obama in the correct attire and waving the appropriate swastika or hammer-and-sickle banner. The one image is just as credible as the other.

The standard, ubiquitous yardstick begins on the left side with Communism and ends on the Far Right with fascism. But is this yardstick of any value? Is it a valid measure of political systems? Is it a trustworthy indicator of an individual’s or organization’s political beliefs? For decades it has served only the Left when the Left wishes to characterize a politician or political agenda in deprecatory terms as being on the Far Right.

In truth, there is no fundamental difference between the Far Left and the Far Right. They are both totalitarian in nature. Their median is a mushy socialism posing as “Progressive” welfare statism that leaves no whine or grievance left behind. And in all historical cases, the median has always drifted inexorably in one direction or another. The “liberty, equality, and fraternity” of the French Revolution that threw off the aristocracy – a revolution colored by egalitarian collectivism – gave way to the Reign of Terror, a dictator, and two decades of war. In truth, the direction is irrelevant. One can be enslaved, robbed, imprisoned, and beaten by a man wearing a brown shirt as thoroughly as by a man wearing a red one. Or a black one. Or even by a man in an Earth First T-shirt.

The 2010 Super Bowl Audi commercial was a tongue-in-cheek depiction of “Green Police” lording it over violators of government environmental regulations with all the fervor and intrusive power of TSA screeners. Whose progeny are they? The Left’s, or the Right’s? Who sowed the dragon’s teeth of environmentalist tyranny and let loose the uniformed harpies? Tom Haydn and Bill Ayers, or Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush?

The standard yardstick is ambidextrous in nature, and is useful only to the totalitarians of either “side” when they wish to resort to name-calling and pre-digested bromides. There is no yardstick that truly incorporates the antithesis of the alleged opposites, which is individual rights under laissez-faire capitalism. Seen from the perspective of an “outsider,” the Left-Right yardstick is useful only if one wishes to measure the contradictions and conundrums posed by modern political trends and how they imperil individual liberty.

The device of “ambidextrous politics” to measure and explain political trends and consequences is not new. Search the Web and one will find dozens of references to the subject, and long essays about how the standard yardstick is inadequate to explain contemporary or even historical political systems. The Left-Right yardstick has been critiqued before. But because there is a common revulsion among “conservatives” and Progressives alike for unfettered free markets and the rule of secular law (and not of bureaucrats or priests), laissez-faire is missing from the yardstick. And justly so. Laissez-faire breaks the ruler in half. But that yardstick has been burned into the minds of millions over decades of indoctrination in schools.

Norman Berdichevsky, editor for The New English Review, is the author of The Left is Seldom Right, published in 2011 by The New English Review Press. It is a collection of essays and articles by Berdichevsky from over the last five to six years. It challenges the Left-Right yardstick and offers ample evidence of its inadequacy to explain and incorporate all the varieties of statism and freedom. Berdichevsky, however, does not offer an alternative measure that would handily identify the particulars of the Left and Right. It owes much to Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, which pioneered the critiquing of the Left-Right yardstick.

The Left is Seldom Right is a virtually unedited collection of twenty-two of Berdichevsky’s pieces. It suffers from numerous typos, awkward syntax and sentences, and duplicated paragraphs that pop up in different articles or chapters. There is no index of subjects, only a selective bibliography. An index would have been helpful because so many of the names, kinds of government, and historical instances recur or overlap in the chapters. The book is disorganized and lacks a thematic flow. And often one will find whole paragraphs lifted from sources like Wikipedia without attribution (e.g., the account of the Luxor, Egypt massacre of tourists by jihadists in 1997, p. 244). Attorney General Eric Holder is referred to as “District Attorney.” One is at a loss to understand why so little care was invested in a book that purports to refute an important ideological premise.

An instance of how the Left-Right yardstick can tilt one’s perspective on politics (not cited in the book) is offered here from “Our Bipolar Politics” on The Working Reporter website about politics in Wisconsin and Minnesota:

Minnesota and Wisconsin are politically bipolar. Wisconsin, in particular. The home to so many progressives and union activists is the same state that gave us Joe McCarthy and Paul Ryan. McCarthy’s record of deception, witch-hunting, black-listing, career-wrecking and defamation, speaks for itself. Congressman Ryan, who grew up in a nearly all-white town, attended a nearly all-white college and then went to work for his family’s small town business before being encapsulated by the bubble of conservative politics (great range of experience), is “ranked among the party’s most influential voices on conservative economic policy.”

Lucky us. No surprise that this guy is to the right of Attila. Before long, he’ll probably be calling for hearings on un-American activities. Like his fellow-traveler Michele Bachmann, he’s on the “Less government and more God!” track.

“Our founders got it right when they wrote in the Declaration of Independence that our rights come from nature and nature’s God, not from government.” – Paul Ryan

Apparently Mr. Ryan sees no gap between the figurative and the literal, feels no real need for context (a number of the founders were Deists), and thinks that if we all pray hard enough everything will be just fine. Hallelujah.

My home state of Minnesota is also on tilt. They’ve given us Humphrey, Mondale and Franken. The good ol’ DFL. Common sense at every turn. Garrison Keillor’s written a wonderful book about Minnesota politics entitled, “Homegrown Democrat: A Few Plain Thoughts from the Heart of America.” And now, like a bad cold that won’t go away, the great state of Minnesota continues sending us the uninformed right-wing mental machinations of Michele Bachmann.

The author would be less flummoxed had he not employed the Left-Right yardstick, which makes him the prisoner of an unnecessary paradox. But, note the repeated usage of the term “right” in the screed, always as a term of disparagement. The term “left” is not in evidence. This is because the implied “correct” direction is left and needn’t be mentioned in print or outloud. There is no other default direction. The term “left,” after all, might alert the reader to unsavory elements of that position better left unsaid and un-implied. “Left,” however, is synonymous with welfare state entitlements, “empowered people” vs. political cronyism and corruption and unrepresentative government, caring for the poor, soaking the rich, guaranteeing a “quality of life,” opposing an ossified “establishment,” and so on. All of it “good.” All of that is implied or insinuated.

Conservatism, allegedly a “right-wing” phenomenon, always stands for penny-pinching, heartless, union-busting, old-boy networking Scrooge-ism, not to mention unfettered, unregulated capitalism. In fact it does not stand for any of those things. Conservatism means: conserving or preserving the status quo, even if it means preserving a wealth-consuming and wealth-spreading, right-violating, deficit-financing welfare state. The Left always wins in these circumstances, even if it loses elections. Conservatives do not challenge the moral premises of the Left. It shares the basic altruistic, collectivist premises of the Left. It would rather “progress” to full statism in a soap-box racer, instead of on the Left’s Harley-Davidson. But both sides depend on building their statist utopias on the standing rubble of a semi-free economy.

It is this kind of blinkered, epistemologically arrested measure that can be dispensed with. In the first chapter, “The Origins of the Right-Left Metaphor; The True Right-Left Dimension,” Berdichevsky presents several alternative yardsticks, or graphs, or compasses which, while they are inadequate in themselves, demonstrate that the notion that all politics must be viewed as either Left or Right or somewhere in between (the “center” or “middle ground”) is absurd and misleadingly simplistic.

Surely, a pictorial guide is needed. Berdichevsky depicts one on page 30 of his book, a compass with four directions emanating from liberty and tyranny, with Republicans on the right and Democrats on the left, Objectivists, independents and centrists on the top of liberty, pointing to freedom, and communists, fascists and other totalitarians on the bottom, pointing to serfdom.

Berdichevsky presents abundant evidence throughout his book that the Left-Right dichotomy is patently false. He describes how various authoritarian regimes in history were designated “right” or “left” by their opponents. Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, supposedly a “pro-business” regime that oppressed the workers, was simply a pale imitation of Hitler’s National Socialist regime, complete with major industries and businesses entering into government-private sector “partnerships” in command economies. The sauerkraut of Nazism was complemented by the pasta of Fascism.

Oddly, Berdichevsky does not mention Otto von Bismarck’s socialist welfare state, thus missing a chance to underscore the nascent and watershed fascist origins of a unified Germany and how its welfare statism spread to the rest of Europe. Were Mussolini, Hitler and Bismarck “right-wingers,” or “left-wingers”? Neither. They were statists of varying degrees and styles of tyranny. The details of the regimes are almost irrelevant. Force was the sole and final arbiter of an individual’s relationship with the state. The Hitler and Mussolini regimes were noted for their “right-wing” violence and brutality: street warfare, assassinations of opponents, party purges, show trials, and the like, all staged in the pursuit or retention of power. As were the Lenin-Stalin brands of Communism. But they were all instances of socialism and collectivism in action. That is, of the “Left” in action. Or the “Right.”

Berdichevsky’s book, if nothing else, can enlighten a reader about so many past paradoxes, such as why the Left originally endorsed the founding of Israel but now is engaged in anti-Semitic and anti-Israel vitriol. Berdichevsky discusses the Spanish Civil War, the Greek and Argentine episodes of authoritarianism, and why the Left allies itself with Islam and the Right refuses to condemn that particular species of totalitarianism (to question Allah and Mohammad, after all, must eventually lead to questioning God and Jesus Christ – this is my observation, not Berdichevsky’s).

In a chapter too short by several hundred pages, Berdichevsky also tackles Hollywood’s Leftish paradigm and our Leftish literary establishment but leaves one unsatisfied. Ayn Rand is mentioned once as the only screenwriter in Hollywood who had lived under Communism, and a quotation from her HUAC testimony would have been illuminating. Director Elia Kazan is mentioned as the bane of Hollywood communists. Berdichevsky, however, fails to mention one movie that would have helped to underscore his point that Hollywood was under the strong influence of American communists, For Whom the Bell Tolls.

I saw this film, directed by Sam Wood and released in 1943, for the first time decades ago before I knew anything about the Spanish Civil War, that is, about who was on the Left or Right (or who were the Republicans and who were the Franco-Falangists, or who were the good guys and who were the bad). Or before I knew anything about Sam Wood. Hemmingway’s novel was a disappointment. But the film still leaves me almost uncontrollably moved – especially the ending – as much as does the ending of Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac (the Ralph Richardson audio production, not the José Ferrer, 1950 film production, although I won’t gainsay the film). Is liking For Whom the Bell Tolls an indication of political naiveté? Does liking it place me on the Left or Right?

Berdichevsky, apparently an anti-abortionist religious conservative, reveals his own “right-wing” leanings (in many instances he includes abortion as another left-wing imposition) when he excoriates the film Inherit the Wind (the 1960 version) and claims that the depiction of William Jennings Bryan as a fundamentalist, bible-thumping, non-intellectual yahoo, which he actually was, constituted a disgrace and evidence of Hollywood’s Leftism.

And it is here that Berdichevsky also reveals his own Left-Right yardstick confusion. Bryan’s populist appeal meshed neatly with the Progressive or socialist message that grew louder and louder from the 1880’s throughout the 1920’s (culminating in FDR’s New Deal). Somehow, Bryan is revered by Berdichevsky as a tragic martyr of the Right. Yet it was the Progressive movement of the 19th century, coupled with imported statist ideas from Europe, notably from German universities, that resulted in the accelerating growth of big government and the Left’s welfare and regulatory state in the United States. Bryan contributed to that growth, as did many, many “right-wing” Republicans.

How would Berdichevsky place H.L. Mencken on any yardstick or political measure? What does he think of Mencken’s sardonic obituary of Bryan, who died shortly after the Scopes Monkey Trial? Mencken:

“The evil that men do lives after them. Bryan, in his malice, started something that will not be easy to stop. In ten thousand country towns his old heelers, the evangelical pastors, are propagating his gospel, and everywhere the yokels are ready for it…. Heave an egg out of a Pullman window, and you will hit a Fundamentalist almost anywhere in the United States today. They swarm in the country towns, inflamed by their pastors, and with a saint, now, to venerate.”

Mencken was arguably of the “Right” – when the “Right” meant respect for individual rights and opposing an intrusive, invasive, and shepherding government. Where would he fit in Berdichevsky’s political universe?

Is Berdichevsky of the Left, or of the Right? Go figure.

The Storm Troopers of OWS

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 20:51:00 +0000

It would be interesting to draw some parallels between Occupy Wall Street and a phenomenon that preceded and that fed the rise of Nazism and the ascension of Nazi power in Germany. That phenomenon was the post-World War I paramilitary Free Corps (Freikorps), or Freebooters.

When Germany lost the war, its army was disbanded, setting loose hundreds of thousands of German soldiers into a stagnant, debt-ridden, and government-controlled economy that had yet to begin paying the Versailles Treaty-mandated reparations that came to billions of dollars. Armies of Free Corps roamed the country, fighting pitched battles with the Communists. They probably decided the outcome of the German Revolution of 1918-1919. The common enemy of the Free Corps was the Communist Party. However, before the Weimar Republic was formed – and even after it had been installed – Germany was ruled by anarchy, with armed mobs of Free Corps and Communists clashing in city streets, with casualties in the thousands.

In early 1919 the strength of the Reichswehr, the regular army, was estimated at 350,000. There were in addition more than 250,000 men enlisted in the various Free Corps. Under the terms of the Versailles Treaty, Germany was required to reduce its armed forces to a maximum of 100,000. Free Corps units were therefore expected to be disbanded.

The parallels discussed here are not the social or even military ones, but the moral ones.

After World War I, the German Army was restricted to 100,000 men, so there were a great amount of soldiers suddenly de-mobilized. Many of these men were hardened into a Frontgemeinschaft, a front-line community. It was a spirit of camaraderie that was formed due to the length and horrors of trench warfare of WWI. These paramilitary groups filled a need for many of these soldiers who suddenly lost their "family"—the army. Many of those soldiers were filled with angst, anger and frustration over the loss and horror of the war. (Italics mine.)

What have we here? One could say that the protesters of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) have been addled by the “length and horrors” of, well, making a living. By having to earn their own keep. By dealing with a welfare state which they approve of but which they claim isn’t generous enough with other people’s money. Of being fed up with a Congress that doesn’t respond immediately to their “needs.” By being congenitally outraged by the alleged “pro-business” corruption and lobbying in Congress (but not too outraged by the Solyndra scandal, because that kind of taxpayer fraud and malfeasance is okay with them, it only hurts taxpayers, and it was for a “good cause” – all lobbying and cronyism forgiven). They are unfairly burdened by student loan debt (funded by taxpayers), personal lifestyle debt, and other annoyances.

The irresponsible, the indebted, the reckless, the hankerers after the unearned – that is their “family.”

So, there they are, brimming to their eyebrows with “angst, anger, and frustration.” Many of them are now infested with diseases and illnesses that soldiers during WWI actually contracted in those trenches. The OWSers complain about the police using pepper spray and using force (having to compel a protester to have his wrists restrained with plastic cuffs). Would they like to experience a dose of mustard gas, instead? How about having one’s body riddled by machine gun fire, or being blown to a dozen pieces by an artillery shell? Or being bayoneted? Of simply expiring in water-logged trenches from pneumonia or rickets or typhus? Or dying neglected in a body-strewn, crater-dotted landscape of No Man’s Land because medics couldn’t get to them for fear of being blown to bits, as well.

No, the OWSers have no taste for that kind of misery. Their misery has no antidote, no cure, no magic pill that would make the “pain” and “anger” go away except the expansion of government powers. Theirs is the pain of the unearned uncollected, the frustration of the entitled who cannot be satiated except by the slavery of those who must provide or subsidize the entitlement.

Occupy Wall Street was no spontaneous phenomenon, but a planned and organized instance of “community organizing,” on a scale that would make Saul Alinsky proud. It is orchestrated anarchy intended to cripple the “system,” careening towards whatever target its mobs reach a consensus to freeze, personalize, isolate, and polarize, angling for “confrontation” with the police that would put them in the role of “victims of violence” – when they are the initiators of force. One OWS chant is, “The whole world is watching.” Unfortunately for the chanters, what the world is watching is a farce, of the police not obliging the trespassers and profanities and noise by cracking skulls and water hosing the hordes. Which is what ought to have happened the first time OWS blocked a street or broke a window.

(Interesting side-note: secular leftists do not have a monopoly on Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals.” Islamist outfits like the Council on American-Islamic Relations, The Islamic Circle, and other Muslim “advocacy” groups already practice targeting and personalizing issues, and with growing success. They are masters of those rules.)

“Occupying” a public space and blocking its use by the public, however, is an initiation of force. Zuccotti Park in New York, for example, is a nominally private park open to the public. OWS closed it to all but its own. The whole world was watching while the filth accumulated in that park, while crimes like rape and theft and threatening local businesses occurred, while a “flying squad” of pillagers went on a rampage in Oakland, while hundreds have been arrested with kid-gloves and led away to school buses. One strongly suspects that what OWS was plotting and hoping for was a repeat of the violence of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. The news media were on the side of the left even back then. But, it hasn’t happened – not yet. It doesn’t even have a Tom Hayden to excuse, explain, and sanction their cause and its violence. On the surface, OWS has a central nervous system but no brain, no guiding agenda or petition of grievances except a desire to destroy and loot the ruins.

Also, on the surface, OWS does not resemble the pre-Nazi Free Corps. The rabble sports no uniforms, no semblance of military or other discipline, no decorum to speak of, no homogeneity of any kind. It is a conglomeration of slobs, wannabe criminals, punks, weirdos, women with bees in their bonnets and men with only half a deck of cards in their craniums. The variety of protest signs, usually scrawled on cardboard, and often revealing a profound illiteracy in spelling and grammar, testify to the unity of “angst and anger” and the triumph of a university education. OWS brandishes a variety of banners, including the American, but the Palestinian and Puerto Rican flags were also in evidence. On the whole, what OWS is rebelling against is reality, a reality their elective ilk have created.

But like the Free Corps, OWS is a kind of syndicate or an uneasy alliance of disparate collectivist causes and organizations. Some Free Corps upheld the Weimer Republic. Others fought to bring it down. OWS is an amalgam of communists, welfare state liberals, old school radicals, gray panther leftists, new age hippies, holders of worthless degrees, the professionally unemployed, the perpetually alienated, the clinically certifiably disgruntled, career vagrants, vehicles of middle class guilt, black power advocates, Muslims, anti-Semites, Hispanics of indeterminate national origin, unions, AmeriCorps manqués, Peace Corps veterans, environmentalists – all the bilious movements that mushroomed on the mulch of American educational philosophy, and that were prepared and sanctioned by grade and high schools and universities and patronized, idolized, and encouraged by the news media.

But while Barack Obama is blamed for OWS and its violence and health issues and the whole mess, it would be unfair to lay it all on his doorstep. Obama and OWS, like Tom Hayden and the radicals of the 1960’s and 1970’s, are a consequence of the collapse of philosophy and the disparagement of reason. OWS is merely the post-Woodstock, second wave of Borg raiders with bachelor’s degrees.

The protesters of OWS are prime cannon fodder, and perfect recruits for an American version of the Free Corps. We have seen how quickly they can be called up for “action”; that mobs of “Occupiers” sprang up almost simultaneously in cities all over the country testifies to the availability of so many aimless foot soldiers and to a committee or cabal of planners and “community organizers” working behind the scenes and who remain undiscovered and undiscussed by the news media. As we get further into the presidential election campaign, we will see more of this kind of “action.” The “interruption” of Michelle Bachmann’s speech in South Carolina by OWS, and the attempted storming of the Americans for Prosperity event in Washington DC, are but a taste of what is ahead – unless the planners decide that OWS has been a failure, even for the dereliction of responsibility of various municipal leaders of having let the movement grow out of control, as Mayor Bloomberg did in New York. He had Zuccotti Park cleared out – and then invited OWS back, sans tents, tarps, and other camping gear. As though that would make a difference.

The denizens of OWS can be organized into roaming and violent Free Corps. They can be taught discipline and minimal decorum. The SEIU, the UAW, and other strong-arm outfits can give them advice on logistics, manpower, and offer seminars on the art of news-hogging police provocation. They can be given any cause their philosopher-kings wish to give them, and most OWSers will be amenable to it. The news media will give the new Free Corps their blessing, and cheer them on from their insulated TV studios and round tables, and call it freedom of speech, when in fact OWS is an enemy of the First Amendment.

As with the German Free Corps and the consolidation of power that brooks no rivalry – the Free Corps SA was purged, while the Free Corps SS was elevated – there will be purges from OWS and a campaign to paint it in respectable colors. The purges won’t be pretty; there will be weeping and wailing and the gnashing of teeth. As with the non-violent Tea Party movement, it will seek to become an influential “voice” in Washington (not that it lacks such a voice now, as witness the endorsement of OWS by the POTUS, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and other America-changing activists).

OWS in this instance is merely an exploratory phenomenon, to see what will or will not be tolerated, of feeling out the “establishment” for weaknesses and sizing up its strengths. As of this writing, the “establishment” has no proven strengths to counter the intended terrorism of OWS but its own inertia. It has no philosophy of individual rights, of laissez-faire, of limited government, of an understanding of the purpose of government. Fundamentally, in the deepest sense, the federal, state, and municipal governments are one with OWS.

2012 will be a watershed election year. Chickens came home to roost in 1968. In 2012, it will be vultures who flock in large numbers to pick at the carcass of the American Republic.

Firebombing Freedom of Speech

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 13:14:00 +0000

There have been numerous fine articles condemning the November 2nd firebombing of Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical newspaper in Paris that dared mock Islam and front-paged a cartoon of Mohammad with the balloon caption, “One hundred lashes if you don’t die laughing.” Needless to say, this act of terrorism is just another instance of censorship by force.

Robert Spencer drew my attention to a November 2nd Time Magazine article by Bruce Crumley, “Firebombed French Paper is No Free Speech Martyr.” Crumley is Time’s Paris bureau chief. Spencer handily rebuts many of Crumley’s statements in that article in his FrontPage article of November 3rd, “Firebombing Free Speech in Paris,” and I won’t repeat them here.

Crumley, unfortunately, is merely indicative of the problem with the American press; in fact, with most of the Western press. Aside from its unabashed multiculturalist liberal-leftism and wholesome political correctness, and penchant for endorsing every welfare state piece of legislation, proposed or enacted, it has gravitated inevitably and obtusely into an ideological détente with that other major totalitarian contender, Islam. Before correcting Crumley’s dhimmitudal ramblings, however, there are precedents to revisit – numerous precedents – of that meek halal journalism and publishing behavior. Here are a few of them.

In October 2008 the offices of Gibson Square Books, a British publisher, were firebombed, causing the publisher to “suspend” publication of Sherry Jones’s The Jewel of Medina, a novel about Mohammad’s wife, Aisha. This was after Random House in New York scuttled plans to publish it in the U.S. after a University of Texas professor, Denise Spellberg, bird-dogged the novel, citing possible offense to Muslims, saying that it turned “sacred history” into “soft pornography.”

Random House then sent the manuscript to three Muslim scholars. Two said the subject matter could offend some Muslims. On May 21, Random pulled the plug.

So, on the basis of potential offense and imagined reprisals, Random House caved. Beaufort Books in the U.S. picked it up. The novel itself is of marginal literary value. Sequels to it are planned. One may as well have written a fictional account of the romantic life of Adolf Hitler and how he met Eva Braun. For the whole sorry history of the novel, see the Wikipedia entry here.

On November 2nd, Tom A. Peter, writing for The Christian Science Monitor, after a brief report on the firebombing of Charlie Hebdo, reprised three other “violence-provoking” incidents involving images of Mohammad. The article is interesting only because it goes to great pains to be “balanced” in its assessment of the value of the images as instances of freedom of speech, mentioning the advocates of freedom of speech but insinuating caution concerning the “sensibilities” of Muslims to such images. Recounting the reactions to the Danish Mohammad cartoons in 2005, Geert Wilders’s trial over his 2008 film Fitna, and the “Everybody draw Mohammad Day” imbroglio instigated in April 2010 by cartoonist Molly Norris (who has since vanished into the purgatory of unpersonhood on the recommendation of the FBI) over the South Park Mohammad in a bear suit episode, Peter thought it necessary to end each narrative with a “balancing” proviso. After the Danish cartoon story, he writes:

In an article explaining Muslim outrage over the cartoon, the BBC wrote that the cartoons fueled the “widespread perception among Muslims across the world that many in the West harbour a hostility towards – or fear of – Islam and Muslims.”

Ad libbing a line from Crumley’s article, one is tempted to say, “Well…yeah,” there is a hostility towards Islam and Muslims, and even a fear. After all, in whose name have 99.99% of the terrorist attacks over the last thirty years been made, but Mohammad’s and Islam’s?

At the end of his recounting of the Geert Wilders story, he felt it necessary to add,

In 2010 the far-right politician was put on trial for inciting hatred against Muslims in the Netherlands. In June of 2011, Wilders was acquitted. A Dutch court noted that his speech was legitimate political debate, but walked a fine line.

That “fine line” is drawn by whom? The Dutch judiciary, or by “radical” Muslims? And at the end of his squib about “Everybody Draw Mohammad Day,” he noted:

The stunt had a number of outspoken critics in the West who said the day was not part of a constructive discourse. “The problem with the ‘in-your-face message’ of ‘Everybody Draw Mohammed Day’ is not just that it is inconsiderate of the sensibilities of others, but that it defines those others – Muslims – as being outside of our culture, unworthy of the courtesy we readily accord to insiders,” wrote James Taranto in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal.

James Taranto made several other statements in that April 26, 2010 Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Everybody Burn the Flag,” that reveal the tenuous state of journalism’s regard for the First Amendment. In the op-ed, he quotes Ann Althouse, a University of Wisconsin Law School professor:

Our reflexive response to "Everybody Draw Mohammad Day"--which we too thought was serious, not having seen Norris's cartoon or her disclaimer--was sympathetic. But Althouse prompted us to reconsider. Here is her objection:

“Depictions of Muhammad offend millions of Muslims who are no part of the violent threats. In pushing back some people, you also hurt a lot of people who aren't doing anything. . .I don't like the in-your-face message that we don't care about what other people hold sacred.”

If depictions of Mohammad offend millions of Muslims, why? Because they look at them. Has anyone forced them to look at them? Or to read Sherry Jones’s novel? Or to watch Geert Wilders’s film? No. The issue here is not whether or not such things offend Muslims. The issue is that most Muslims lead such pitifully insular lives that neither the cartoons, the novel, or the film would have been noticed by them had not their “champions,” such as CAIR and university professors and dhimmified media brought the offending actions to the attention of these pious folk.

As noted above, Taranto ends his article with:

The problem with the "in-your-face message" of "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" is not just that it is inconsiderate of the sensibilities of others, but that it defines those others--Muslims--as being outside of our culture, unworthy of the courtesy we readily accord to insiders. It is an unwise message to send, assuming that one does not wish to make an enemy of the entire Muslim world.

Is not Taranto aware of the fact that America is already an enemy of the entire Muslim world, that the United States is Dar al-Harb, or the “Land of War”?

Yes, Islam and Muslims are outside American culture, which Taranto does not define, but which I will: it is the culture of individualism, of capitalism, of self-reliance, of being responsible for one’s own life and actions, of being left alone by state and religion – anyone’s religion. Islam reflects none of these qualities. Muslims who flaunt their “Muslim-ness” in dress and behavior in public do not reflect that culture. They are alien to it, and hostile to it, and I will say here and now that I am hostile to Islam and to anyone who submits to it or apologizes or defends it. Islam is anti-individual, and anti-mind. I stand with Jefferson who swore “eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." Islam is demonstrably an enemy of the mind. See my review of Robert R. Reilly’s excellent disquisition on the nature of Islam, The Closing of the Muslim Mind, about why Islam necessarily must suborn and sabotage independent minds.

Back to Bruce Crumley’s sniveling prudery. Robert Spencer, in a Jihad Watch article on the Charlie Hebdo firebombing, made a number of observations.

So Crumley's argument boils down to saying that we should capitulate in the face of violent intimidation. This is not really about being sensitive. It is about doing what the thugs want so they won't hurt us again.

Or even a first time, as Spencer experienced, together with Pamela Geller, when the Hyatt Palace Hotel in Houston and the Hutton Hotel in Nashville cancelled their talks about the perils of Sharia law in this country after the hotels received threatening calls objecting to their appearances.

Spencer later in the Jihad Watch piece scores Crumley for his suggestion that Muslims should be patronized and protected from “hate speech” or offensive cartoons because they haven’t the mental equipment to understand some basic principles:

There are millions of Christians in France even now. And their religion is routinely insulted and mocked on comedy shows, in movies, etc. Do they riot? Do they firebomb? They do not. And why not? Because they understand what civil liberty means. How ethnocentric of Crumley to expect that Muslims will never be able to grasp this point, and call for us to lower our expectations for them.

I must qualify my agreement with Spencer on this point. Frankly, my own expectations are low, not for any “ethnocentric” reasons, but because of the mind-altering drug of Islamic ideology, instilled in Muslim children at a very early age and administered to them in increasing dosages as they mature into adolescents and adults.

How else to explain second and third generation Muslims who never left France or Britain or the Netherlands but became “radicalized” “extremists”? Who was responsible for their “addiction” to Islam? All those humble Muslims one never hears about, “a lot of people who aren't doing anything,” as Ann Althouse put it. The parents and relatives and teachers of those “extremists,” firebombers, and other “radicals.” In lieu of forming rape gangs in Britain and the Netherlands, terrorizing Jews in Malmo, or taking over public streets in France for mass pray-ins, that is what those anonymous Muslim manqués do: turn their children into post-conceptual savages by having nothing to say about the violence of their ideological brethren. The creed forbids it. Submitting to Islam entails the Faustian bargain of self-censorship, and if such a bargain stigmatizes Muslims, so be it.

On the other hand, it would be fair to stigmatize Bruce Crumley as a dhimmi. Observe the wholly locker-room rap-session manner with which he begins his Time article:

Okay, so can we finally stop with the idiotic, divisive, and destructive efforts by “majority sections” of Western nations to bait Muslim members with petulant, futile demonstrations that “they” aren't going to tell “us” what can and can't be done in free societies? Because not only are such Islamophobic antics futile and childish, but they also openly beg for the very violent responses from extremists their authors claim to proudly defy in the name of common good. What common good is served by creating more division and anger, and by tempting belligerent reaction?

First of all, the “antics” of Charlie Hebdo are not “Islamophobic,” not in the sense that Crumley means. Expressing one’s satirical or even damning view of Islam is exercising one’s freedom of speech. The editor, Stephane Charbonnier, did just that, and in a country that is experiencing an inexorable conquest by Muslims. Crumley ought to know that, being Time’s Paris bureau chief and being a first-hand witness to that conquest. Charbonnier fears the Islamization of France. He does not equate Islam with freedom of any kind. That is not a “phobia,” but a justifiable worry. His way of expressing his objection to his country’s Islamization is satire. Mine is the written word. Our means differ, but our goals are the same: to expose Islam for what it is, a killer of freedom.

But Crumley would rather no one cause “division and anger” and tempt “belligerent reaction.” France, Denmark, Sweden, Spain, even the United States, should just expire quietly without making a ruckus and concede a caliphate. Those who value their freedom had better be divisive and angry. Muslims don’t have a monopoly on them.

As Spencer points out in his Jihad Watch and FrontPage articles, Crumley blames the victim for the violence. Just as Islamic terrorist groups and Muslim clerics and Muslim thugs do when non-veiled women are raped, Jews murdered, and hotels threatened when they don’t comply with the Islamic world-view of how things and people should be.

Crumley sticks out his tongue and chides the editor of Charlie Hebdo:

But do you still think the price you paid for printing an offensive, shameful, and singularly humor-deficient parody on the logic of “because we can” was so worthwhile? If so, good luck with those charcoal drawings your pages will now be featuring.

Not exactly adult behavior, is it? No camaraderie or journalist brotherhood or support in evidence there. Just nasty spitefulness. Crumley charges Charbonnier with wanting to provoke Muslims with the “Mohammad-edited” edition of Charlie Hebdo. Probably not. Charbonnier was exercising his freedom of speech. Crumley didn’t like the way he exercised it. Neither did the firebombers. An appropriate kinship.

Crumley isn’t satisfied with holding Charbonnier’s feet to the fire for having shown what he thinks of Islam. The Paris bureau chief is soured on France’s pathetic, draconian gestures of defiance against the Islamic occupation of the country. To him it’s an “over-heated issue” that can only drive Muslims crazy and make them feel alienated and “outside the culture.”

Because like France's 2010 law banning the burqa in public (and earlier legislation prohibiting the hijab in public schools), the nation's government-sponsored debates on Islam's place in French society all reflected very real Islamophobic attitudes spreading throughout society. Indeed, such perceived anti-Muslim action has made France a point of focus for Islamist radicals at home and abroad looking to harp on new signs of aggression against Islam. It has also left France's estimated five million Muslims feeling stigmatized and singled out for discriminatory treatment—a resentment that can't be have been diminished by seeing Charlie Hebdo's mockery of Islam “just for fun” defended as a hallowed example of civil liberty by French pols.

So, it’s better to not talk about growing Muslim arrogance, of the Sharia-governed, crime-ridden banuiles no longer under French law, of the reduction of non-Muslims to the status of second-class citizens in their own country for fear of inculcating division and anger. Crumley’s sarcasm makes one wonder whose side he would’ve been on during the Nazi occupation of France. What was the Noël Coward song? Don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans?

After an obligatory chastising memo to Muslims that they mustn’t let things like Charlie Hebdo get their goat and cause them to misbehave, Crumley pimps for censorship:

But it's just evident members of those same free societies have to exercise a minimum of intelligence, calculation, civility and decency in practicing their rights and liberties—and that isn't happening when a newspaper decides to mock an entire faith on the logic that it can claim to make a politically noble statement by gratuitously pissing people off.

Other Frenchmen might want to mock Islam and Muslims, too, you see, because intelligence, calculation, civility and decency have failed to stop Muslims from wanting to take over France.

Defending freedom of expression in the face of oppression is one thing; insisting on the right to be obnoxious and offensive just because you can is infantile. Baiting extremists isn't bravely defiant when your manner of doing so is more significant in offending millions of moderate people as well. And within a climate where violent response—however illegitimate—is a real risk, taking a goading stand on a principle virtually no one contests is worse than pointless: it's pointlessly all about you.

It wasn’t “moderate” Muslims who firebombed Charlie Hebdo, those “silent majority” manqués who have nothing to say about their more consistent colleagues. Crumley earlier mentions that “Muslim leaders in France and abroad also stepped up to condemn the action,” but apparently he has never heard of taqiyya, the art of Muslim double-speak. (Demonstration: Muslim cleric says to your face in English, French, Dutch, German, pick your language: “We condemn violence, we are for human rights!” Cleric turns to his companions: “He is an ape, a pig, a dog and not human. When the time comes, we’ll clean his clock, take his daughter, his wallet, his property, and his head, just as Mohammad did and said we must do, blessings and peace be upon him!”)

So, yeah, the violence inflicted upon Charlie Hebdo was outrageous, unacceptable, condemnable, and illegal. But apart from the “illegal” bit, Charlie Hebdo's current edition is all of the above, too.

I’ve read better journalism in The Rolling Stone. You expect to encounter this level of semi-literate smarminess and ignorance in the denizens of Occupy Wall Street, not in a national news magazine. And, as Robert Spencer emphasizes, what Crumley’s article boils down to is a call for censorship, for “responsible” discourse that won’t encourage Muslims to carry Molotov cocktails or bombs or knives to the debate. This kind of gagging will be accompanied by unspecified penalties for “risking” any kind of violence with words.

Crumley made a point in his article of asserting that one doesn’t have a right to shout “Fire!” in the “increasingly over-heated theater.” But suppose the heat is caused by actual fire, a conflagration set by Muslim arsonists? This scenario Crumley refuses to imagine. And if hot-headed Muslims did set the fire, he asks, who can blame them?

Crumley shouldn’t worry much about it, however. President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, The Muslim Brotherhood, and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation are all working assiduously but secretly to bring about the criminalization of freedom of speech. Words, images, and attitudes, after all, they claim, can be just as hurtful and injurious as bombs, fire, and knives at one’s throat.

Book Review: The Closing of the Muslim Mind

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 18:59:00 +0000

Even if one has read the Koran, or sampled its most outrageous verses, injunctions, and imperatives, or discussed Islam with other concerned individuals, nothing could better guarantee a fundamental and essential grasp of the utter irrationality of Islam than Robert R. Reilly’s The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamic Crisis.* This work can help one understand precisely why Islam is so intractably irrational and inherently violent. It renders irrelevant any hope or notion that Islam can be “tamed” or rendered “moderate” or redeemed as a benign faith.

What one will grasp is that Islam, that berserker ideology in a cilice rampaging around the world in pursuit of a global caliphate of totalitarianism, leaving countless dead and maimed and incalculable destruction in its wake, is irrational by intent, that is, it is explicitly, unapologetically, and irrevocably irrational and beyond the realm of reason. As Reilly brilliantly explains it, the Islam we know and fear today is a product of a deliberate, conscious rejection of reason, of causality, of reality, of comprehension.

No review of Reilly’s book would do it justice. Reilly has performed an intellectual feat and service of incalculable value. What follows here are merely highlights of some of the more salient points Reilly elucidates.

Reilly delves into the intellectual history of Islam, going back to the so-called “golden age” of Islam when it nearly conquered Europe, not long after Muslims had secured the Arabian Peninsula and spread their power over North Africa.

In this early jihad, Islamic thinkers and theologians encountered Hellenic thought: Plato, Aristotle, and the surviving works of other Greek thinkers. Reading these works opened up the minds of many of these men and allowed them to venture tentatively beyond the strictures of the Koran, the Hadith and other Islamic documents. Up until then, inquiry into the nature of Allah and the universe had not been an issue, because the minds of most Muslims were already closed to the possibility that the universe or reality was comprehensible and explainable.

Along came the Mu’tazilites who dared to uphold reason and claim that Allah was a benevolent god who meant well, rewarded a volitional man for his good or evil character and actions, and could be known, and that reason could lead men to a knowledge of him or his revelation. It is interesting to note (though Reilly does not dwell on the point) that the Mu’tazilites became influential under the Umayyad caliphate that existed a little after Mohammad’s death, became controversial and then dangerous, and fled to Spain where the school of enquiry thrived under the caliphate-in-exile of Córdoba (until extinguished, after a civil war, by its enemies, traditionally the Berbers of North Africa).

Reilly writes:

Most learned men in these sciences [medicine, mathematics, natural science, alchemy, and astrology], however, were also schooled in philosophy and theology, which meant that Muslim interest began to spill over into philosophical and theological issues. Muslims were also called upon to defend and advance their faith against Christians and others who used philosophical methods in their apologetics. Some Muslim converts in these new territories were already versed in Greek learning and prepared to deploy it on behalf of their new faith. Thus, by the late eighth and early ninth centuries, a new kind of discourse began to affect Islamic thought that had hitherto been largely doctrinal and jurisprudential. New words were created in Arabic to take in Greek concepts. Philosophy opened the Muslim mind in a way in which it had never been before in the spirit of free inquiry and speculative thought. It is at this juncture that the greatest intellectual drama of Islam took place.

Opposing them were the Ash’arites (and their doctrinal allies), who asserted that reason had no power to “know Allah” (or God), that reason could not lead to the revelation of his existence, and that it was an illegitimate means on which to found one’s faith in Allah. Of the two general schools of Islam at that time, the more consistent school won. These were the Ash’arites, who chose faith over reason and banished actual thought and speculation and deemed them heretical if not blasphemous. The less consistent school was the Mu’tazilite, because its proponents attempted to reconcile reason and reality with faith and a capricious and literally unknowable deity, Allah. Reilly narrates this conflict with an adeptness that belies the intricacies of the conflict.

The Mu’tazilites differed from their opponents in their teaching that God had endowed man with reason specifically so that he can come to know the moral order in creation and its Creator; that is what reason is for. Reason is central to man’s relationship to God….Therefore, reason logically precedes revelation.

The Mu’tazilites wished to retain a Supreme Being and at the same time claim that reason not only can aid man in his establishing what is good or evil, but that it must, among other things, aside from enabling men to lead virtuous lives of their own volition, lead to faith in God. The Ash’arites vehemently objected to this line of thinking, claiming that man is unable to formulate what is good or evil – chiefly because such an ability would allow men to hold Allah in judgment for his actions, and Allah, they claimed, is beyond judgment. Ultimately, they feared that men would even question Allah’s existence, if allowed to follow a logical train of thought.

The Ash'arites’ solution was to shut the door on all speculation and substitute literal faith and submission to the unknowable. To use novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand’s term, the Ash’arites argued in favor of a complete, universal, across-the-board “blank out.” They were the equivalent of the Islamic thought police, who answered to any queries about what was going on: There’s nothing to see here. Move along, or we’ll poke out your eyes.

Rand wrote:

Reason integrates man’s perceptions by means of forming abstractions or conceptions, thus raising man’s knowledge from the perceptual level, which he shares with animals, to the conceptual level, which he alone can reach. The method which reason employs in this process is logic—and logic is the art of non-contradictory identification. (“The Objectivist Ethics,” The Virtue of Selfishness, 20)

And:

The senses, concepts, logic: these are the elements of man’s rational faculty—its start, its form, its method. In essence, “follow reason” means: base knowledge on observation; form concepts according to the actual (measurable) relationships among concretes; use concepts according to the rules of logic (ultimately, the Law of Identity). Since each of these elements is based on the facts of reality, the conclusions reached by a process of reason are objective. The alternative to reason is some form of mysticism or skepticism. (“The Left: Old and New,” Return of the Primitive, 162)

Reilly explicates these observations and demonstrates how the Ash’arites waged a consistent and merciless campaign against man’s perceptual and conceptual faculties. They claimed, ultimately, as they developed and honed their arguments, that no one can be certain of his knowledge, because Allah has the power to change things whether they are stationary or in motion, that he controls everything’s existence from second to second, that he makes things exist, and can change their perceived nature at whim. An arrow flying through the air could wind up being a Playboy bunny or a flea. Furthermore, they claimed that Allah controls every atom in the universe – that he is the universe, and because he is beyond judgment of mortals, is essentially an amoral entity. Allah is pure Will. As Reilly demonstrates, Islam in its Ash'arite form is a species of pantheism.

The Ash’arites and their allies preceded philosophers such as David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Hegel and the rest by a millennium. The Ash’arites motive in opposing the Mu’tazilites differed not a whit from Kant’s, who fashioned a brain-cracking system of philosophy to save religion from the Enlightenment. The Ash’arites wished to save Islam from the first steps away from faith and mysticism.

The Koran itself was central to the dispute between the Mu’tazilites and Ash’arites. The Mu’tazilites contended that the Koran was an act of creation by man via Mohammad. Thus it was open to correction and interpretation. The Ash’arites contended that the Koran and Allah are one and the same and had always existed. They were a single unity. They were eternal and so could not be changed, corrected, or interpreted. To say otherwise was to suggest that Allah could be changed, corrected, or interpreted. Which, of course, is heresy or blasphemy.

One must ask oneself: So, the Koran was never “created” but always existed and was Allah himself, inseparable in “unity,” and Allah won’t be merciful if you burn one in protest? Was the original Koran a mass of rolled-up parchment? Or a book? Or an iPod?

And the Hadith? Wikipedia notes that “Hadith were evaluated and gathered into large collections during the 8th and 9th centuries. These works are referred to in matters of Islamic law and history to this day.” So, the Hadith is a collection of rumors, gossip, and apocryphal sayings and episodes of Mohammad collected long after his death. Can you imagine Muslim scribes having a lot of fun making this stuff up in the Koran and the Hadith? Picture the comedic ancestors of Jay Leno and Dave Letterman: “Did you hear the one about Mohammad and Aisha…?”

As Reilly explains it, in contrasting the Mu’tazilite position that God does not have reason but is reason (and therefore can know good and evil and instruct man in what are good and evil), with the Ash'arites’ position:

Therefore, He cannot do anything unreasonable. This is not a constraint; it is freedom. The ability to negate who and what you are is not freedom; it is nihilism. For the Ash’arites, however, God, as pure will, is not bound by anything, including Himself. His freedom of will is absolute. He has no ‘nature’ to deny. He has reason, but is not reason. Therefore, by removing God’s attributes from His essence, the Ash’arites made these attributes products of His will. In other words, God was not mercy, but merciful when He wished to be. Likewise, there was no impediment to His acting unreasonably when He wished to do so.

The Mu’tazilite position is closer to the Christian idea of man’s relationship with God, as an individual in charge of his own life, thinking and actions, with God conceived as a deity who wishes him to be good and who establishes comprehendible moral behavior (in order to save his own, and not anyone else’s soul). The Ash’arite position requires that individuals erase their own identity to merge themselves with a “community” whose sole purpose is to submit to and worship Allah, who is not beholden to any comprehensible measure of morality, his own or man’s. (One is strongly reminded of the Borg Hive in the Star Trek TV and movie series, in which Borg-conquered races are given two choices: absorption and assimilation into the Hive to serve it without thought, or death.)

Free will, volition, thought, choosing to be moral or not (according to Koranic injunctions, that is) – these are the bane of the Ash’arites’ version of Islam (chiefly the Sunni or Saudi brand, Reilly does not focus on the Shi’ite side of Islam). This is the brand of Islam that dominates the Muslim world today.

No injustice can be conceived on the part of Allah because, according to al-Ghazali, justice means performing an obligation – something that would cause serious harm if not performed. God has no obligations, and cannot be harmed. Good and bad, justice and injustice, pertain to whether something achieves or frustrates a purpose. Since God [Allah] has no purpose, these terms are superfluous to Him. He can do anything, and there could not possibly be any blame. As the Qur’an states, ‘He cannot be questioned concerning what He does’ (21:23.

And:

If Allah is pure will, good and evil are only conventions of Allah’s – some things are halal (permitted/lawful) and others are haram (forbidden/unlawful), simply because He says so and for no reasons in themselves. Evil is simply what is forbidden. What is forbidden today could be permitted tomorrow without inconsistency. God, in short, is a legal positivist.

This explains the ubiquity of beheadings, mutilations, child marriages, wife-beatings, censorship, 9/11, suicide bombers, and every jihadist atrocity on record emanating from the Muslim world. The Koran, which is one with Allah, says so; ergo, it is to be without question or hesitation or reference to any moral code whatsoever.

The Immanuel Kant of Islam was Imam Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali (died 1111), who pounded the final nails into the edifice of Islam as we know it. In his various works, according to Reilly, he codified Islam’s final and permanent stance on all matters, personal, political, and social, including what he claimed was the ephemeral nature of reality itself. Man perceives reality through the evidence of his senses, but because Allah controls not only what man perceives but his means of perceiving, reality is illusory, because Allah can change things at will. For man, there is not even a “primacy of consciousness” (as opposed to the primacy of existence, which is the rational position) that allows him to see things as they are not or as he wishes. At first glance, that would seem to be the privilege of Allah. Reilly writes of the Ash’arites:

They began with a conclusion received from revelation, and then deduced what they thought was necessary to support it in metaphysical terms. This drove them to abandon causality in the natural world. In short, the Ash’arites were compelled by their theology to deny reality.

But the possibility of Allah “seeing things as they are or are not” would mean that reality is apart from Allah, whether or not he created it. This the Ash’arites would not allow. Only Allah is “conscious” and everything is him. Ergo, he is conscious only of himself and of everything he “created.” But this is too “logical.” Allah “created” nothing. He just was and everything in the universe just was. This conception of Allah obviates the concept of time, of eternity, and even the argument from the primacy of consciousness. Allah is just “the One.” Period.

Reilly relates that al-Ghazali compared reason and the evidence of the senses to dreams. When one awakens from a dream, once “…in that new sphere you will recognize that the conclusions of reason are only chimeras.” Reilly remarks:

Of course, speculations such as these reduce everything to gibberish and make it impossible to think. Once you negate the reliability of the senses and jettison the principle of contradiction, all meaningful discourse comes to a halt.

It should not be surprising that Reilly writes that al-Ghazali, towards the end of his life, having dispensed with reason, rationality and reality – with epistemology and metaphysics – found solace and refuge in Sufism, or a “spiritual” union with Allah which required not the intellect or the mind or theological sophistry, but “experience” or pure emotion. Writing about al-Ghazali’s conversion to Sufism, Reilly notes:

This, then, was not so much an intellectual as a spiritual exercise. “It became clear to me that the last stage could not be reached by mere instruction, but only by transport, ecstasy, and the transformation of the moral being.” Therefore, says al-Ghazali, “I saw that Sufism consists in experiences rather than in definitions, and that what I was lacking belonged to the domain, not of instruction, but of ecstasy and initiation.”

This is the Islamic version of “rapture,” in which emotions are used as tools of cognition. To “be one” with Allah one must have a temporal “out of body” experience, and lose one’s mind. Allahu Akbar, indeed. If the 9/11 hijackers were really “perfectly united” with Allah, if Allah had predestined 9/11, and if everything and every human action was of a piece and non-discrete, then Islam ought to be condemned as the most nihilistic faith that ever was. But, then again, Islam is more an ideology than it is a faith.

I have very few reservations about Reilly’s opus, and they are so minor I will not mention them here. The only major fault with his book is that it does not include a glossary of Arabic and Islamic terms. One does tend to lose the train of thought if one encounters such a term several pages after a first encounter, and must hunt it up again.

That being said, The Closing of the Muslim Mind should be required reading for anyone who hopes to argue effectively against Islamic jihad. I think it would also be indispensible in formulating arguments against statism and collectivism, for many of the fallacies, mystical, and collectivist concepts to be found in the book have doppelgangers in modern secular political and philosophical thought. If you can grasp the insidious nature of Islam in Reilly’s book, grasping the ends and means of Obama, the Democrats, and their own jihadist agenda for this country then ought to be a cinch.

*ISI Books (Intercollegiate Studies Institute), Wilmington DE. 2010. Paperback 2011.

Occupy Wall Street’s Declaration of Dependence

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 22:31:00 +0000

If the unwashed and odiferous masses of Occupy Wall Street – that less than one percent of the American population, most of whom are at work and do not have the free time to camp out in public or private parks – originally gathered to protest a grab-bag of disparate, alleged and imagined offenses, they are now getting direction from the undead of the Left. Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is being given guidance by those who know what they want. Power.

The election of Barack Obama in 2008, together with a single term in the White House, with good luck and good premises, may be looked back upon as the Last Hurrah of the Left in this country. Obama literally campaigned on his own “occupy” mantra: OWH. Which he did, and trashed it, too. The Left has been the ideological vessel of socialism and tyranny. It fooled no one, not even its exponents. It had been found out, exposed, and repudiated, more by the failure of People’s Republics worldwide, including the Soviet Union, which ran out of economic steam, and Red China, which retained the trappings of Communism but turned fascist, than by any argument offered by the Right.

Reality repudiated Communism and every other form of collectivism. And always will.

The allegedly unemployed of OWS have it all wrong: the economy is not fascist, Wall Street is not by nature fascist, and a chief problem with today’s economy is that the government is in it. OWS wants it to take over the economy. Which would mean the end of the economy.

If they want a taste of genuine fascism, they ought to apply for a job in China. There they would get a taste of “crony capitalism” but wouldn’t be allowed to “occupy” Tiananmen Square to protest it. Not after what happened there the last time, when genuine freedom-fighters were brutally dispersed, maimed or killed by tanks, and rounded up and imprisoned for life. The heroes of Tiananmen Square erected a Statue of Liberty as their symbol of defiance. The OWS adopts a percentile in a vague silhouette of George Washington as a claim on the wealthy and on anyone else who earns more than $20,000 a year.

Obama gave the Left’s dead battery a jump-start. Until the current administration, the Left as a motivational force was dying a deserved death. Now the redistributive clunker is merely sputtering, coughing, dying and reviving, trying to stay alive. Its ideological carburetor is unequal to the task of reconciling the air of its ideology with the gasoline of reality, and must be struck repeatedly with a two-by-four to get it working again. Its spark plugs fire haphazardly, and half of them are dead. Its tires are bald. Its transmission needs rebuilding.

The Tea Party movement called the administration’s and Congress’s policies for what they were and continue to be: political and economic clunkers, unsafe at any speed and liable to die anytime, anywhere. If it moves at all, it is only because there are a pair of donkeys in harness, disguised as politicians. Obama and Congress still insist that the clunker is salvageable and that Americans pour more and more money into it to keep it running.

Cash for Clunkers? Remember that Obama-inspired scam? The catch now is that you give Congress and all the federal bureaucracies the cash, not the other way around. There’s not even a figment of a trade involved. Just expropriation, regulation, and tyranny.

This is a clunker that should be sitting on cinder blocks in Arkansas, right next to the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, with a bronze plaque affixed to its rusted bumper: HERE LIES WELFARE STATISM. GOOD RIDDANCE.

OWS wishes Congress or the government to give everyone cash as an entitlement, or at least a guaranteed job. Where is the money to come from? The Bureau of Printing and Engraving. To pay for what? Whatever the members of OWS wish to have – provided they can find it to buy, for if they get their way, there won’t be much left on store shelves to buy. All those evil corporations will have perished or been nationalized.

OWS can be taken as not so much a Last Hurrah as an inarticulate, spittle-spewing, obscene gesture to everything its denizens hold malice for. The “99% Declaration” is an â la carte prescription for socialist rule. “Democratically” adopted and enforced, it would be the end of “democracy,” or rule by “the people.” It would pave the way for a French Revolution-style directorate of dictators in which “the people” have no say.

This in turn would pave the way for a man on a white horse. Or a palomino pony. Or on another unicorn.

Section IV of the “99% Declaration” contains twenty clauses that call for a complete takeover of the economy. The first three abolish the First Amendment vis-à-vis election campaigns.

1. Elimination of the Corporate State. Implementing an immediate ban on all private contributions of money and gifts, to all politicians in federal office, from individuals, corporations, "political action committees," "super political action committees," lobbyists, unions and all other private sources of money or thing of value to be replaced by the fair, equal and total public financing of all federal political campaigns. We categorically REJECT the concepts that corporations are persons or that money is equal to free speech because if that were so, then only the wealthiest people and corporations would have a voice.

And what happened in November, 2008? Was or was not Barack Obama, who sympathizes with OWS, elected by these same people? Did or did he not have the help of the Mainstream Media? Did or did not major corporations and wealthy individuals contribute millions to his campaign chest? Are they still not donating? And, since when was money ever equal to free speech? Is this is just a sloppy metaphor? If all federal political campaigns were to be totally and exclusively “publicly financed,” by what measure would a federal election committee determine who was qualified to run for office, and who was not, whose petition of signatures was acceptable, and whose was not? And if only corporations and the wealthiest have had a voice in politics, why is the country sliding perilously close to complete socialism, in which they would be nationalized, eliminated, imprisoned, or shot out of hand?

There is no such thing as a “corporate state.” All that exists now is an omnivorous federal government determined to absorb everything.

2. Rejection of the Citizens United Case. The immediate abrogation, even if it requires a Constitutional Amendment, of the outrageous and anti-democratic holding in the “Citizens United” case proclaimed by the United States Supreme Court. This heinous decision equates the payment of money by corporations, wealthy individuals and unions to politicians with the exercise of protected free speech. We, the People, demand that this institutional bribery and corruption never again be deemed protected free speech.

It does no such thing as “equating.” The Citizens United case is a special bugbear of OWS, but we should never expect the lights of OWS to examine anything closely enough to get at the truth. Hans A. von Spakovsky, in his article, “The Occupy Wall Streeters – Destroying the First Amendment,” clarifies this issue:

The claim that the Citizens United decision allows payment of “money by corporations” and unions to politicians is a myth that liberals and campaign reformers continue to spew. Corporations and unions are prohibited from making campaign contributions to politicians by federal law, and that law has not been overturned by the Supreme Court (although some would argue that it should be overturned by Congress).

Citizens United held that the First Amendment prohibits Congress from censoring the political speech of any entity, and that includes independent expenditures that fund political speech. That decision is in the greatest traditions of liberty and free speech, the most fundamental principles upon which this country was founded.

Furthermore, apparently OWS cannot imagine the prospect of any politician or any advocacy group spending millions to broadcast or publicize its issues, and an individual not being convinced or persuaded on any specific issue. In fact, Obama spent millions on his election campaign, but I was not convinced, persuaded, or even duped by his rhetoric. Quite the opposite.

3. Elimination of Private Contributions to Politicians. Prohibiting all federal public employees, officers, officials or their immediate family members from ever being employed by any corporation, individual or business that they specifically regulated while in office; nor may any public employee, officer, official or their immediate family members own or hold any stock or shares in any corporation they regulated while in office until a full 5 years after their term is completed; a complete lifetime ban on the acceptance of all gifts, services, money or thing of value, directly or indirectly, by any elected or appointed federal official or their immediate family members, from any person, corporation, union or other entity that the public official was charged to specifically regulate while in office. In sum, elected politicians and public employees in regulatory roles may only collect their salary, generous healthcare benefits and pension. Any person, including corporate employees, found guilty and convicted of violating these rules in a court of law by proof beyond a reasonable doubt, shall be sentenced to a term of mandatory imprisonment of no less than one year and not more than ten years.

I have a much, much simpler proposal: get the government out of the economy. This means forbidding the government to fund anything but national defense and the courts and the bare minimum expenses of operating Congress. Abolish all subsidies to private enterprises and companies. Abolish most of the Cabinet, especially the Departments of Education, Energy, Agriculture, Commerce, Interior, Labor, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, and Transportation. None of these offices and attendant bureaucracies has any legitimate purpose in a limited government. Keep the Copyright and Patent offices; they perform legitimate, rights-protecting functions. Abolish all civil service unions. Abolish 99% of the various rights-violating, regulatory bureaucracies.

Abolish House and Senate salaries and all special, protected perks and privileges, and pay Senators and Congressmen on a per diem basis, for the expenses incurred in getting to Washington to represent their constituencies as briefly as possible; grant them closely audited meal allowances and board at a Super 8 Motel. I’m betting that an argument could even be made against that fillip. The goal of all this abolishing would be to discourage any political ambition but the desire to protect and uphold life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness.

The balance of the “99% Declaration” is so predictable as to be dull reading. It cadges other, non-OWS proposals for term limits. It calls for a “fair tax code,” as though any tax code is “fair.” But from a collectivist’s perspective, OWS’s “fair tax” seeks to soak the rich and expropriate the wealth of those who are also not in the “1%.” It demands health care for all or the adoption of the single-payer system, completely omitting mention of the status of those who are to provide such health care: doctors, surgeons, nurses, and other medical personnel who presumably would be drafted into government service and paid pittance. We all know how that idea was received by doctors. Very few were willing to labor in a “ready reserve.”

The Declaration comports with environmentalist ideology by making Mother Earth a party to the proposed national general assembly of OWS. The clause citing a demand for debt reduction, given the amounts of money it would take to bring OWS’s fantasy world into existence, is an exercise in reductio ad absurdum. Point Nine demands jobs for all Americans. As whose employees? Doing what?

9. Jobs for All Americans. Passage of a comprehensive job and job-training act like the American Jobs Act to employ our citizens in jobs that are available with specialized training and by putting People to work now by repairing America's crumbling infrastructure. We also recommend the establishment of an online international job exchange to match employers with skilled workers or employers willing to train workers in 21st century skills. In conjunction with a new jobs act, reinstitution of the Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps or a similar emergency governmental agency tasked with creating new public works projects to provide jobs to the 46 million People living in poverty, the 9.1% unemployed and 10% underemployed.

In short, make everyone a public employee, dependent on what public service jobs are available in a statist, command economy and on what some bureaucrat or “czar” determines is a livable wage. Private jobs, providing such an economy doesn’t first collapse, will be few and hard to find. And regulated.

The Declaration demands universal, across-the-board student loan forgiveness, to be paid for by socking it to Wall Street with a “reparations” surcharge. After all, didn’t you know, Wall Street caused the economic collapse of 2007-2008. Well, no, it didn’t. It was government meddling in the economy with subprime mortgages and the like.

Displaying their ignorance, the authors of this point forget, if they ever knew, that student loans have been rising for decades with the cost of higher education. And who is funding that rising cost? The federal government, by inflating the currency and causing schools to compete for those extra tuition dollars. With what consequence? Graduates in a variety of specialties and studies that have little or no value in the private sector. Graduates who are barely literate and have no thinking or critical skills, which were beginning to be erased from their minds in grade and high school.

The Declaration demands the immediate passage of the Dream Act. That is, its authors wish the ballot boxes to be stuffed by illegal immigrants who vote early and often.

There are six other “demands” in the Declaration, all worth a critique, but one of the last ones exhibits a special species of ignorance. It demands that the Federal Reserve Bank be ended. Yes, end the Fed. Get the government out of the economy. But, excuse me, your personships, the Fed is not “privately owned.” It is a creature of government, and it regulates banks. This ending of the Fed, says the Declaration, should be in conjunction with a moratorium on foreclosures. And mixed in with the demand to abolish the Electoral College – the last safeguard against populist tyranny and the democracy the Founders so feared – it advocates the creation of national identity cards under the ruse of voter registration.

It is nearly laughable that the unwashed masses of OWS are now complaining about crime in Zuccotti Park, and about freeloaders and the certified “homeless” who have found a hassle-free nest, free food, and refuge among its malodorous ranks. After all, OWS advocates freeloading as a right. It is the perfect model for anarchy, complete with ineffective “security” and the Woodstock spirit of free sex, unlimited drugs, noise that passes for music, uncollected garbage, hepatitis, syphilis, bugs, and rats. One wonders how many of these people in the future are going to be crowding into “free clinics” demanding to be cured of whatever maladies they picked up in Zuccotti Park.

All in all, the “99% Declaration” is nothing less than an appeal for dependence on government and an explicit surrender to anyone who lusts for power.

Occupy Wall Street: An Axis of Enemies

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 23:22:00 +0000

A number of stark contrasts should be noted between the freedom of speech and assembly as practiced by Occupy Wall Street and Pamela Geller.

On the one hand, Occupy Wall Street (OWS) has literally taken over a piece of public property near Wall Street in New York City by force of its protesters and with the tacit sanction of the city and its mayor, Michael Bloomberg. OWS has made itself not only a public nuisance, but an unsanitary and dangerous one.

OWS has attracted every collectivist, socialist, communist, environmental, and even anti-Semitic loon to its cause. It is a grab-bag of “movements,” ranging from the call for the “reform” of Wall Street (meaning its abolition) to the persecution of Jews. If you are “anti-establishment” and have a gripe against “the system” – whether you are a WalMart employee, an unemployed, a welfare recipient, a trust fund tyke, unsure of or unhappy with your gender, a pal of the Palestinians, an indebted career student, a Facebook socialist, a son or daughter of Woodstock, a public employee, an SEIU or UAW thug, an “artist,” “writer,” or “musician,” a fan of Farrakhan, a New or Old Black Panther, a Jew against Israel, a Muslim against Jews, an anarchist, a neo-Nazi, a Marxist, a Trotskyite, or something in between – OWS is the place to go and be.

The Sugar Land Tea Party reserved a conference room at the Hyatt Place Houston/Sugar Land Hotel to hear Pamela Geller, prominent anti-jihadist and anti-Sharia advocate, speak last week on the subject of the dangers of stealth Sharia and stealth jihad in the United States. The Hyatt abruptly, with little or no notice, cancelled the event, originally citing “security reasons.” The Sugar Land Tea Party rushed to find another venue for the event, a community center. What security reasons did the hotel name? “Complaints” by Muslims that Geller’s explanation of Sharia law constituted “hate speech.”

The Mainstream Media (MSM) has drooled over, cooed about, and coddled OWS, providing it with free publicity it could never afford to pay for itself and implicitly approving of its multitudinous aims. It is tantamount to inveighing against prostitution, but demonizing the “johns” and painting the prostitutes as “victims of the system.” The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (aka Communist Public Brainwashing, “funded by viewers and taxpayers like you”) through its outlets of NPR and PBS is standing in the corner, treating OWS “neutrally” as though it were a volcanic eruption or an outbreak of salmonella, but not questioning the legitimacy of the protest.

All one hears from OWS, however, is “hate speech” directed against the rich, against corporations, against Jews, against capitalism, against freedom. This is “hate speech” approved by the MSM, while anyone who criticizes Islam, Sharia law, or anything remotely Arabic is branded an “Islamaphobe” or a “racist.”

Some protesters, apparently, are more equal than others. This is how things are done and said on America’s own Animal Farm, a leftist fantasy park that exists only in the minds of the MSM.

Had Geller a right to object to the Hyatt cancelling the venue of her talk? Did the Hyatt’s action constitute suppression of speech? Did it violate her right to speak?
Nominally, the Hyatt exercised its right to cancel the venue, because the hotel is private property. If someone or some organization uses another’s private property as a “soapbox” to promulgate specific views, it is with the tacit or express permission of the property owner. But Geller was not going to address her audience about the wisdom of buying gold stocks, life insurance, or new computer technology. Nothing as mundane as that. She was going to speak on the perils, inequities, and insidiousness of Sharia. This is an ideological subject, not a “practical” one. The Hyatt may have been indifferent to the subject. It is reflective of the “What? Me Worry?” attitude most American business executives exhibit when confronted with important moral and ideological issues.

That indifference ended when the local chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations mounted a telephone protest against the event, causing Hyatt to think twice and withdraw the venue. Hyatt executives then became “worried.” In concrete terms, the Hyatt did not violate Geller’s First Amendment rights. But seen in a broader context, Hyatt’s action contributed not only to the suppression of her freedom of speech by CAIR and its fellow Hamas- and Muslim Brotherhood-spawned organizations – dhimmis make such useful, facilitating proxies – but of its own, and in doing so advanced the agenda of Islamists to gut the First Amendment guarantee in order to protect itself from legitimate criticism and exposure.

Such is the stuff American businessmen are made of today. Can you imagine what would not have happened had the colonials who gathered on Lexington Green, upon only hearing the distant tramp and cadence drums of approaching British regulars, said among themselves: “Uh, do we really want to do this? I mean, they can bomb our homes, harass our customers, make life miserable for us if we stand here. They got us out-gunned anyway. What’s the point? We got crops to tend to. I’m out of here.”

OWS, on the other hand, not only does not face the kind of obstacle and censure that Geller, Robert Spencer, and other writers about Islamic jihad and Sharia, but has been given a free hand by the MSM and various municipal governments, and without recrimination, retribution, or rebuttal, to slander, libel, trash, and spit on all the hands that feed its yelping, chanting, non-producing, parasitical minions, and make their sorry lives possible – corporations, investors, innovators, taxpayers, and even government.

Is the hand of President Barack Obama to be seen in OWS and the Hyatt back-down? One cannot but help suspect that the answer is Yes. Here are some interesting threads:
Obama “sympathizes” with OWS. He is on “their side.” This is his kind of “community action.” It follows the prescribed methodology and tactics of Saul Alinsky Rule No. 13 to bring about “change” or “reform”: Identify, isolate, freeze and escalate.

"I think it expresses the frustrations that the American people feel," he said Thursday. "People are frustrated and the protesters are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works."

This is Alinsky-lingo dressed in the pinafore of political verisimilitude.

“The most important thing we can do right now is those of us in leadership letting people know that we understand their struggles and we are on their side, and that we want to set up a system in which hard work, responsibility, doing what you’re supposed to do, is rewarded,” Obama tells ABC News.. “And that people who are irresponsible, who are reckless, who don’t feel a sense of obligation to their communities and their companies and their workers that those folks aren’t rewarded.”

)
Obama tried to equate the anti-big-government sentiments and civil behavior of the Tea Party rallies and town halls with Occupy Wall Street. It is his version of the Bronx Cheer:

The president also compares the protesters to the Tea Party. “In some ways, they’re not that different from some of the protests that we saw coming from the Tea Party," Obama says. "Both on the left and the right, I think people feel separated from their government. They feel that their institutions aren’t looking out for them.”

Frankly, the government isn’t separated enough from Americans. There is hardly a realm of action in which the government does not set the terms or make life more expensive and complicated. Americans who value their freedom do not want their government looking out for them, except to protect their individual rights. They want to be left alone, not nurtured, regulated, and throttled from cradle to grave.
It is the rabble of OWS who wish to be wards of the government. Read their signs. Listen to their chants. Observe their behavior.

So, even if the Democratic National Committee actually has had no hand in the fomenting and growth of OWS, a sanction from the highest office in the land is culpability enough.

It should not be surprising that Islamist supremacists wish to share the stage with socialist supremacists. In too many photos of OWS in New York and of “occupations” in cities around the country can be seen men wearing Yasser Arafat-inspired keffiyah around their necks. These photos predated news of an Islamic sanction of OWS. Their presence among the rabble also comports with OWS signs that call for the end of the “occupation” of Gaza. Do we detect a smidgen of double-standards here, concerning “occupations”? Yes, but don’t tax an OWS protester with it. These people wouldn’t know a double standard if it bit them in their butts.

It is only a matter of time that we will see photos of neo-Nazis marching, chanting, singing, sign-waving, harassing, defecating, urinating, shoulder-to-shoulder with Islamist supremacists, flaunting their neo-Nazi swastika banners. Think that’s impossible? Think again. Rocky Suhayda, head of the American Nazi Party, assured his members it was okay to join OWS, even though there are “non-whites” taking part in OWS:

In a message posted Thursday on its official website, organization head Rocky Suhayda said members of the “pro-white” movement should join and support the Occupy demonstrators because they share a common enemy: The “Judeo-capitalist banksters.”

Suhayda said though many “racialists” are concerned about the demonstrations because the “many protesters are non-white and/or ‘communists,’” that shouldn’t matter because they are all against the same “evil, corrupted, degenerate capitalist elitists.”

“… Even Adolf Hitler’s NSDAP had to vote with open communists on some issues to achieve their goals. WE need to utilize and support every movement of dissent against this evil American empire, regardless of which end of the political spectrum it originates from.”

Most people do not know that Hitler also stooped to dealing with those “racially degenerate” Arabs (who were as bad as or worse than those Jewish-led communists!) when it came to eradicating Jews. He had a close relationship with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and planned with him a Mideast version of the Holocaust.

Now, the Hyatt Hotel chain is owned or controlled by Penny Pritzker. Geller mentions her in her article about Hyatt’s dhimmitude. Pritzker is another billionaire on the Obama bus. She was his national campaign finance manager in 2008. She oversaw the Superior Bank subprime mortgage scandal. She was recruited to donate money to Obama’s campaigns. She is still active for Obama, serving on a committee to raise (more) money for his 2012 reelection campaign.

President Obama's close relationship with Warren Buffett goes back to his Illinois Senate run; now the billionaire investor is helping Obama not only on the tax fairness front, but in fund-raising for his 2012 re-election bid. Buffett hits Chicago Oct. 27 for a $35,800-per person dinner and reception.

The host committee includes Obama's major Chicago based finance team: Jim Crown, Vicki & Bruce Heyman, Mellody Hobson Steve Koch, Penny Pritzker, John Rogers Jr., David Scherer.

Who are all those people? Rich people. But the kind of “1%” rich people OWS studiously neglects to excoriate or curse. But, don’t bother pointing out the contradiction to the protesters. Contradictions are beyond their grasp, excised from their minds by “reformist” educators in public schools and in the universities.

My betting is that Pritzker ordered the Houston Hyatt executives to scratch Geller’s event. Word got to her, she was appalled (“I won’t allow hate speech to be spewed on my properties!”), or was warned, or was advised, and out went the order.

Occupy Wall Street is an in-plain-sight, transparent vortex of every collectivist and totalitarian cause and movement that ever befouled American soil and that ever assaulted American liberties. “Soaking the rich,” ending property rights, collectivizing or nationalizing all property, can only lead to across-the-board censorship, the end of freedom of speech, and the scuttling of the First Amendment. There would be no private property left on which to advocate or oppose anything. Pamela Geller insists on exercising her freedom of speech. Occupy Wall Street and all its enablers, supporters, allies, and financiers insist on ending it.

That is “Polarization” with a capital P. Anyone with an ounce of self-respect and who values his life, liberty, property, and pursuit of happiness, should be for it. After all, there is no “coming together,” no reconciliation, no “common ground” possible with OWS or Sharia law. They are both the mortal enemies of America.

The Naked Apes of Wall Street

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 02:06:00 +0000

While immersed in the 1920’s to complete my latest detective novel, chickens came home to roost on Wall Street. Also, wannabe hippies, yippies, union thugs, and the countless clueless who went to “occupy” Wall Street because they had nothing better to do. I watched and read with dismay the trashing of that short but great street as hundreds, then thousands blocked it, trashed it, yelled at it, probably urinated on it, and then camped out on Zuccotti Park. Or rather, took it over.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the “Duke of New York,” has not ordered the police to clear out the park. He has not called in companies of riot police armed with shields, batons, and Mace. He has not brought in fire engines to hose the barbarians, not so much to give them much needed baths, as to drive them off into custody. But then Bloomberg endorses the Ground Zero Mosque. Perhaps he likes the new “Camp of the Saints.”

The mainstream media has done its best to sanction and egg on the “protestors.” The only objective reporting on the continuing outrage can be found in the non-MSM. From Brian Williams to Diane Sawyer to Matt Lauer, the yelping and gesticulating and sign-carrying on Lower Manhattan amuses them, encourages them. It is provocative and newsworthy. The Occupiers of Wall Street get a free pass, references to the American Revolution, and sonorous sympathy, something the MSM never gave the Tea Party.

To reprise the MSM’S role in perpetuating the alleged “spontaneity” of the occupiers’ “freedom of expression” would be redundant here. Much has been made by the non-MSM of the hypocrisy of the occupiers. Daniel Greenfield of Sultan Knish is especially on top of the irony of thousands of trust fund beneficiaries protesting the system that makes trust funds possible, and has written a number of perceptive pieces on the character of the protesters and of the phenomenon. Kelly O’Donnell of Canada Free Press exposes the bogus “spontaneity” of the masses of Zuccotti Park by tracing its funding and organization to that Marxist billionaire, George Soros, its endorsement by William Ayers, the former Weatherman bomber, and other notorious notables. All this ground and more have been covered by those not distracted by the task of finishing a novel.

What I would like to do here to present The Naked Ape. I saw a picture somewhere of the protesters on which someone had written all the product names of the things worn and used by the protesters: the cap from Gap, the cameras by Sony, shoes by Nike, the iPods by Apple, and so on. In short, the protesters were protesting the corporations that produced those objects and which helped to facilitate their protest.

Now, governments produce nothing but forms and other kinds of paperwork, and even here government printing offices rely on technology and methods they never originated and could not improve on. The Congressional Record, the Federal Register, White House invitations, and your dollar bills all have their roots in some individual’s or private corporation’s innovation. All the desks, equipment, technology, family pictures, pens, pencils, glass in the windows, rugs, paint on the walls, insulation, flags, memo pads, etc. in any given politician’s office are all privately produced. Not even the military develops its own weapons; that task is farmed out to independent contractors in the private realm. There’s no such thing as a government tank factory or munitions farm.

I will take that photograph one step further.

Picture a protester, fully dressed, armed with his cell phone, iPod, perhaps with a poncho rolled up in his backpack along with toiletries and other necessities.

Take away his cap – his shirt and tee-shirt – his watch – his jacket – his backpack and all is contents – his sweater or sweatshirt – his cell phone – his camera – any other gizmo he has become dependent on to communicate with his pals or to see what else is happening on Facebook, Twitter, Linked In and other social sites – his wallet – his pants – his underwear – his socks – his shoes – his shaving instruments – his deodorant (if any) – his hair cut (if he has had one) – his pill box, nasal spray, inhaler, chap stick, or whatever else enables him to breathe without difficulty – his childhood inoculations – his cigarettes – his lighter – his plastic packet of whatever else he may smoke – his glasses or contacts – his tent – his sleeping bag.

Take away his cardboard sign and the length or wood or plastic it may be affixed to, if it is affixed to anything. Take away the marker or pen or spray that printed the words on it.

No Starbucks. No Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. No Zuccotti Park-cooked pasta and stir-fried veggies. Maybe cockroaches. Or silverfish. Or dead rats. But nothing prepared in defiance of Mother Earth. No Poland Spring water. No plastic water bottles at all.

And what have you? You have a naked ape. A protester against corporate greed, an advocate of expropriating wealth and the means of production.

Picture a woman and do the same to her. No hairspray, either. No make-up kits. No dyes. No lipstick. No tampons. No nail polish. No clothes. No gizmos. No signs. Nothing.

And there is the female of the species.

Don’t avert your eyes. Multiple those two images by the thousands, in Technicolor. Pack them all together on Wall Street or Broad Street or Broadway, and what have you?

A frightening, noisy, intimidating mob stripped of everything they are protesting against. A George Romero-like Dawn of the Dead. A phenomenon more repellent than a canvas by Pieter Brueghel the Elder of peasants cavorting in the mud. Coming at you, the middle class, the bourgeoisie, the producer of wealth. The owner of wealth. The property owner. The honest wage-earner. The hot dog vendor. The cabbie. The investor. The industrialist. The inventor. The risk-taker. The gainfully employed in any private capacity. The self-employed. The bill-payer. The tax-payer. The savings account owner. The rich. The modestly well-off. Aspirants to being rich or modestly well-off.

Coming to get you, because the naked apes are none of those things.

They are coming at you and for you. If you don’t join them, and apologize, and hand over your property, your wealth, and your life, and join, not their “99%,” but their actual 0.83%, they intend to kill you. So said one protester during the Oakland “occupation.”

Lout: S—t…won’t be exactly how you want it. S—t’s gonna change. You don’t know what’s gonna happen….

Tea Party interviewer: What do you do with the people who don’t want to change their beliefs, or don’t agree with you?

Lout: Kill ‘em. (“Just kiddin’,” he added with a chuckle, but it was too late. His answer came instantly, eagerly, and from the gut.)

Lenin wasn’t kidding. Nor was Hitler. Nor Stalin, nor Mao or Pol Pot. It’s anyone’s guess that Obama isn’t kidding, either. Or William Ayers. Or George Soros.

So, it isn’t a matter of hypocrisy. It’s not an issue of venality. That is not what the protesters are primarily guilty of. It is of allowing themselves to be brainwashed so thoroughly by their educators that they can no longer think. Their brains have been automatized or programmed to repeat whatever their teachers wished them to think. If they are protesting anything, it should be their government-mandated, state-commanded, and bureaucrat-tailored education.

They should be protesting the government’s involvement in their lives and in their futures. By extension, they should be protesting in favor of private property, wealth accumulation, individual rights, and for getting the government out of the economy.

Instead, they are demanding more of what has stunted their minds. And they believe – not think – but believe that impoverishing everyone will compensate for their imagined persecution and purported downtroddeness and make things right and level so that no one will envy anyone else. Their obvious and enervating malice was bred in our schools as surely as Pavlov’s dog was conditioned to drool.

Do not bother asking them to know cause and effect. Syllogisms are beyond their ability to grasp. To them, there is no cause and effect. Things just are. The universe is causeless. Human action is causeless. The unskilled laborer, with nothing to offer the world but his muscles and capacity for mindless routine, is the source of all wealth, which the rich and the industrious and the innovators have somehow stolen from him. Steve Jobs’s personal net worth was $7 billion. He should have been made to exist on a ditch-digger’s wage, and to give them their iPods and other gizmos, too. So they have been taught. All differences in wealth and standards of living are inequitable and unjust, they were taught. The solution is to abolish all equity and the concept of justice.

So, imagine that army of naked, gibbering, wild-eyed apes heading in your direction. John Dewey and a host of other Progressive educators set them loose. And they were made possible by Immanuel Kant, Heidegger, and other philosophers. Karl Marx? He was a Johnny-Come-Lately heir of Kant and Hegel.

Ideas have consequences. And there they are, in Lower Manhattan, occupying it.

Not So Wonderful a Life

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 22:03:00 +0000

At the risk of the accusation of my being a curmudgeon, a Grinch, overly analytical, and a person who was likely raised on a diet of sour grapes and Castor Oil, what follows is a critique of that hoary old American cinematic Christmas holiday chestnut, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). I have never liked the movie, but have watched it many times, obsessed with the problem of why I did not like It’s a Wonderful Life (IAWL).

In fact, originally, after my first exposure to it, which I think was at the age of twelve, I took as personal exception to it as I did later to Arthur Penn’s Bonnie & Clyde (1967) or Robert Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump (1994). It is an essay I have wanted to write for years. Other literary tasks postponed it. That I tackle it now is in the way of a birthday present to myself. Also, most stores have already hung up their Christmas decorations and begun stocking Christmas merchandise, although we are still a month away from Thanksgiving. I am writing this far ahead of time, so I can enjoy the Christmas season.

To begin, I left a comment on an Andrew Klavan Pajamas Media article, "Why Left-Wing Artists Should Not All Be Put to Death,” of October 10, 2011:

Mr. Klavan concludes: “To take a strictly leftist or conservative approach to culture is to live half blind. Trust in God and affection for mankind demand, it seems to me, that we allow every life that is not vicious to live itself out in its own way.”

I don’t think it’s profitable to take a leftist-conservative approach to the arts, either, although what he claims is the “conservative” perspective is perplexing. Klavan cites It’s a Wonderful Life and Bonnie & Clyde as excellent films, but they are both vicious. The Stewart movie is better made, and for that reason is more vicious than is the latter, which is pure leftist propaganda that obviously glorifies criminals as “rebels” against the supposedly capitalist establishment (thus the lingering, slow-motion ambush of Bonnie and Clyde), at a time when FDR’s socialist programs were being implemented and which perpetuated the Depression. The Stewart movie, however, glorifies selflessness and the “community” and surrendering one’s ambition to the needs of others, and ends with an eerie “bail-out” of George Bailey and the Bailey Savings & Loan – eerie because it presages the Obama-Democratic economic policy, with everyone “chipping in” to save George from financial ruin and being arrested for embezzlement, malfeasance, and other financial crimes.

So, the conflict is not primarily political, but moral, and as a novelist myself (and as an atheist), I am at odds with both leftist and conservative artists. In strictly moral terms, Mr. Klavan shares the moral values that leftists tout in literature and on the big screen. It also explains why Republicans are ineffectual when going toe-to-toe against Democrats on any issue; the Democrats want a selfless, “community” oriented society NOW, with the “rich” soaked with taxes and industry burdened with onerous regulations, and “essential” services provided free; the Republicans say, yes, that’s fair, but not so fast.

One reader castigated me for being so harsh on IAWL.

It’s been quite awhile since I’ve seen the movie but as I remember, there is one BIG difference between what they did and what Obama does. The people in the movie were coming together to help a neighbor of their own free will, Obama just takes to “help” those he thinks need it more than we do whether we want to or not. As I remember, the banker was set up because he had been helping his neighbors during bad times. He was not making loans knowing they wouldn’t be paid back but was making loans to people he knew would pay them off as soon as they could when bad times turned around.

I replied:

It’s a Wonderful Life is one long ode to altruism and living for others. Every time George Bailey is about to escape Bedford Falls and into the wider world, something keeps him there, and in every instance it’s his feeling that it’s his “duty” to surrender his life to others’ needs. So, he never did what he had dreamed of doing, and the question is open whether or not he was just dreaming and didn’t really mean it, or if he was a true victim of his own mixed premises. His mother is a piece of work, too, literally pushing him in the direction of Mary (the Donna Reed character), a homebody (home from college) whom she knows will probably kill whatever chance he has of escaping. The “evil” Potter character is merely a caricature of capitalism. Most of the principal characters do get to escape Bedford Falls, but return to live banal lives. And the moral of the end of the story – depicting all the town citizens “volunteering” to help George – is that this is what everyone, everywhere is supposed to do. What isn’t depicted is that if they prospered at all, it was at the expense of George’s life and values. So, that’s why I say the film is insidious and vicious.

The other reader had no answer to that.

Let us count the ways George Bailey was betrayed, stymied, or prevented from following his dreams, exhibiting some independence, or realizing his ambition:

• George is about to leave town to spend time on a tramp steamer to “see the world” when his father dies. He stays to save his father’s business, Bailey Savings & Loan, which otherwise will fall into the hands of his father’s nemesis, Henry Potter, the town banker. His brother Harry has just graduated from high school and has won a football scholarship and is leaving town. George agrees, reluctantly, to run the business to keep it out of Potter’s hands.

• Years later Harry Bailey returns from college, a football hero and married to a woman whose father has offered him a job “doing research.” Harry assures George that he’ll run Bailey Savings & Loan while George goes to college. This is doubtful, because Harry’s wife doesn’t look like she would be willing to settle down in Bedford Falls and allow her husband to pass up a chance to work for her father. This conundrum is not depicted or resolved, except by implication.

• George, standing outside his home while everyone else is inside celebrating Harry’s return, looks out of sorts, as though he knows he’s doomed to stay in Bedford Falls by doing the “right thing” and letting Harry accept his father-in-law’s job offer. His mother comes out and tells him Mary Hatch is back from college, too. It’s clear that she wants to marry George off to Mary, and literally pushes him in the direction of Mary’s house. George goes off screen, but returns in a second going in the opposite direction.

• After wandering aimlessly around town (at one point ogling a passing girl, and having a less than inspiring encounter with Violet Bick, the town flapper), George nevertheless gravitates towards Mary’s house, and ends up proposing to her (more or less). Why he should do this is never explained. At the same time, a former Bedford Falls boyhood friend, Sam Wainwright, who did leave town and has attained some kind of success, calls from New York and offers George a chance to run a factory.

• But George by now is emotionally committed to marrying Mary. It is in this same scene that he verbally renounces any ambitions he might have had that would allow him to leave town. His commitment to Mary makes little sense, because the only previous contact between George and Mary, at least what we are shown, was at Harry’s high school dance, during which they fall into the swimming pool beneath the gym dance floor. Walking home, George flirts with Mary. Then Peter Bailey, the father, dies. In the next scenes, George is shown agreeing to stay in town to save the Savings & Loan, but before which he expresses a resolve to leave town, saying to the board of directors, “you can do with this thing what you want.”

• When George and Mary are about to leave on their honeymoon in New York, the stock market has crashed and there is a run on the Savings & Loan. It is George’s decision to go back to the Savings & Loan. He and Mary sacrifice their trip to stop the run, offering their honeymoon money to pay depositors.

• George has some success with the Savings & Loan. Potter offers him a job that will allow him to “see the world” outside of Bedford Falls, a handsome salary, and other perks. George, initially tempted, turns down the offer because, after all, Henry Potter is the villain who probably drove his father to his grave. Potter is depicted as a “greedy businessman” who wants to control the whole town. George, however, is a kind of crusading “community organizer” who has defied Potter. In the meantime, George is settled into married life and has children. He is doomed to stay in Bedford Falls. Family responsibilities, you know.

• World War II does not interrupt George’s life in Bedford Falls. Many of his friends go off to war, but George is passed up by the draft because of his “bum ear,” an injury he sustained when he saved his brother Harry’s life years before in the frozen pond. Harry is now a war hero, being awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor by the president, and the town is preparing to welcome him home. \

• Uncle Billy, in Potter’s bank, unknowingly gives Henry Potter the Savings & Loan deposit during an episode of braggadocio. Potter does not return it. The money remains missing. George panics, calls Uncle Billy a “drunken old fool.” He goes to Potter for help. Potter gloats and threatens to report him to the authorities. In a state of emergency, George turns against his family, as well. He concludes that his only way out is to commit suicide and let his family collect on an insurance policy.

This is when Clarence the angel intervenes.

So, there is the sequence of events leading up to the miraculous denouement of IAWL

Some correspondents have objected to my critique of IAWL. Their liking of the film is based largely on an emotional response to the ostensive benevolence exhibited in much of the story. One friend suggested that perhaps George Bailey changed his mind about wanting to build bridges and skyscrapers and so on, and decided he would be happier staying in Bedford Falls running the Savings & Loan. Ergo, there is no justification for condemning the movie. But this is a fallacious defense.

One can't judge a fictional character by what he might have done, one can only judge a character by what his creator has shown. Ayn Rand in one of her articles did that with Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, in the opening scene with Keating on the porch, recasting Roark as a naturalistic character to show him a as completely average person who placed value on what others thought, was unsure about what he wanted, respected Keating's opinion of him, and so on.* She demonstrated that the recast Roark would have made the rest of the novel literarily impossible and literally incredible (if she had left the rest of the novel intact).

And, hypothetically, if she had originally stuck with that recasting, and written the novel from that one scene, logically Peter Keating would have emerged as the "hero" (as a champion of pragmatic compromise), and not Roark, because, as she notes, Roark would not have withstood the first crisis that came along and would have caved. The novel would have dispensed with the necessity of a Gail Wynand and Toohey. In fact, it would have dispensed with plot. As for Dominique, if Rand had kept her consistent with her original depiction, she couldn't have fallen in love with Roark and have had her conflict with him, because there wouldn't have been any distinction between Roark and Keating. Hypothetically, by the time Dominique enters the story, there would have been no Roark at all.

But my point here is that while the reader or viewer can project possibilities on a fictional character; one must accept what the artist shows about the character, because that's what the artist has created and intends people to see. One can append one’s own metaphysical value judgments to what an artist has created, but it won’t change the metaphysical fact of the artist’s creation. One can only accept the artist's metaphysical value judgments, and judge for oneself whether or not they're a value.

I’m sure there are artists or art critics, for example, who think that Michelangelo’s statue of David could have used a little more work, say, by turning David’s head a tad, or slightly altering the position of his legs, or mellowing the expression on his face. But they, too, must accept David as Michelangelo created him. (Such “editing” of the David is less horrific than what many so-called artists have done with the image of the statue, such as adding a baseball cap, or boxer’s shorts, or running shoes – those alterations fall into the category of desecration.)

As for George Bailey's marriage to Mary, that whole aspect of the film is a reflection of the common notion that love is "blind" and inexplicable and causeless. I was never able to see any reason why he would want her, and suddenly express that love in her mother's house, in the scene after Harry comes home and pulls a guilt trip on George (the brother has just revealed that he's married and has a great opportunity to "do research" for his father in law -- not in Bedford Falls, either). The brother claims, however, that he'll stay in town and run Bailey Savings & Loan as a kind of implicit favor so George can leave town, but we never see George deciding to stay in town to allow his brother to leave with his wife to work for her father. It just happens.

And what's Mary's conception of an ideal man, someone she'd want to marry? Because we aren't shown much of that, either, we can only conclude that her ideal is a man who selflessly surrenders his life to others in the altruistic tradition and who would never pose a problem to her by being anything other than what he is. Not exactly a Dominique Francon, nor even a Gail Wynand. Given what's shown about George, that's the only conclusion I can arrive at, why Mary would want George and not the clownish "Hee Haw" Sam Wainwright who calls from New York to offer George a chance to leave town. Remember also that during that call, Wainwright derides Bedford Falls and the Bailey Savings & Loan.

I don't think Frank Capra's motives were so innocent. Don't forget the device of Clarence the angel, who shows him Bedford Falls as it would have become if George hadn't been there to save it from Potter. Why it was imperative or necessary for Bedford Falls to become a pit of vice and corruption isn’t explained. It's a pretty dark alternative Bedford Falls, and reveals Capra's estimate of men and the value he placed on living a virtuously altruistic life (which was, according to Capra, necessary to save the town), that without a George Bailey, the townspeople would be naturally miserable and degraded and in thrall to "evil" capitalists like Henry Potter.

Capra’s “alternative” Bedford Falls is a by-the-book, dogmatic, Marxist conception of life under capitalism in a small town in which its savior had never been born.

Everything I've discussed here is based on what Capra showed, and not what I projected his characters might have done otherwise. I must accept Capra's conclusions or evaluations, and not fiddle with them. And I've never accepted Capra's conclusions or his artistry. I can only critique them without attempting to rewrite them.

The benevolent aspect of the film is what I believe most people fall for. It makes viewers feel good. But “feeling good” is not a proper measure or guide to judging whether or not a thing is “good.” And here’s why: The sudden concern of the townspeople about George Bailey’s predicament is an instance of what Rand called “package-dealing.” George has surrendered all his alleged important values (and I stress alleged – no matter how many times I view the film, I’m never quite sure that they are important values to George) in order to allow everyone else in town to attain theirs. That alone was a death sentence. It does not comport at all with another principle Rand articulated: the trader principle.

On “package-dealing,” Rand noted:

[Package-dealing employs] the shabby old gimmick of equating opposites by substituting nonessentials for their essential characteristics, obliterating differences.

And:

“Package-dealing” is the fallacy of failing to discriminate crucial differences. It consists of treating together, as parts of a single conceptual whole or “package,” elements which differ essentially in nature, truth-status, importance or value.

The well-wishing for George by the townspeople and their showering him with money to replace the missing Savings & Loan deposit (stolen by, who else? The evil banker) attempts to obliterate the observable fact, demonstrated throughout the whole film, that George sacrificed his values for theirs, that they are the beneficiaries of that ongoing sacrifice. Add the Christmas spirit of good will to all men to the picture, and the package-dealing is successful.

As for the townspeople “giving back” to George, after he’s “given” so much to them, that’s also a twist on Rand’s idea of package-dealing. It’s the Bill Gates “giving back” morality in reverse.

All together, it’s Hitler in a Santa Claus suit. Or Stalin. Or Obama. I never bought the message that it was better to give than to receive, and never will.

Did Frank Capra know what he was doing? Did he plan every little detail of It’s a Wonderful Life with the intention of fobbing off a package deal? I very much doubt it. There is no such creature as an “evil genius,” only men who are adept at taking advantage of their victims’ ignorance, blindness, fallacies, or faulty premises. Capra, like many other capable directors then and now, was merely a receiver of the culture’s ideas, not an intellectual or an originator of ideas. And the ideas he received but never questioned were largely altruist and collectivist. But being a passive receiver of those ideas doesn’t let him off the hook. Unlike his George Bailey, Capra had the choice to think.

Well, that’s off my chest. Now I can turn back to more important work. Have a nice Thanksgiving, Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year.

*See Chapter 7, “Characterization” in The Art of Fiction: A Guide for Writers and Readers, ed. by Tore Boeckmann (New York: Plume-Penguin, 2000), pp. 63-65.

Attack Watch: An Unintended “Talking Point”

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 21:51:00 +0000

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

In June of 2009, the White House launched an “inform on your fellow Americans” email campaign. It was subsequently and immediately swamped beyond capacity with ridicule, anger, and mockery by Americans who were offended by the suggestion that they are just naturally untrustworthy and coveted their neighbors’ homes, bank accounts, lawnmowers, and wives. The campaign’s purpose was to cajole Americans to rat on anyone who bad-mouthed Congress’s socialist healthcare plans. It was a short-lived experiment. When one goes to that particular White House website, one finds a blank page with a Jobs Act banner atop.

Fortunately, the words of that infamous campaign have been preserved in past commentaries:

“There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors travel just beneath the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.... Scary chain emails and videos are starting to percolate on the internet, breathlessly claiming, for example, to ‘uncover’ the truth about the President’s health insurance reform positions.”

Now we have Son of Snitch, a.k.a. “Attack Watch,” copyrighted, no less, by “Obama for America.” And it looks like it’s going to suffer the same fate. It is not so much “scary” as astonishingly obtuse. Word no sooner got out that Attack Watch was up and ready for Americans to “report” smears, inaccuracies, and lies about the White House agenda, than the site was deluged with countless responses, most of them of a “Tonight Show,” Jay Leno-monologue caliber.

You can’t make this stuff up, unless you’re George Orwell composing a novel about kids turning in their parents for being thought criminals. What’s that slogan the Department of Homeland Security dreamed up? “If you see something, say something.” Attack Watch is perfectly in line with that brand to proactive “patriotism.”

Of course, after reporting unauthorized “talking points,” one can also donate money to the White House’s reelection campaign, run by the Democratic National Committee. Highlights from the Attack Watch site include:

Immigration Reform Inaccuracies: Republican media figures have accused President Obama of refusing to deport hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants.

Israel and Middle East Falsehoods: President Obama’s opponents have falsely suggested that the President has not been a strong ally to Israel.

Gun Control Gossip: Public figures have made outlandish claims that President Obama is planning to use a United Nations treaty to take away legal firearms from gun owners in the US.

TARP Bank Bailout Smears: Attacks claiming the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) was signed into law by President Obama are factually incorrect.

Opponents are using smears to undermine the success of President Obama’s auto rescue. Get the facts.

Well, yes, Americans want to get the facts, but the last place they should hunt for them is in the White House. There, facts are scarcer than roses on Venus. Allow me some ribaldry:

The White House refuses to deport hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants because they’re going to be virtually the only people who will vote Democratic in 2012.

The White House is a strong ally of Israel. It wants Israel to return to its pre-WWII borders, that’s all it’s asking.

The White House isn’t against the private ownership of BB guns and water-pistols. Or even paintball guns. The United Nations has said nothing about those weapons.

TARP was not the White House’s idea. It was President Bush’s. He signed the legislation, not the current occupant, who simply continued his predecessor’s policies. And Congress’s. Do not blame the current occupant of the White House if TARP is a shambles and a scandal!

On a more serious note, any chief executive who would recruit a nation’s citizens to report on the speech of other citizens, regardless of its form or venue, is indicative of an individual who has violated his oath of office, and who would not feel constrained by the Constitution to act to punish anyone for speaking his mind. This is aside from the executive’s allegations that what others are saying about him or his policies is true or not. It is not the legitimate function of the executive branch of our government to behave like a human litmus test or a philosopher’s stone.

It is not the function of that office to establish any one truth, but to acknowledge a truth. If certain policies are being “attacked,” that is in the nature of politics. Policies are not exempt from debate, discussion, or criticism. What Attack Watch seeks to accomplish is the obfuscation of truth.

And the truth about the efficacy, ineptness, or destructive nature of those policies is a natural “talking point” of all American citizens, in and out of office.

Our Post 9/11 World: A Ten-Year Retrospective

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 19:13:00 +0000

New York, Sept. 11 – The new World Trade Center towers, now six years old, rise in a silvery shimmer over lower Manhattan, both fifteen stories taller than the originals, commanding a plaza and an assortment of lower towers. In the daytime, only the plaza, chock full of figures hurrying purposefully on their numerous errands, gives evidence of the unseen commerce that occurs inside the fully occupied towers. IRT and PATH trains rumble through the lower levels of the plaza. Taxis rarely idle for long in the three designated cab stands that border the plaza as they skitter in and out of what seems like yellow conveyor belts of business, dropping off and picking up passengers. Bands, orchestras, and soloists usually occupy the small, sunken amphitheater; the plaza is rarely without music. Vendors serve hot dogs, knishes and ice cream from kiosks and wheeled carts. Dozens of stores, restaurants and fast food shops populate the plaza’s lower levels, even a movie theater and a bookstore.

One unkind critic of the sleek new twin towers wrote in The New York Times, before they were completed, that together they looked like a giant tuning fork. But another critic, writing for The New York Post, said they were reminiscent of Winston Churchill’s “V” for victory sign. If the original towers collapsed because of the heat of an inferno, what replaced them was an inferno of controversy that resulted in the resignation of a governor, the dissolution of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation racked by scandal, corruption, and favoritism, and the relinquishment of the property by the Port Authority to a syndicate of private developers dedicated to building a new World Trade Center “as tall or taller.”

Where the oddly sculptured globe once sat in the original plaza is a modest, circular black marble plaque, enclosed by an oval pool with calming, splashing fountains. The plaque contains the engraved names of all who died here that awful day a decade ago. Benches ring the front of the pool, and are usually filled with tourists and office workers from the towers at lunchtime.

Similar modest memorials were erected in front of the repaired Pentagon, and in the Shanksville, Pennsylvania field where passengers on the flight died fighting to regain control of a hijacked plane destined to crash into either the White House or the Capitol Building. It has never been determined which was the hijackers’ target, although authorities are certain that the White House was the intended target. Monitored Al Qaeda communications repeated the query, “Is he dead yet?” They could only have been referring to President Bush, who fortunately was not in the White House that day.

The Attack

That day! Ten years ago, on September 11, 2001, the United States was attacked on its own soil by agents of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, and Iraq. Complicit in that attack, or at least aiding and abetting it by supplying resources, training, sanctuaries, and “foot soldiers,” were key enablers, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Nearly 3,000 people died in the attack, mostly Americans, including the passengers on the hijacked planes that slammed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and that Pennsylvania field.

Everyone can remember the response of everyday, rank-and-file “moderate” Muslims: in Gaza, in Iran, in Cairo, in London, in Paris, in Indonesia, in Patterson, New Jersey, in Brooklyn, New York, in Dearborn, Michigan, celebrated, passed out candy, danced in the streets, and shouted their hatred for the U.S. Their spokesmen and leaders put on pious faces and published solemn-sounding regrets, but did not chastise their collects of celebrants.

Two days after the attack, in a stirring, televised speech to Congress and the American people, still reeling from a greater loss of American life than the country had suffered during the attack on Pearl Harbor sixty years before, President George W. Bush assured the nation – and the world – that the “parties responsible for the attack will regret and rue the day they decided that this country had lost its resolve to exist as a free and sovereign nation. It will act to defend its citizens and its shores.” He did not name the suspected “parties,” nor did he specify what actions would be taken.

But everyone knew the identities of the suspected “parties.”

The governments of all Western nations sent their condolences: Britain, France, Italy, and most of the European Union nations. Many announced plans to hold remembrance days in honor of all those killed by the 9/11 hijackers. Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal presented New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani with a $10 million check, on one hand claiming Saudi Arabia was with the U.S. “wholeheartedly,” but on the other blaming U.S. policies for the attack.

During his visit to the wreckage Thursday, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal called the Sept. 11 terrorist attack "a tremendous crime" and said the suspected mastermind, Osama bin Laden, "does not belong to Islam."

But in a written statement handed out by his publicist, the prince said: "At times like this one, we must address some of the issues that led to such a criminal attack. I believe the government of the United States of America should re-examine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stance toward the Palestinian cause."

“Ingratitude”

After reading this statement, an angry Giuliani returned the check, stating that the attack was not merely criminal, but an actual declaration of war in which Saudi Arabia was complicit, if not an active party. “Crimes,” said the mayor during a press conference at the site of the smoking, jagged piles of the World Trade Center, “are committed by individuals or gangs. Wars are declared by belligerent nations and by the victims of such belligerence. This was a declaration of war on us. We will not apologize for our policies, nor will we shrink from our duty to avenge the deaths of all those who perished in the attacks – mostly civilians – nor will we fail to demand the immediate and worst possible punishment.”

Giuliani was roundly criticized for calling the attack an “act of war,” which only the President and Congress can do. He was accused of “grand-standing” and exploiting the catastrophe for his own political gain. President Bush held his tongue and did not gainsay the mayor’s usurpation of his and the Congressional prerogative. Giuliani was to be proven correct in the following days.

Prince Talal, feeling offended by the rejection and by Giuliani’s remarks, gathered together his entourage and flew back to Saudi Arabia. His publicist issued another brief press release in which Talal said he felt “profound ingratitude.” A poll conducted by The New York Post of New Yorkers revealed the general sentiment about the prince’s departure. “Good riddance.”

The world held its breath. It did not need to hold it for long. The retribution was swift, terrible, and permanent. The remembrance ceremonies and proposed minutes of silence, premature in their conception, were cancelled. It was, as one liberal pundit put it in a daze of astonishment, “the shortest war in human history. And the cruelest.”

He was wrong about it being the shortest. That ranking goes to the Anglo-Zanzibar War of 1896, which lasted thirty-eight minutes. Still, another pundit retorted, “And the most just!”

A Declaration of War

On September 15th, President Bush asked Congress for a declaration of war. He named names. With only six dissensions, Congress approved the declaration. And the clock began ticking.

Christopher Hitchens, writing as a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, adopted that theme in a column which did not please the literati or the news media, but which got him invited to the White House for dinner with President Bush (and later, in 2004, earned him a Medal of Freedom):

“The clock is ticking, as inexorably as the clock in High Noon. We don’t know what Bush has planned, and we are all biting our nails while we wait and create patriotic bumper stickers and try not to think of all those people jumping to their deaths from the World Trade Center tower rather than be roasted alive. But this much is clear: It’s Marshall Will Kane who’s on the train, coming to wipe out Frank Miller and his gang. It’s Frank Miller who's watching the clock this time, and his pals and the cravenly accommodating citizens of Hadleyville are debouching for anywhere in the wastes of Arizona rather than stay in town. Forgive me, Fred Zinnemann, wherever you are, but I couldn’t resist.”

Everyone was familiar with the names of the guilty “parties.” The first was Osama bin Laden, an expatriate Saudi sheik who was the head of Al Qaeda and the mastermind of the attack. He immediately boasted of the attack within eight hours of the collapse of the World Trade Center, fulfilling a prophecy he had made years earlier. The boast, recorded on a cassette tape that made its way by anonymous couriers to the Arab news network, Al Jazeera, was soon filling the screens of countless American television sets. This was a grave error. The image of the unkempt, bearded face taunting Americans with an arrogant demand for submission, simply stoked fires of determination fiercer than those that incinerated the hapless passengers of the hijacked planes.

Hiding in an Afghan village in the Swat Valley, bin Laden for two months maintained radio contact with his sympathizers and enablers in the Pakistani government and in Kabul. On November 4th, when our intelligence had confirmed his location and that of his enablers and protectors in Pakistan, the village was vaporized with a battlefield nuclear projectile mounted on a drone fired from a nuclear submarine patrolling the Indian Ocean, the Patrick Henry.

A great hole was dug in the middle of Karachi when three more of the missiles, launched consecutively by the submarine, were targeted on the Pakistani intelligence headquarters. Stealth bombers also reduced to glass Pakistan’s nuclear fuel processing plants and much of its nuclear weapons arsenal. Pakistan subsequently descended into an anarchy which continues to this day. India’s military has turned back hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis looking for refuge in India, often having to fire on crazed mobs. It is thought that all of bin Laden’s lieutenants, including the hierarchy of the Taliban, perished in the Afghan blast, because nothing has been heard from bin Laden, Al Qaeda or the Taliban since then.

On the same day, Kabul, capital of Afghanistan and held by the Taliban, was similarly razed.

On September 22nd, in response to Prince Talal’s statement about the Palestinians, Bush ordered all U.S. subsidies terminated to Gaza and the West Bank. Al Fatah, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Palestinian Authority immediately and jointly attacked Israeli settlements with rockets and suicide bombers. Israel’s IDF responded by reducing Gaza and the West Bank to rubble with coordinated counter-attacks. Palestinian forces and their terrorist allies were decimated. Palestinians by the tens of thousands streamed for safety to Egypt, Syria and Jordan and established impromptu refugee camps. Gaza is now fully Israeli (it has since become the Israeli “Silicon Valley”), as is the West Bank. Israel has enjoyed ten years of unprecedented peace, and has become a major economic force in the Mideast.

Neighboring Lebanon again became wracked with civil war between Christians, the remnants of Hezbollah, and other intractable factions seeking power. Beirut is still a ghost town where reporters fear to tread lest they and their crews be taken hostage or simply murdered on the spot.

Islam the Enemy

On October 3rd, President Bush warned Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, and Iraq that the “severest measures” would be taken against the regimes of those countries within forty-eight hours” if they did not confess their role in the 9/11 attack.

“Let us not mince words. It has been determined by our intelligence sources that much of the funding and support of the hijackers, most of whom were Saudi nationals, was facilitated through Saudi and U.A.E. banking entities. The network was not disguised well enough, and the money trail that leads back to Riyadh, Damascus, Tehran, and Bagdad points directly to the governments of those countries playing a third-party role in the attack. If the principal figures of these regimes did not directly order or plan the attack, then they had knowledge of it. Silence about the imminent commission of a crime, or even an act of war, does not acquit the silent, it does not exonerate the mute.

“State-sponsored terrorism must and will end immediately.

“Further, lest defenders of those regimes claim that we have declared war on Islam – for all those nations are under the yoke of Islam – they will be right. Islam is not a religion of peace. Let me inform my former friends in Riyadh that I have since 9/11 re-read the Koran more closely, and I am sorry to say that the Koran is nothing less than a blueprint for conquest. I confess that I was misled and saw Islam through rose-colored glasses. Now I realize that the rose tint was the color of blood. It is a heinous, barbaric, and contemptible document.”

But perhaps the most memorable words in that public announcement were:

“Let no one claim that Islam was hijacked by terrorists. The Koran was the magic flying carpet on which the hijackers rode.”

Previously, on September 23rd, President Bush ordered the freezing of all Arab assets in U.S. banks, and the confiscation of all Arab-owned property in the U.S., which included office buildings, vacation resorts, and other real property. “Ill-gotten gains seized by Feds,” ran the headline of the Investors Business Daily. Some of those money assets were subsequently released to private developers to rebuild the World Trade Center, “as tall or taller,” as the slogan went. All the real property was auctioned off to private Western developers and the revenue from the sales credited to the U.S. debt as a reduction measure.

“Extortionists,” said Secretary of the Treasury, “do not have property rights over wealth they have stolen.”

The only Arab government to reply to Bush’s ultimatum – and one of two not named in the declaration of war – was Jordan and King Abdullah II bin al-Hussein, who confessed his negligence and offered evidence of Saudi, Iranian, and Syrian money-laundering that had occurred in Amman-based banks. Jordan was spared the American reprisal, and Abdullah is the sole remaining Arab monarch in the Mideast. With the property confiscation and Jordan's U.S. assets frozen and dispersed, Abdullah is sitting on a tinderbox of revolution and a restless population of former Palestinian refugees.

Members of the Kuwaiti royal dynasty were captured by local Islamist supremacists – agents of the former Muslim Brotherhood – and executed. The government established by the Brotherhood soon fell after an “intervention” by U.S. Marines sent to recover the oil fields. No other Arabs stepped forward to set up an Arab government. Kuwait is now an American dependency with a territorial governor.

“The United States is no longer under the thumb of OPEC,” President Bush said during a press conference last March. “We are no longer in thrall to medievalists. We are no longer financing our own enslavement and destruction. Sharia law will never replace our Constitution.”

With Arab oil-producing clout gone, non-Arab OPEC members scrambled to reduce their production and raise prices as a means of leveraging their new-found hegemony. But the leverage proved illusory, for a freer market allowed prices to rise and fall according to demand. State-produced oil was driven from the market. Venezuela and Ecuador nearly went to war over which country’s oil should enter the market according to old OPEC rules. The organization received its final death sentence when President Bush persuaded Congress to repeal legislation that prohibited oil drilling and development in the shallower waters of the Gulf of Mexico and in Alaska.

“Moderate” Muslims Riot

And everyone remembers the response of the “parties”: Riots in London, Madrid, Marseilles, the Scandinavian capitals, and in Paris, Frankfurt, and Berlin by immigrant Muslims. Riots in Malmo, Cairo and Tripoli and Toronto. Riots in Tehran and Kuala Lumpur. All of them staged by activist Muslims, sometimes called “extremists.” Spokesmen of Islamic governments jeered and mocked the U.S. “The Great Satan is also a paper tiger,” they claimed. Americans and Europeans in Islamic countries were attacked and killed as they tried to escape. “Behead those who insult Islam!” was the constant theme of signs carried by chanting Muslim demonstrators everywhere, most notably in Western capitals.

British police battled Muslim mobs that tried to invade Parliament. Non-Muslim Britons, including Sikhs and other “Asians,” responded to Muslim rioting in Manchester, Sheffield and Birmingham by forming their own armies of protestors to combat rampaging Muslim mobs in those and other British cities. Prime Minister Tony Blair cancelled plans to fly to Washington to confer with and “stand by” President Bush when the violence dictated that he remain at home. Oslo and Copenhagen fell into the hands of Muslim mobs for a few days, inaugurating a reign of rape, murder, pillage, and destruction, until those countries’ military forces were ordered to act with unaccustomed force with full authority to fire upon Muslims and restore order regardless of casualties suffered by the mobs. Danish, Swedish and Norwegian police and military soon warmed to their duties when they saw the death and destruction wrought by the mobs.

In Paris, Muslim mobs invaded the Louvre and destroyed works of art they considered “offensive,” including the Nike of Samothrace. Mobs in Rome stormed the Vatican and sacked or destroyed its artworks. The Swiss Guard was overwhelmed; the Pope was taken for safety to a special bomb-proof bunker in the basement of his palace. In Florence, Muslims invaded the Galleria dell Academia and toppled Michelangelo’s “David,” smashing it to bits. They stomped on the fragments, shouting, “There is only one God – not man – and his prophet is Mohammad!” David’s head was carried off by the mob as a trophy, and has never been recovered.

Also in Paris, when Muslims took time out from their rioting for prayers, usually on Paris streets which they had been closing for that purpose for years to emphasize their conquest of France – with the silent cooperation of the police – Parisians finally rallied and began attacking the prayer services and engaged the Muslims in pitched battles. French police could not keep up with the battles. Many were killed on both sides. One group of Frenchmen set up loudspeakers in the open windows of their apartments and played “La Marseillaise” and Jean-Baptist Lully’s choral overture to Isis, “Publicons en tous lieux….” at full volume as the usurpers bowed, completely drowning out the cleric leading the prayers.

The Muslims at first shouted obscenities and epithets at the protestors, then, when the residents defiantly continued with the music, proceeded to invade the buildings, killing some of the residents, beating up others, raping whomever they thought worthy of assault, and then setting fire to the buildings. Fifty people died – mostly non-Muslim French citizens – in the ensuing blaze, which the Muslim mob would not let firefighters through to put out. Too late did the police, lethargic by habit from avoiding conflict with Muslim arrogance, respond with force and tear-gassed the mob. Violent confrontations between the police and Muslim mobs occurred throughout the rest of the country. The government banned the burqa, the veil, and prohibited the obstruction of public streets for “religious reasons.”

The French government, sometime after the war, embarked on a concerted campaign to reclaim all the notorious Zones Urbaines Sensibles, or Muslim “no-go” areas throughout the country, and re-impose French law and arrest clerics and activists who called for “holy war” against the “invading” infidels, often resulting in more riots by Muslims to retain their separatist enclaves. This policy was emulated by Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium. After acrimonious debate in Parliament, Britain also adopted the policy, removing its kid-gloves and donning brass knuckles. More riots ensued. A bomb was exploded in St. Paul’s Cathedral, killing dozens during services. Muslim extremist Abu Izzadeen and his “Allah’s Brigade” claimed responsibility. He and his lieutenants were killed in a gun battle between them and the police.

Writing about the French and Indian War in North America, English author Horace Walpole wrote, "The volley fired by a young Virginian in the backwoods of America set the world on fire.” It seemed that President Bush’s defiant volley of words had ignited the same scale of conflagration. Some supporters began to doubt the wisdom of his rhetoric. Other Americans did not, and began to prepare for the worst. Gun and ammo sales spiked off the charts. The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Islamic Circle of North America, and other Muslim “civil rights” organizations issued joint warnings about the growing “Islamophobia.”

Enemy Capitals Attacked

But suddenly the Bush-inspired violence in Europe came to an abrupt end. After the storm, came a quiet. At first, it was not understood why. But soon, everyone knew why.

On October 5th, drones armed with battlefield nuclear bombs eliminated portions of Riyadh, Tehran, Dubai and Damascus. In Tehran, political opposition forces rounded up survivors of the Mohammad Khatami/Mahmoud Ahmadinejad religious regime and executed them, and their bodies hung upside-down from lampposts, just as the bodies of Mussolini and his mistress were displayed in Italy. Iranians are still struggling to consolidate a republican government.

King Fahd, principal members of the House of Saud, and most of the king’s advisors rose as super-heated molecules in the mushroom cloud that towered over Riyadh. Impoverished survivors of the House have been jockeying for and bickering over the king’s title to rule a country that no longer exists ever since. Saudi brothers and cousins of the late king have resorted to assassination and murder of each other in a turf war that recalls the Prohibition gang wars of 20th century America.

The royal family of Abu Dhabi fled when U.S. Navy vessels approached its shores. The United Arab Emirates subsequently disintegrated. Navy Seal teams and Special Forces units covertly sent into Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E. and Iran before the drone launches neutralized, before they could act, the security forces responsible for sabotaging oil facilities in case of hostilities. Stealth bombers pinpointed the palaces and bunkers of Saddam Hussein in and around Bagdad and flattened them with tons of heavy ordnance, including napalm. Hussein and his sons were consumed in the fires. The Iraqi government collapsed and this artificially created country has also been in a state of chaos ever since, marked by interminable tribal warfare between Sunnis, Shi’ites and Kurds.

Oil fields nationalized or expropriated by the Arabs were returned to their rightful owners, American, British and French oil companies. Although many of the claims are nearly a century old and now mired in court challenges and disputes over prior claims, oil is flowing and is cheap. Aramco, a Saudi-American “partnership” for decades, was abruptly dissolved. The Petroleum Club of Houston filed for bankruptcy. Numerous stocks of companies in which Arabs held majority interests were delisted from trading on Wall Street.

Holy Shrines Eliminated

But what ended what might have been continued rioting and dissension in Europe and elsewhere for years by immigrant Muslims was President Bush’s most courageous act. On October 6th, without warning, one Stealth bomber took off from the Enterprise in the Mediterranean, and another from Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany. The first dropped a two-kiloton bomb on Mecca. The second dropped a two-kiloton bomb on Mohammad’s burial place in Medina. The Kaaba in Mecca and the Green Dome in Medina were rendered gaseous. Tens of thousands of pilgrims perished in the blasts.

More stunned than Westerners by the operation were Muslims. Their holy shrines were erased from existence in milliseconds. The expected wrath of Allah did not materialize. He had forsaken his chosen people. The sun did not rise in the West. The stars did not begin to vanish. The Five Pillars of Islam were rendered redundant, proven meaningless. The absence of supernatural retaliation and vengeful global punishment resulted in mass disorientation among Muslims, a species of trauma still being studied by top psychologists in major universities. Suicide rates among Muslims skyrocketed –suicides that did not include bombs detonated in public, but which were private affairs of family heads killing their own families before themselves.

Countless other Muslims simply ceased adhering to the faith. Once-faithful Muslims proclaimed their apostasy, preaching tearfully and angrily to sympathetic crowds about what a fraud Islam was. Women discarded their burqas and veils, and even burned them in the streets in demonstrations of freedom. Prayer rugs were turned into welcome mats or converted into scratching posts for cats. Mosques in Western nations were eventually abandoned by the dozens. Once-influential imams and mullahs preached to ever diminishing congregations. Several clerics were arrested by authorities for plotting terrorist acts against the U.S. government and are serving life sentences.

In a completely unrelated and unexpected development, on October 6th the government of Hosni Mubarak announced the return of the Suez Canal to the British and French governments. “The government and people of Egypt,” announced Mubarak, “apologize for the actions of Gamal Abdel Nasser Hussein, who was nothing more than a bandit aided and abetted in his theft by a very strange American president.”

By April of 2002, the world had settled down again. Vladimir Putin of Russia had stopped making bellicose threats against the U.S. and directed his energies to extinguishing the Islamic “separatist” movements within Russia. Former Soviet “republics” have formed an effective alliance against Russia to forestall any “reunification” moves by Moscow. China clamped down on the “democracy” movement there, evicted Western business and industrial “partners” and confiscated their holdings. Hong Kong defied Peking with its own separatist movement and won its independence.

Droves of diehard Muslims began returning whence they came, abandoning their self-created ghettos and separatist enclaves, leaving Western nations now hostile to their creed, to countries still governed by the diminishing power of Sharia law, or where they thought there was still a chance of reestablishing it. Talk of a global caliphate ceased. Islamic “civil rights” organizations such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations” and the Islamic Society and Circle of North America found their funding drying up and they dissolved. Several officials of those organizations left the U.S. just ahead of arrest by authorities investigating their role in the attacks, or just steps ahead of being served subpoenas by authorities investigating their finances. The Muslim Brotherhood, sire of all such organizations in the West, experienced a renewed extermination effort by Mubarak’s government.

George Bush was severely criticized by the American and European press. He was accused of “cowboy geopolitics” and charged with jeopardizing world peace with his unilateral military actions, actions taken without first consulting the United Nations. Calls were made in the U.N. by Russia and China to hold the U.S. responsible for the “callous collateral casualties, in the hundreds of thousands, in actions that can only be described as criminal.” Newly appointed Secretary of State John Bolton answered them in January, 2002, “If the United Nations regards the United States as a renegade nation, why is this body still here?”

War Won, Government Diminishes

But as many of Bush’s critics have since acknowledged – only reluctantly and often with muted bitterness – his actions have actually created an “environment conducive to peace,” even though, for example, the European Union, an expensive and authoritarian behemoth, is on its last legs as the citizens of member nations rankle loudly against its corruption and arrogance. But the last suicide bombing occurred on New Year’s Eve in Madrid, and had nothing to do with Islam. It was a Basque terrorist action. The plane hijackings and atrocities committed by Islamists in the second half of the 20th century and the first year of the 21st comprise a nightmarish Hieronymus Bosch-like canvas of hell on earth, of bodies strewn through a landscape of wreckage and ruins, with the dark sun of the Islamic crescent and star rising over the carnage. That was the “garden of Islamic delights” this country narrowly missed becoming its reality.

George Bush was, of course, reelected for a second term, and taking his cue from insurgent Republicans almost immediately dubbed by a contemptuous press the “Tea Party,” embarked on a program of vetoing Congressional spending bills and endorsing the privatization of Social Security. He also advocated ending Medicare and other welfare programs, and reduced the Department of Education to an anemic skeleton staff. It was completely abolished and its staff furloughed in 2006. The Radio Act of 1927 was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court (better late than never), and the Federal Communications Commission disbanded. The Food and Drug Administration and the Securities and Exchange Commission are next on the chopping block and are expected to expire in 2014.

And Ramadan dinners in the White House, initiated by President Bill Clinton and held once by Bush in 2001, were never held again. “We shouldn’t be feeding the enemy,” said Bush in June of 2002. Muslim holidays even disappeared from calendars.

As his second term neared an end, the country was on tenterhooks during the 2008 election, with John Bolton running against a nobody from nowhere, Barack Obama, a former Illinois senator with questionable political connections and associations that could not remain hidden. His past could not withstand scrutiny, not even by his supporters. Someone unearthed a video of his Chicago pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, “God-damning America,” and columnists speculated on just what kind of person was actually running for the highest office in the land.

Joe Wilson, a Representative for South Carolina, asked a question for which he was excoriated by the press, but for which the public forgave him: “They lie! Who’s running for office here? Reverend Wright or Mr. Obama? Or Bill Ayers?” Discouraged and disillusioned by this and other unsavory revelations, Democrats stayed away from the voting booths that November. In a landslide victory, Bolton won the popular vote and the Electoral College. The defeated candidate returned to his former post of teaching law at the University of Chicago Law School, and was later dismissed from it for having doctored his students’ test scores.

President Bolton has in turn been criticized by the news media for playing too much golf and holding too many whist games in the White House. Health advocates have even scored him for smoking cigars in the Oval Office and in the presence of non-smokers. In answer, during a press conference last February, he said, “Look: Why should I be busy lobbying and strong-arming Congress, when I pledged to make government as inconsequential as possible in the lives of Americans? Idle hands are not necessarily the devil’s tools, and I mean to be as idle as possible. Congress should follow suit.”

President Bolton is assured a second term in the White House. Democrats have yet to settle on a slate of candidates to run against him in 2012. Their majorities in the Senate and House were irretrievably reduced in midterm elections and by an unprecedented number of resignations and sudden retirements, leaving Republicans in control of both chambers.

Authors Paint Grim Futures

The nation began to rebound in prosperity and economic growth. Everyone seemed happy with the course of events that could have led to disaster and economic and societal collapse – everyone but those who had plans to turn the country into authoritarian paradise. And columnists and psychologists had another phenomenon to report: Many people would suddenly believe they were being stalked by jihadists. They would turn around see nothing. The fall of Islam and its virtual disappearance from men’s concerns was a true sign of “Islamaphobia,” but eminently curable. It is not every century when a major faith suffers from mass abjuration.

One can only wonder what the U.S. would be like had Bush been less dedicated to its sovereignty, less forthright in identifying the issues, and more compromising in his facing the Islamic threat. It is hard to imagine what state the world would be in. Not a few imaginative novelists have penned credible dystopian political fantasies that describe a world almost as dysfunctional and schizophrenic as that described in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Novelist Tom Wolfe, in Love Thine Enemy, which appeared in early 2003 to rave reviews, painted an America groaning under the weight of a “Department of Homeland Security” – a very Nazi-Gestapo sounding organization that pries into the lives of all Americans – the merger of the CIA, NSA and FBI into one ineffective intelligence gathering Goliath, more concerned with controlling Americans than detecting and combating terrorism. There are his police state entities called the Transportation Security Agency and Community Action Groups that search travelers and patrons at airports, bus terminals, churches and synagogues, and even in Walmarts. In the meantime, he creates a gloomy picture of mounting government debt as Washington fights two costly wars in the Mid- and Far East to bring “democracy” to peoples who neither understand it nor want it, while American casualties mount to the thousands.

Tom Clancy wrote another best-seller, Ground Zero, which debuted in 2004 also to rave reviews, echoing the style of Allen Drury, depicting the creation of “Eurabia” and the Islamic conquest of Europe by invading hordes of Muslims, with only Britain just barely holding out, awaiting the appearance of a new Churchill or Margaret Thatcher. But his focus was the jihad waged within America’s own borders. Former functionaries from Islamic “civil rights” organizations are now White House cabinet members.

The IRS is empowered to collect Islamic jizya, the Islamic tax on non-Muslims, in addition to regular income taxes. The Secretary of State, Imam Feisal Rauf, negotiates a détente with La Raza, representing millions of illegal Mexicans. There are rumors of impending war between La Raza and Washington. His wife, Daisy Khan, runs a federal program to “educate” military and civilian draftees on the “ins and outs of Islam.” Non-Muslim recruits who convert to Islam during basic training are awarded instant promotion and special “G.I. Bill” educational status.

As did Wolfe, Clancy describes the incremental loss of all Constitutional guarantees and limitations that once preserved American liberties, and the rise of a new class of citizens: the privileged Muslim. De facto Sharia law complements regulatory law. Muslim judges sit on half the federal district and appellate courts. Both writers conceived of patriotic, underground “resistance” groups or “militias” that function like the French ones of World War II, led by fugitive men and women who once wrote columns warning Americans of the advancing enemy, and of the Quislings in government who paved the way for the conquest. They are regarded as “subversives” and hunted by the DHS.

Uncounted thousands of “dissidents” are transported to “reeducation” camps built on the Alaskan tundra, where food rations depend on how well prisoners respond to a daily and constant immersion in a multiculturalist curriculum designed to strip an individual of his identity. The curriculum, Clancy wrote, “was designed by leading lights in the Department of Education and approved by the National Education Association, although some dared think the roles were reversed. This hardly mattered, however, to the inmates. Few could withstand the ‘good cop-bad cop’ regimen of the indoctrination and emerge to damn the ‘therapeutics of tyranny.’ Those who did were branded ‘intractable recidivists’ and simply vanished one day from the barracks.”

Clancy’s novel climaxes with the dynamiting of the “Ground Zero Mosque,” a “victory monument” approved by a former mayor of New York, erected near the site of a new World Trade Center that more resembles a public housing project than a monument to capitalism. This segment of the novel tasks one’s credibility – what cowardly souls would actually allow an Islamic victory monument be built anywhere in America? – but it is an entertaining read nonetheless Demolition of the mosque by the “James Madison Strike Force” serves as a signal for a general American uprising against the “establishment,” although Clancy left open the denouement of the rebellion. After all, the manpower and firepower are on the side of the “establishment.” But then, the British Crown had the same advantage over the colonists over two centuries ago. Clancy leaves the ending to his readers’ imaginations. Movies were made of the Wolfe and Clancy novels, and have become cult classics, especially among the young and college students.

But as we remember those who died on this day ten years ago, we should be thankful to all those living souls who took their responsibilities seriously and rose to the occasion to preserve a sane and safe world. They saved us from what might have been an awful and terrible future, the end of America as it crept along a path to extinction, like a senior citizen leaning on a walker, headed for a precipice, and unable or unwilling to resist the momentum. The attack required nothing less than victory over the cancerous phenomenon of Islam, a totalitarian ideology riding on the coattails of expanding and insatiable federal powers. Islam is now a fading memory, as is Congressional arrogance. The change authored by President George W. Bush has given America – and the world – new and tangible reason for hope for the future.

Benjamin Franklin wrote: “He who would trade liberty for some temporary security, deserves neither liberty nor security.” Americans can be proud that they deserve both. They have not short-changed themselves. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, once jeopardized by ignorance and complacence and an omnivorous pragmatism, have been renewed in men’s minds and in fact. Their symbols are the new World Trade Center towers that flash their meaning as eloquently and permanently as does the Statue of Liberty. Knock us down again, if you dare. We will rise again.

Long may the Twin Towers shimmer in the sun! And Long Live Lady Liberty!

© 2011 by Edward Cline

The Light That Must Not Fail

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 14:33:00 +0000

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

(Common English translation)

It was first an epigram written by French novelist, critic, and publisher Alphonse Jean Baptiste Karr in 1849. Now it is regarded as a proverb. It applies to the Islamic nations of Pakistan and Afghanistan (and any other Islamic nation), because nothing there has changed in centuries but the weaponry and technology that Islam could never have created and has certainly appropriated to “defend the faith.” American presence there has had less influence than had the British. The cultures of Pakistan and Afghanistan are still stagnant, obdurately and contentedly imprisoned by a barbaric creed. Those who in those countries raise their hands or their minds against the creed are almost immediately struck down.

Over a century ago Winston Churchill described the problem with Islam, and specifically with Muslims. His first-hand experiences with them in Afghanistan and later in the Sudan are evidence of an uncorrupted epistemology and an uncompromised moral evaluation of them. Not even the most ardent anti-jihadist would portray Muslims in the frank and objective terms that Churchill did. He did not flinch from the evidence of his eyes. He did not search for some “saving grace” in Islam or in a Muslim that would forego a blanket condemnation of Islam

In The River War, his two-volume account of the Sudan Campaign of 1896-1899 – the campaign ending with the battle of Umm Diwaykarat and the demise of the Mahdiyah regime, established in 1885 over the Sudan – he picks up where he left off in The Malakand Field Force:

"How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity.

The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities - but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome."*

In those and in subsequent paragraphs there is no hint of a suggestion by Churchill that Islam could be “reformed” or that there are redeeming qualities in the creed which would civilize a Muslim and render him as indistinguishable from and non-threatening as the average Catholic or Presbyterian.

In The Malakand Field Force, published before The River War, Churchill went into damning detail about the Afghan tribesmen and their culture, which have not changed to this day, and never will.

Except at the times of sowing and of harvest, a continual state of feud and strife prevails throughout the land. Tribe wars with tribe. The people of one valley fight with those of the next. To the quarrels of communities are added the combats of individuals. Khan assails khan, each supported by his retainers. Every tribesman has a blood feud with his neighbor. Every man's hand is against the other, and all against the stranger.

Nor are these struggles conducted with the weapons which usually belong to the races of such development. To the ferocity of the Zulu are added the craft of the Redskin and the marksmanship of the Boer. The world is presented with that grim spectacle, "the strength of civilisation without its mercy." At a thousand yards the traveller falls wounded by the well-aimed bullet of a breech-loading rifle. His assailant, approaching, hacks him to death with the ferocity of a South-Sea Islander. The weapons of the nineteenth century are in the hands of the savages of the Stone Age.

Every influence, every motive, that provokes the spirit of murder among men, impels these mountaineers to deeds of treachery and violence. The strong aboriginal propensity to kill, inherit in all human beings, has in these valleys been preserved in unexampled strength and vigor. That religion, which above all others was founded and propagated by the sword -- the tenets and principles of which are instinct with incentives to slaughter and which in three continents has produced fighting breeds of men -- stimulates a wild and merciless fanaticism. The love of plunder, always a characteristic of hill tribes, is fostered by the spectacle of opulence and luxury which, to their eyes, the cities and plains of the south display. A code of honor not less punctilious than that of old Spain, is supported by vendettas as implacable as those of Corsica.

In such a state of society, all property is held directly by main force. Every man is a soldier. Either he is the retainer of some khan -- the man-at-arms of some feudal baron as it were -- or he is a unit in the armed force of his village -- the burgher of mediaeval history. In such surroundings we may without difficulty trace the rise and fall of an ambitious Pathan. At first he toils with zeal and thrift as an agriculturist on that plot of ground which his family have held since they expelled some former owner. He accumulates in secret a sum of money. With this he buys a rifle from some daring thief, who has risked his life to snatch it from a frontier guard-house. He becomes a man to be feared. Then he builds a tower to his house and overawes those around him in the village. Gradually they submit to his authority. He might now rule the village; but he aspires still higher. He persuades or compels his neighbors to join him in an attack on the castle of a local khan. The attack succeeds. The khan flies or is killed; the castle captured. The retainers make terms with the conqueror. The land tenure is feudal. In return for their acres they follow their new chief to war. Were he to treat them worse than the other khans treated their servants, they would sell their strong arms elsewhere. He treats them well. Others resort to him. He buys more rifles. He conquers two or three neighboring khans. He has now become a power.

Many, perhaps all, states have been founded in a similar way, and it is by such steps that civilisation painfully stumbles through her earlier stages. But in these valleys the warlike nature of the people and their hatred of control, arrest the further progress of development. We have watched a man, able, thrifty, brave, fighting his way to power, absorbing, amalgamating, laying the foundations of a more complex and interdependent state of society. He has so far succeeded. But his success is now his ruin. A combination is formed against him. The surrounding chiefs and their adherents are assisted by the village populations. The ambitious Pathan, oppressed by numbers, is destroyed. The victors quarrel over the spoil, and the story closes, as it began, in bloodshed and strife.

The conditions of existence, that have been thus indicated, have naturally led to the dwelling-places of these tribes being fortified. If they are in the valley, they are protected by towers and walls loopholed for musketry. If in the hollows of the hills, they are strong by their natural position. In either case they are guarded by a hardy and martial people, well armed, brave, and trained by constant war.

This state of continual tumult has produced a habit of mind which recks little of injuries, holds life cheap and embarks on war with careless levity, and the tribesmen of the Afghan border afford the spectacle of a people, who fight without passion, and kill one another without loss of temper. Such a disposition, combined with an absolute lack of reverence for all forms of law and authority, and a complete assurance of equality, is the cause of their frequent quarrels with the British power. A trifle rouses their animosity. They make a sudden attack on some frontier post. They are repulsed. From their point of view the incident is closed. There has been a fair fight in which they have had the worst fortune. What puzzles them is that "the Sirkar" should regard so small an affair in a serious light. Thus the Mohmands cross the frontier and the action of Shabkadr is fought. They are surprised and aggrieved that the Government are not content with the victory, but must needs invade their territories, and impose punishment. Or again, the Mamunds, because a village has been burnt, assail the camp of the Second Brigade by night. It is a drawn game. They are astounded that the troops do not take it in good part.

They, when they fight among themselves, bear little malice, and the combatants not infrequently make friends over the corpses of their comrades or suspend operations for a festival or a horse race. At the end of the contest cordial relations are at once re-established. And yet so full of contradictions is their character, that all this is without prejudice to what has been written of their family vendettas and private blood feuds. Their system of ethics, which regards treachery and violence as virtues rather than vices, has produced a code of honor so strange and inconsistent, that it is incomprehensible to a logical mind. I have been told that if a white man could grasp it fully, and were to understand their mental impulses -- if he knew, when it was their honor to stand by him, and when it was their honor to betray him; when they were bound to protect and when to kill him--he might, by judging his times and opportunities, pass safely from one end of the mountains to the other. But a civilised European is as little able to accomplish this, as to appreciate the feelings of those strange creatures, which, when a drop of water is examined under a microscope, are revealed amiably gobbling each other up, and being themselves complacently devoured.

… Truth is unknown among them. A single typical incident displays the standpoint from which they regard an oath. In any dispute about a field boundary, it is customary for both claimants to walk round the boundary he claims, with a Koran in his hand, swearing that all the time he is walking on his own land. To meet the difficulty of a false oath, while he is walking over his neighbor's land, he puts a little dust from his own field into his shoes. As both sides are acquainted with the trick, the dismal farce of swearing is usually soon abandoned, in favor of an appeal to force.

All are held in the grip of miserable superstition. The power of the ziarat, or sacred tomb, is wonderful. [By this, Churchill did not mean “wonderful” as we use the term, but rather that the superstition defied all reason.] Sick children are carried on the backs of buffaloes, sometimes sixty or seventy miles, to be deposited in front of such a shrine, after which they are carried back -- if they survive the journey -- in the same way. It is painful even to think of what the wretched child suffers in being thus jolted over the cattle tracks. But the tribesmen consider the treatment much more efficacious than any infidel prescription. To go to a ziarat and put a stick in the ground is sufficient to ensure the fulfillment of a wish. To sit swinging a stone or colored glass ball, suspended by a string from a tree, and tied there by some fakir, is a sure method of securing a fine male heir. To make a cow give good milk, a little should be plastered on some favorite stone near the tomb of a holy man. These are but a few instances; but they may suffice to reveal a state of mental development at which civilisation hardly knows whether to laugh or weep.
Their superstition exposes them to the rapacity and tyranny of a numerous priesthood -- "Mullahs," "Sahibzadas," "Akhundzadas," "Fakirs," -- and a host of wandering Talib-ul-ilms, who correspond with the theological students in Turkey, and live free at the expense of the people. More than this, they enjoy a sort of "droit du seigneur," and no man's wife or daughter is safe from them. Of some of their manners and morals it is impossible to write [Victorian sensibilities prohibited Churchill from describing these “manners and morals.”]. As Macaulay has said of Wycherley's plays, "they are protected against the critics as a skunk is protected against the hunters." They are "safe, because they are too filthy to handle, and too noisome even to approach."

Yet the life even of these barbarous people is not without moments when the lover of the picturesque might sympathise with their hopes and fears. In the cool of the evening, when the sun has sunk behind the mountains of Afghanistan, and the valleys are filled with a delicious twilight, the elders of the village lead the way to the chenar trees by the water's side, and there, while the men are cleaning their rifles, or smoking their hookas, and the women are making rude ornaments from beads, and cloves, and nuts, the Mullah drones the evening prayer. Few white men have seen, and returned to tell the tale. But we may imagine the conversation passing from the prices of arms and cattle, the prospects of the harvest, or the village gossip, to the great Power, that lies to the southward, and comes nearer year by year. Perhaps some former Sepoy, of Beluchis or Pathans, will recount his adventures in the bazaars of Peshawar, or tell of the white officers he has followed and fought for in the past. He will speak of their careless bravery and their strange sports; of the far-reaching power of the Government, that never forgets to send his pension regularly as the months pass by; and he may even predict to the listening circle the day when their valleys will be involved in the comprehensive grasp of that great machine, and judges, collectors and commissioners shall ride to sessions at Ambeyla, or value the land tax on the soil of Nawagai.

Then the Mullah will raise his voice and remind them of other days when the sons of the prophet drove the infidel from the plains of India, and ruled at Delhi, as wide an Empire as the Kafir holds to-day: when the true religion strode proudly through the earth and scorned to lie hidden and neglected among the hills: when mighty princes ruled in Bagdad, and all men knew that there was one God, and Mahomet was His prophet. And the young men hearing these things will grip their Martinis, and pray to Allah, that one day He will bring some Sahib -- best prize of all -- across their line of sight at seven hundred yards so that, at least, they may strike a blow for insulted and threatened Islam. …**

I excerpted this lengthy quotation from Malakand because it was difficult to select a single sentence or paragraph that would not also illustrate the point that Muslims are still this primitive, not only in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but in any Western country Muslims have emigrated to, and even have been born in as second generation Muslims. On its own terms, as an instance of fine prose writing about Islam, we do not see its like today, and certainly not in the mainstream media. I highlighted Talib-ul-ilms (meaning “students) because the Taliban are still there, still killing our soldiers, still terrorizing other Muslims, still plotting against the “Empire of the Kafir.” Churchill uses a term that is employed today: kafir (unbeliever) by anyone who writes about Islam and has correctly identified the peril. The term is synonymous with “infidel.” Which, for the jihdist, is synonymous with fair game for slaughter, rape, plundering, enslavement, and conquest.

Note also that there is no suggestion of “hate” in Churchill’s description of Islam and the state of Muslims. He may as well have been writing about a nest of termites. He was unable to imagine Muslims valuing the kind of liberty the West takes (or took) for granted, and incapable of projecting a credible Western version of Islam. When the barbarians overran Rome, they didn’t come to introduce new modes of plumbing or life-saving surgery or poetry. And when the Moslems captured Alexandria in Egypt, it wasn’t to browse through what remained of its great library. They burned it.

Would General Petraeus be able to pen an assessment of Islam as honest as Churchill’s? Or Colin Powell? Or any modern military commander assigned to “win the hearts and minds” of Muslim “extremists”? Political correctness, in the context of military operations, governs the “rule of engagement” in any public discussion of Islam, whether it is the violent kind or the stealth kind. All it accomplishes are needless casualties and ultimate defeat, an unconscionable waste of blood and treasure in pursuit of a détente with destruction, in which only the destroyers can triumph.

The first step in defeating an enemy is to acknowledge that it is one. The second step is to not to talk it to death, or engage it in a friendly panel discussion on the meaning of life. Jihadists know this, and act accordingly – bringing down a helicopter full of American soldiers, and winning a foot-bath and prayer room in a Western business or factory. But the West has forgotten the true rules of engagement, preferring to pretend that the enemy would not be an enemy if only we “understood” it and “tolerated” it. Kipling had some advice about indulging in that kind of evasive “tolerance” of an enemy one secretly fears will destroy for the sake of destruction.

“To each man is appointed his particular dread – the terror that if he does not fight against it, must cow him even to the loss of his manhood.”***

The light that is failing in the West is the knowledge of its own superior, life-affirming and life-sustaining value. Islam is a nihilist ideology that must be fought against with the same dedication one must oppose the ongoing jihad of secular collectivism unleashed against us by the Progressive Marxists in Washington.

Islam will not and cannot change. It can trade filthy robes and sandals for three-piece suits and Rolex watches, and spears and swords for rocket-propelled grenades and Kalashnikov rifles, but it will remain what it has been for fourteen centuries: a cult of death and degradation.

*Winston Churchill, The River War, Vol. II, pp. 248-50. London: Longmans, Green, 1899.

**Winston Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War, pp.6-8. (Originally published by Longmans, Green & Co. 1898.) Text quoted here is from my copy of the Dover 2010 reprint of the Thomas Nelson & Sons edition, 1916 (London).

***Rudyard Kipling, The Light That Failed, p. 128 (1899). New York: Charles Scribner’s & Sons, 1909.

Hillary Clinton Auditions for Lady Macbeth

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 21:07:00 +0000

Come, you spirits, that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me, and fill me from the crown to the toe topful of direst cruelty. (Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 5)

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a woman scorned, first by her husband former President Bill, who favored swishier skirts and less nagging, and then by the Democrat machine in favor of a nobody from nowhere during the 2008 election, finds every little opportunity to vent her wrath on her own country. Her latest roller-pin is reminiscent of Lady Macbeth’s supplications to be given the nerve to commit murder. Hanging out so often with all those Muslim men has more or less unsexed her to the point that she is willing to commit, if not murder, then a dire cruelty which arguably could be defined as treason.

As reported by Jihad Watch and other news outlets, the principle advocates of a move to criminalize the legitimate examination of any religious faith, especially Islam, are globalist One-Worlders who seek to bring the U.S. under their thumb. Their particular “one world” is a global caliphate, with or without United Nations trappings. Their particular bugbear is “Islamophobia” or a legitimate fear of Islam and Sharia law – briefly, of Islamic totalitarianism.

JEDDAH, Ramadan 1/Aug 1 (IINA)-During the next few months, Washington plans to host a coordination meeting to discuss with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) how to implement resolution no. 16/18 on combating defamation of religions, and how to prevent stereotypes depicting religions and their followers; as well as disseminating religious tolerance, which has been endorsed by the UN Human Rights Council last March, in agreement with Western countries. The resolution was adopted after lengthy discussions held between the OIC and countries in which the phenomenon of Islamophobia is in [sic] the rise.

The U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had announced the intention of the U.S. State Department to organize a coordination meeting during her participation in the meeting which she co-chaired with the OIC Secretary General, Professor Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu in Istanbul on 15 July 2011. The meeting issued a joint statement emphasizing the dire need for the implementation of resolution 16/18.

According to informed sources in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the two sides, in addition to other European parties, will hold a number of specialized meetings of experts in law and religion in order to finalize the legal aspect on how to better implement the UN resolution.

The OIC recently changed its name to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (from “Conference”), believing it was less frightening or portentous, and more pacific and amenable.

But “Islamophobes” do not have a monopoly on fear. The distinction between “Islamophobes” and “Freedom-of-Speechophobes” is that the first group does not seek to gag, penalize, suppress, or criminalize speech per se. “Islamophobes” do not fear freedom of speech. They value and encourage it.

For a glimpse of ideal dhimmitude, in which Islam is a protected religion, see this Christiane Amanpour sales pitch on the lifestyle of Aramco employees in Saudi Arabia. Notice the abject deference its American employees pay to Islam and Saudi Arabia. This is a glimpse of one’s life under Sharia law, except that you won’t be horseback riding and living in a privileged infidel’s ghetto. The Americans you see here are dhimmis, and Amanpour approves.

Speechophobes, on the other hand, fear the unfettered, free discussion and criticism of Islam because otherwise Islamophobes might convince others that Islam is a primitive, barbaric, man-hating system ripe for totalitarian implementation, that every facet and aspect of Islam, from its iconic “Prophet” to its magic wand metaphysics to its schizophrenic Koran to its damnation of non-believers is open to scrutiny, refutation, and even mockery. Islam begs to be insulted on top of injury, to be defamed, blasphemed, and denigrated.

The sources said that the upcoming meetings aim at developing a legal basis for the UN Human Rights Council’s resolution which help in enacting domestic laws for the countries involved in the issue, as well as formulating international laws preventing inciting hatred resulting from the continued defamation of religions.

On the other hand, the OIC Secretary General, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, stressed that the crime committed recently in Norway was a result of the rise of the extreme right in Europe and its easy mobility in political circles. He said that the OIC had warned several times against of what might be called institutionalization of the phenomenon of Islamophobia through the involvement of the European extreme right in government institutions and political action....

There is only one religion that has been consistently “defamed,” and that is Islam. From the mass murders in the West to the everyday murders and persecutions in Muslim countries, Islam has been the inspiration of ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the atrocities. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it must be Islam. Can anyone be blamed for identifying the duck? Especially if it leaves a trail of blood and guts behind its waddle?

Clinton did not need to conjure up “spirits” to imbue her with the strength to betray her own country. She sat with them in Jeddah and plotted to bring Islamic censorship to the U.S. via the U.N. She is such a special dhimmi to the Islamists that she apparently has been granted dispensation and need not wear a headscarf in their company or in Saudi Arabia. There are no pictures of her in Saudi Arabia wearing one. Any other woman caught on Saudi Arabian streets without one would be jailed by the religious police, Muslim or non-Muslim.

Clinton’s character aside – and that could be the subject of book-length treatment and not a pretty picture – why would she be willing to sell out not only America, but Israel? Because, on a purely diplomatic and “practical” standpoint, she will not challenge, first, the anti-Semitic nature of Islam, and second, the notion that Islam is a “religion of peace” (as Westerners perceive it, not as Muslims know it is not).

Ron Kampeas of Capital J discusses this issue and has this to reveal about the OIC and its agenda for censorship, or the suppression of speech if it “defames” Islam:

In a revealing comment on the nature of this controversy, the observer for Indonesia remarked in the UN Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities (1997, December 22) that ‘‘it could only be assumed that the motive of those who insulted Islam was to generate conflict with Islamic peoples or even to justify the injustices to which they were currently being subjected’’ (para. 14). Accordingly, Indonesia – along with other OIC states – maintains the view that no critical comment concerning Islam is justifiable – regardless of whether the forum is academic or the objective pursued is a worthy one, such as the elimination of discrimination. Underscoring this perspective two years earlier, a representative from Iran informed the UN that ‘‘in the opinion [of] the Organization of the Islamic Conference the right to freedom of thought, opinion and expression could in no case justify blasphemy.’’

So, those who “insult” Islam are responsible for the murders and persecution of not only Muslims in Muslim and non-Muslim countries, but of non-Muslims? (Call it the Oslo-Breivik Syndrome, newly discovered by Islamists.) These are not “injustices”? Stonings, amputations, female genital mutilation, beatings, child rape, woman rape, mandatory self-effacement, ritual self-abnegation, and the whole Islamic culture do not constitute injustice?

To the OIC, and with the silent consent of Hillary Clinton, freedom of thought, opinion and expression do not justify “blaspheming” or “defaming” Islam. Period. And Clinton will help the OIC find legal ways to enforce that censorship in this country. She will “cooperate.”

The United States oath of office for the President is specified in the Constitution (Article II, Section 1):

"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

So help me, Allah? If she had been elected President, would she have simply mouthed the oath of office, as Barack Obama did, and proceeded to not preserve, protect and defend this country, as he has done? Would her policies have been any different from Obama’s, or worse?

Is she one of the Weird Sisters of Macbeth, or the nagging, instigating wife of Macbeth? Whichever she is, it is the task of “Islamophobes” to undo what she has done and will do. We should not expect her to ever wring her hands in regret, as Lady Macbeth did in the end.

We will not suffer the fate of King Duncan. We will not be silenced.

Comic Cosmological Relief

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 02:05:00 +0000

Ah, cartoons! And comic books! They could be so much fun to read, often educational, but perhaps even more fun to create. But those days are gone. Now American children will be offered the chance to read of the adventures of the Silver Scorpion, a wheelchair-bound Muslim “superhero.” He can alter metal, you see, and presumably cause gangsters’ guns to jam and American Predator drones to miss their targets.

And for a while kids have been enthralled (well, maybe not) by the quest of “The 99,” a bigger gang of proselytizing Muslim “superheroes” after the alleged ninety-nine qualities of Allah. These are now magical stones that contain the wisdom of the Bagdad Library (not the Alexandrian one). Imagine a glorified Muslim Easter egg hunt. You wouldn’t catch the League of Justice wasting their time looking for talking rocks. This has also been turned into an animated feature that would make NPR proud (“made possible by viewers like you – thanks for your tax dollars and contributions”).

The editor of Family Security Matters a year ago ran a comprehensive exposé on how Islamic comics are infiltrating the culture, and with the encouragement of President Obama (see the video in this link to the article; he boasts in his best multicultural manner that Superman and Batman have shaken hands with Islamic superheroes). I will not try to top that excellent article. But every panel and frame of this propaganda is intended to indoctrinate children about the putative goodness of Islam. The Ninety-Nine are all children, including glib-tongued teens, crafted to appeal to modern sensibilities. Those sensibilities allow for creeping dhimmitude, prepared and propagated by American educational policies.

Cultural jihad and creeping dhimmitude aren’t just about banning Voltaire, imposing politically correct Newspeak in politics and journalism, including Islamic holidays on calendars, and demonizing critics of Islam. It’s also about conditioning children to be passive manqués who will obey the state (or the caliphate) and never presume to think for themselves. Imagery has proven to be a powerful ideological weapon. B.F. Skinner would lavish praise on the phenomenon. Communists and Nazis would be envious.

In the meantime, my sketching and blocking skills being rusty, I invite anyone to illustrate the following story. Turn it into an animated short, with special CGI effects, á la Avatar.

Picture fierce-looking, never-smiling Allah, always in a nightgown and sandals, slightly bald but boasting a flowing white beard, with a kosh tucked inside his belt and a scimitar sitting at his feet (just in case), playing celestial poker with his buddies Moragu, Saturn (snacking on one of his own children), Zagaga, Lord Shiva (recently divorced from Kali, whom he finally realized was a dominatrix), and Yahweh. In between hands, and in between sips of Dazzle Dust Chablis, Allah and Yahweh reminisce about the good old days, or the good old eons when the universe was young and they had the run of the place. They went back a long way. They were the cause of the “Big Bang.”

Yahweh and Allah are best friends. They weren’t always. You see, long ago (in another dimension not detectable by mere mortals), when they were all pubescent kids, Yahweh was the original alpha-male god of all gods and the neighborhood bully. Nobody knew who appointed him to that station, he just was; his and everyone else’s origins were the subject of many a heated, contentious, and often violent debate among the student body at the Universal Academy of Supreme Power and Metaphysical Manipulation (much like the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry). The issue was never resolved.

However, Yahweh once tried to steal Allah’s lunch money in the school playground. Allah, being a possessive and obnoxious little brat anyway – he was parentless, as well, having had no role model on which to fashion his character, and this may have contributed to his crankiness and aggressive behavior – beat the Beejesus out of Yahweh after a vigorous game of kick-the-can (a tie between the teams). For the longest time, Yahweh was “It.” That had abruptly and unexpectedly changed during the course of the game. It was not well received by Yahweh.

Yahweh, a moody and gnarly person himself, was resentful that he had only tied. He had failed to spot Wontonka, a totem-sized future American Indian god, who was hiding in plain sight behind a boxwood. He did not believe in good sportsmanship. So he attempted to channel his frustration by bullying Allah into surrendering his four-and-six-pence.

Allah, not lacking in arrogance, forthwith delivered a powerful knee to Yahweh’s groin and soon was thrashing the Anointed One with a hail of blows. Yahweh stumbled back in shock and confusion.

When the latter added insult to injury as Allah had him pinned down, and accused Allah’s mother of having mated with a scorpion (Yahweh knew that David Lean’s movie, Lawrence of Arabia, would be made six billion years hence, and he really liked that line of Anthony Quinn’s), Allah laid into Yahweh with even more furious blows, yanking painfully at Yahweh’s peach-fuzz beard for extra measure, screaming, “You offensive, insensitive, callous brute!” Yahweh at last had to cry uncle and plead for mercy. “Yahweh concedes to Allah!”

Spectators of this match thought they had heard, “Allah concedes to Yahweh!” so similar were their names in pronunciation. They were confused. It made no sense. They argued amongst themselves as Allah continued to pummel Yahweh. But, these were up-and-coming deities, who did not need to make any sense.

Hovering in the background was God (nicknamed “Bog”), a shy, quiet little gamin whose constitution caused him to flit from recognizable humanoid form to a dove. All the other students avoided him, even Yahweh and Allah, because there was something strange and unsettling about him. It was his mesmerizing eyes. Allah envied those eyes. But he knew that eventually God or Bog would cause trouble in the future. He had once remarked to Baal, “Better look out for that one. It’s always the wallflowers who make the most trouble later.”

“He gives me the creeps,” agreed Baal, the demon god, munching on a piglet. He was nothing to look at, either, resembling as he did the Rancor in Star Wars, a silly movie about magical powers Allah knew would be shot six billion years hence. Baal didn’t know that, for he could not see into the future. His talents lay elsewhere. There would be a falling-out between him and Allah.

Back to the schoolyard dust-up. Allah relented, released Yahweh from his hold, and stood up. “Allah is merciful,” he said, shaking a finger down at Yahweh, who was near tears, “and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise!”

Thus, the Big Bang, which didn’t happen that instant. It took time for the energy expended by Allah and Yahweh in that terrible fight to gather enough pressure and molecular dissonance for the temporal realm to explode, and time hadn’t been invented yet. By Allah.

And that was how Allah became the only true God (so gossips say). All the other Academy’s male students more or less conceded Allah’s supremacy and offered no challenges to his new-found title as Numero Uno of the Firmament.

There were some future goddesses in the school, too, but Allah didn’t like girls, especially not those pretty little Greek ones, showing off in their skimpy robes and behaving like they were Someone’s gift to men. It was just an expression, but no one could say who that Someone was; no one wanted to “go there” on the matter of the infinite regression of First Causes; the subject was not in the school’s curriculum and forbidden to discussion. Allah harbored a special dislike of the Cretan girl-goddesses, who traipsed around wearing nothing at all on top. When he accused them of immodesty and of being a distraction during class, they would usually retort, “In your dreams, Kilroy. We caught you looking.”

Allah, being a natural prude who could not brook rejection, because he knew he was perfect, complained to the headmaster about the girl-goddesses. But this venerable person (no one knew where he came from, either, or how he acquired his knowledge and powers; he just was) advised Allah to be patient. “This school has a policy of diversity, and welcomes students from all cultural and belief backgrounds. But someday your time will come, and you will set the rules. In the meantime, you must be tolerant.” He paused and added another admonition. “You must stop teasing Kali about her four arms. You mustn’t make fun of others’ disabilities.”

The headmaster studied Allah’s petulant face. He noted that the child’s beard was growing thick and would soon need some trimming, and perhaps a shampoo. “By the way, you have been tardy in deciding how many Imams will deliver humankind from its misery. And when. You must decide soon. Will it be the seventh, or the twelfth, or the thirty-first? I cannot award you a diploma if you continue to be so indecisive.”

“I’ll do what I wish,” muttered Allah. “I will nominate the Mahdi or the Expected One when I’m damned good and ready.” From that day onward, Allah brooded, and brooded, and brooded, and thought many dark thoughts. Not deep thoughts, just dark ones. It was his foremost and governing quality. He had ninety-eight to go.

Allah graduated with honors from the Universal Academy. Immediately upon receiving his diploma, he dove into his work with an enterprising passion. As the temporal realm unfolded in the Big Bang, he staked claims to large portions of it, planned the demise of the other Academy graduates (all false gods anyway, he was “It,” but he might keep a few around, just for company), and contrived a way to make himself known to humankind without really showing himself . He was very sensitive about his personal appearance. “I will invent a prophet, and his name will be Mohammad!” he exclaimed triumphantly to the void, which was slowly coalescing into the heavens.

It came to him, just like that, although the thought confounded him for a moment, because he should have known about it beforehand, eons ago. That was when Allah learned that he was also omnipotent, as well as omniscient, and could change his own predestined knowledge of what was to be and what he might and might not do about it. “It is the will of Allah! It will be written!” But, where? Ah, yes, a holy book! Full of fairy tales and blood and gore and rapine and slaughter for the gullible and impressionable. Appeal to their prurience. And sacred stones! And commandments! Dozens of them! I’ll make them genuflect – No! Bow five times a day – in submission to a rock he would cast from the sky! And then have the fools swathe it in silver!

But, the book? – No illustrations! He would keep them guessing! What would he call the holy book? Allah snapped his fingers. The Recitation! The story of Allah as told by Gabriel to a brigand! And it’ll be a bloody miracle if Mohammad could memorize it all! So, he’d have to make Mohammad an idiot savant!

Allah cackled to himself, and rubbed his hands together, and began imagining the likeness of Mohammad the Prophet. And he remembered the mesmerizing eyes of Bog. “Yes. Svengali! He’ll put the fear of Allah in a rhinoceros!” Which he hadn’t invented. Still, he did a merry jig in celebration of his own almightiness.

The rhinoceros was Bog’s doing. Bog, you see, was busy in another quadrant of the universe.

Allah was right. That one was going to be trouble.

But, that’s another story.

MSM Thuggees Run Amok Over Breivik

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 00:03:00 +0000

Call me Gunga Din. Or at least the Gunga Din who stood on the pinnacle of the Temple of Kali in the 1939 movie production of Kipling’s poem, and sounded the alarm of danger for the approaching British-Scottish troops of the Thuggee ambush that lay ahead of them. Or perhaps I should hand the bugle to Adrian Morgan of Family Security Matters, or to Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch, or to Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs, or to Steven Emerson of IPT, or to Daniel Greenfield of Sultan Knish, or to Daniel Pipes and Raymond Ibrahim of the Middle East Forum….

In my previous commentary, “The Oslo Factor: Blame Free Speech” I noted half-way through that The Washington Post was leading the way to government regulation or suppression of speech by hammering its nail in the coffin of “Islamaphobia,” and added:

There will be a chorus of hammering by the Main Stream Media (MSM), and calls for “responsible” speech. Which is not the same thing as free speech.

“Responsible” speech is not freedom of speech. Enforcement means force, with concomitant penalties, fines, and jail time. Only the government can define and enforce “responsible” speech. One is either free to speak, or one is not. Denmark, Britain, and other countries have already broken ground with overt or covert censorship, and have penalized individuals who have “irresponsibly” spoken out against Islam and against the “Camps of the Muslims” who are immigrating into their countries at government invitation in the names of multiculturalism, indiscriminate tolerance, and moral equivalence.

I noted that:

You see, he [Breivik] was “Islamaphobic.” He was also crazed and insensitive and insulting and perhaps even saw his country being stealthily taken over by the enemy in the guise of Muslims and Marxists. So, anyone who criticizes Islam or Muslim behavior in Western countries – or even in Muslim countries – will be branded by association with Breivik. Well-reasoned arguments, evidence of stealth jihad, connections between multiculturalism, Islamic hubris, and the Islamification of the West, impeccable scholarship, reputations for truth-telling and fact-finding, will be dismissed as “Islamaphobic,” intolerant, bigoted, and hateful.

To my knowledge, my warning was one of the earliest in the current avalanche of commentaries about the unintended consequences of Anders Behring Breivik’s act of terrorism in Norway. Critics of Islam, anti-jihadist and counter-jihadist writers and thinkers are all now the liberal-left’s “fall-guy,” having been the “inspiration” of Anders Behring Breivik to do what he did.

Now we know, courtesy of Breivik’s 1,500-page manifesto, “2083,” that he was not in essence a “Christian fundamentalist,” but an alienated, nihilist lone wolf who seized upon virtually any anti- or counter-jihadist thought to buttress his psychological disorder and sanction his admitted criminality. Imagine an alleged advocate of capitalism concocting a Brunswick stew of the economics John Law, John Maynard Keynes, Adam Smith, and Frédéric Bastiat and calling it “capitalism,” and then car-bombing the General Motors tower in Detroit.

Sultan Knish has a brilliant and revealing analysis of Breivik is and is not.

But, like The Washington Post, The New York Times has also fashioned its own Thuggee ambush. It began on July 25th with an innocuous unsigned but very subtly-worded article reporting the arrest of Breivik and his background.

Toward the end of high school, he joined the youth wing of the Progress Party, drawn to its anti-immigrant platform and market capitalist bent. But those who knew him from those days said that he failed to leave much of a mark.

And at the end of high school, was Breivik already being “enabled” by Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, and the English Defense League? Assuming he graduated from high school in 1995 or 1996, did Spencer’s Jihad Watch, Geller’s Atlas Shrugs, and the EDL even exist? Or the Gates of Vienna? Or any other “right-wing,” anti-Islamic or counter-jihadist blog? As he grew older, Breivik may have matured physically, but not mentally.

With the 1,500-page manifesto, which he said took three years to complete, Mr. Breivik endeavored to find common cause with xenophobic right-wing groups around the world, particularly in the United States. He quoted extensively from the anti-Islam writings of American bloggers, and cut and pasted a whole section of the manifesto written by Theodore J. Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, into his own, replacing “leftism” with “multiculturalism” as the object of aspehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifrsion.

Yes, “leftism” and “multiculturalism” are deserving of aspersions, considering the demonstrable and incalculable destruction they have caused. But that is no reason to suggest, as the Times article implies, that Breivik’s evaluation of those phenomena is evidence of a pandemic of unsound minds that ought to be shunned or put into the straightjacket of “responsible” speech.

That article was preceded on July 24th by the first overt attack on anti-Islamic and anti-jihadist writers, “Killings in Norway Spotlight Anti-Muslim Thought in U.S.,” by Scott Shane. It would be up to lawyers and the courts to determine whether or not the article is slanderous in nature. What the article is not, however, is a news article. Its sneering tone and borderline allegations disqualify it from being treated as a sterling instance of objective reporting. Key suggestive or slanderous terms are highlighted in this sampling of Shane’s style of insisting on guilt by association:

In the document he posted online, [Breivik], who is accused of bombing government buildings and killing scores of young people at a Labor Party camp, showed that he had closely followed the acrimonious American debate over Islam.

“Acrimonious”? Say, rather, a principled opposition that documented the violence and stealth jihad of Islamic activists? If any acrimony was present in that opposition, it was reserved for policymakers who have allowed Islam to advance unopposed to eradicate Western civilization.

More broadly, the mass killings in Norway, with their echo of the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City by an antigovernment militant, have focused new attention around the world on the subculture of anti-Muslim bloggers and right-wing activists and renewed a debate over the focus of counterterrorism efforts.

So, to belong to a handful of outspoken individuals who have done their best to warn Americans of the very real peril of Islamic supremacism and the inroads it has made in this country (not to mention Iran’s inching closer to acquiring nuclear weapons with which to vaporize Israel and the West) presumably is to belong to a “subculture” of loons and hash-smoking drop-outs who regularly consult Ouija boards for their wisdom. Note that Mr. Shane does not even honor us with the term “counter-culture.” We are members of a “subculture,” untouchables or pariahs from whom to keep children away lest we infect them with a disease.

And there is nothing wrong with being “anti-government” when your government is thoroughly reaming you and your country with astronomical debt and the expansion of federal power over your diet, lighting fixtures, and speech. But the insinuation here is that to be “anti-government” is to be a bomb-throwing anarchist whose first and sole style of argument is violence, assassination, and machine-gunning a camp full of defenseless teenagers and young adults.

The revelations about Mr. Breivik’s American influences exploded on the blogs over the weekend, putting Mr. Spencer and other self-described “counterjihad” activists on the defensive, as their critics suggested that their portrayal of Islam as a threat to the West indirectly fostered the crimes in Norway.

“Self-described”? Mr. Shane should check Mr. Spencer’s credentials. What Mr. Spencer and his fellow counter-jihad activists know about Islam would fill a Pentagon warehouse. What Mr. Shane knows about Islam would fill a thimble. Would he accuse Barack Obama of being a “self-described president”? Or Harry Reid of being a “self-described” senator?

Mr. Spencer wrote on his Web site jihadwatch.org, that “the blame game” had begun, “as if killing a lot of children aids the defense against the global jihad and Islamic supremacism, or has anything remotely to do with anything we have ever advocated.” He did not mention Mr. Breivik’s voluminous quotations from his writings.

“Voluminous quotations”? That should be more a credit to Mr. Spencer’s persuasive writing than an insinuated indictment of his alleged culpability Breivik’s crime.

Marc Sageman, a former C.I.A. officer and a consultant on terrorism, said it would be unfair to attribute Mr. Breivik’s violence to the writers who helped shape his world view. But at the same time, he said the counterjihad writers do argue that the fundamentalist Salafi branch of Islam “is the infrastructure from which Al Qaeda emerged. Well, they and their writings are the infrastructure from which Breivik emerged.”

“Emerge”? Here it is suggested that the literature of anti-jihadist writing is a polluted “infrastructure” from which the Creature from the Black Lagoon emerges to cause havoc and death.

Mr. Breivik frequently cited another blog, Atlas Shrugs, and recommended the Gates of Vienna among Web sites. Pamela Geller, an outspoken critic of Islam who runs Atlas Shrugs, wrote on her blog Sunday that any assertion that she or other antijihad writers bore any responsibility for Mr. Breivik’s actions was “ridiculous.” “If anyone incited him to violence, it was Islamic supremacists,” she wrote.

Atlas Shrugs is just “another blog” whose owner is supposedly just as suspect and culpable as Robert Spencer, because Breivik often visited the site and posted comments on it. To be cited by a psychotic killer is presumably prima facie evidence of one’s own psychosis.

Finally, Roger Cohen’s New York Times editorial, “Breivik and His Enablers” of July 25th takes off the gloves. It is such a scurrilous and venomous screed that it bears a full reading. However, here are some highlights:

No doubt, that is how Islamophobic right-wingers in Europe and the United States who share his views but not his methods will seek to portray Breivik.

Translation: Don’t pay attention to anything these people say. They deny responsibility and are in denial. Anyone who criticizes Islam or Muslims is a bigoted, paranoid fruitcake, just like Breivik.

We’ve seen the movie. When Jared Loughner shot Representative Gabrielle Giffords this year in Tucson, Arizona — after Sarah Palin placed rifle sights over Giffords’ constituency and Giffords herself predicted that “there are consequences to that” — the right went into overdrive to portray Loughner as a schizophrenic loner whose crazed universe owed nothing to those fanning hatred under the slogan of “Take America Back.” (That non-specific taking-back would of course be from Muslims and the likes of the liberal and Jewish Giffords.)

No, Mr. Cohen, what we have seen before is the MSM in action to discredit legitimate and articulate opposition to Obama’s domestic policies, and also and also anyone who opposes Islamic jihad. If any organization was in overdrive then, it was the MSM. As it is now.

Breivik is no loner. His violence was brewed in a specific European environment that shares characteristics with the specific American environment of Loughner: relative economic decline, a jobless recovery, middle-class anxiety and high levels of immigration serving as the backdrop for racist Islamophobia and use of the spurious specter of a “Muslim takeover” as a wedge political issue to channel frustrations rightward.

Yes, Mr. Cohen, Breivik was a loner. And his violence was not “brewed” by any external causes, but in his own mind. And, “Islamaphobia” is neither racist nor unhealthy; if one objects to Islamic beheadings, stonings, rapes, murders, car bombs, suicide bombers, and terrorism – all repeatedly committed by Muslims who have their own brand of racism – Islamophobia is a life-saving mindset. And “Muslim takeovers” of Western cities – say, of Luton, of Bradford, of Malmo, of Dearborn, even of Oslo, where a day before the Oslo bombing, a Norwegian woman was raped in broad daylight on the steps of the Norwegian parliament by a Somali immigrant – are hardly “spurious.” Or perhaps Mr. Cohen would consider moving Tower Hamlets in London, which is more or less a successful Muslim secession from London and the U.K.

Further into his editorial, Cohen manages to implicate Geert Wilders, Marine Le Pen, and without naming her, Angela Merkel of Germany, who stated that Muslim integration into Western societies, is a dismal and dangerous failure. In short, Cohen’s editorial is instructive only in the sense that one can see just how vile, nihilist, and hateful the left can be.

Finally, the employment of the term anti-Muslim is a package-deal, one that includes by implication any thoughtful and considered opposition to Islamic ideology. One can be faultlessly “anti-Muslim” if one knows, among other things, that Muslims regularly bow East in homage to a gussied-up meteorite, treat women as chattel, revere a murderous brigand and pedophile, and more or less surrender their minds and souls to the authority of grotty-looking imams and mullahs. In practice, the Islamic creed, whatever its sect, is so grotesque that one has difficulty satirizing it.

But the usage of the term “anti-Muslim” is wrong. Spencer, Emerson, Geller, Horowitz and other regular writers on Islam, are not “anti-Muslim,” but anti-totalitarian. Islamists themselves admit that Islam is totalitarian, and not just a Wontonka-worshipping creed.

Now, for the longest time, I had never understood what a right-winger was. Aside from the caricature of a right-winger as a gun-toting, Bible-quoting, goose-stepping, Storm-Trooperish goon wielding a night-stick, the term, I eventually realized, is an emotive one that connotes the absolute power of fascism. But fascism is simply socialism with a gun, or King Kong astride the Empire State Building beating the breast of collectivism and national “unity.”

It is Nazism, or corporatist socialism, with all businesses, industries, and all citizens working for the greater glory of the collective and taking orders from on high. It is Mussolini, and Tojo, and Nasser, and Saddam Hussein, and the Perons. Fascism can be embroidered in many different cultural and ethnic colors, but they all boil down to the surrender and sacrifice of the individual to the state or the race or the collective.

And in the context of today’s peril, aside from fascist tendencies in this country, it is the Islamic Ummah, or Muslim “community,” which will not find “peace” until it embraces the whole globe, when believers and unbelievers alike are in thrall to http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifit. In essence, a “right-winger” is not a champion of individual rights, private property, freedom of speech and other liberties. There are secular “right-wingers” and religious ones and they are all enemies of freedom. The term is a misleading misnomer, measured on a scale whose origin dates back to Revolutionary France and the Reign of Terror. But on its own terms, a “right-winger” is simply a “left-winger” in disguise, seeking the same repressive, totalitarian ends.

So, the standard spectrum of political ideology has for decades been established and perpetuated by an invalid premise. The whole yardstick is leftist. Please, people, stop being fooled by it. Reality beckons. “Right-wingers” are simply “Left-wingers” in drag.

Conservative writers, such as Ron Radosh and David Horowitz, perpetuate the fallacy by defending “conservatives” against charges of nascent “right-wing” terrorism.

Perhaps more importantly than diverting attention away from the legitimate concern with Islamic jihad and the stealthy introduction and imposition of Sharia law in Western nations, is the blank check the MSM is handing our government to monitor and perhaps repress legitimate criticism of Islam. Many of these “Islamaphobic” websites are sponsored, edited and written for by Christians. Because Breivik was initially alleged to be a “fundamentalist Christian,” ergo, goes the illogic, all Christian and other critics of Islam are potential mass murderers and must be reined in. And if not actual mass murderers, then they are ideological “enablers” of them who must be taught to be “responsible.”

If censorship comes to this country, it will be by the invitation of the MSM and the left-liberal political and intellectual establishment. Then we shall see the true “right-wingers” at work.

In the meantime, I shall continue blowing my bugle, and be thankful that I number among the “blackfaced crew” of “bhistis” who carry the water of reason. We oppose the Thuggees of Islam and their enablers on the Marxist-liberal-left, who carry the strangling cloths of multiculturalism and the burial picks of political correctness.

And, should someone object to my use of the term “Thuggee,” I recommend going here for the etymology and history of the term. He will see that not only would Breivik have fit into the mindless fanaticism of the cult of Kali – he was willing, after all, to ally himself with Islamic “extremists” and inaugurate a reign of violence – but that the Hindu cult had Islamic origins.

What a coincidence!

Or not.

The Oslo Factor: Blame Free Speech

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 12:37:00 +0000

In Dashiell Hammett’s nonpareil detective novel, The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade, the street-wise and glib private eye, toys with and manipulates the contentious members of a gang of hustlers in order to nail the person among them who murdered his business partner. He pretends to ally himself with their purposes, but warns them that someone must take the rap for that murder and others, someone who can be turned over to the authorities. They must have a “fall-guy,” he explains to the gang leader, Casper Gutman. He at first nominates Wilmer, the leader’s psychotic “gunsil” and bodyguard.

“Let’s give them the punk.” He nodded pleasantly at the boy in the doorway. “He actually did shoot both of them – Thursby and Jacobi – didn’t he? Anyway, he’s made to order for the part. Let’s pin the necessary evidence on him and turn him over to them.”

The horrific attack in Oslo, Norway last Friday, in which 84 Norwegian youths were mercilessly gunned down by Anders Behring Breivik, a psychotic Norwegian Christian fundamentalist and anti-Muslim who also allegedly planted a devastating and lethal bomb in central Oslo, has produced an “Islamaphobic” fall-guy, made to order for the part.

You see, he was “Islamaphobic.” He was also crazed and insensitive and insulting and perhaps even saw his country being stealthily taken over by the enemy in the guise of Muslims and Marxists. So, anyone who criticizes Islam or Muslim behavior in Western countries – or even in Muslim countries – will be branded by association with Breivik. Well-reasoned arguments, evidence of stealth jihad, connections between multiculturalism, Islamic hubris, and the Islamification of the West, impeccable scholarship, reputations for truth-telling and fact-finding, will be dismissed as “Islamaphobic,” intolerant, bigoted, and hateful.

I do not believe in “evil geniuses.” So I will not make the argument that Al Quada or some other Islamic terrorist group put Breivik up to committing the crime in order to divert attention from Islam’s own and numerous depredations – although the idea is a credible one.

However, there are several legitimate observations to make and questions to ask.

An Australian TV news report at least hypothesizes that the double attack was too well organized and had a jihadist M.O. Based on statements by survivors of the massacre, police suspect that a second gunman was involved.

Up front, the “Christian fundamentalist” nature of the attack makes little sense. Was Breivik unbalanced? Was he so out of it that jihadists could convince him that it was fellow Norwegians who were the “enemy” and not Muslims? If he were a Christian fundamentalist, would he not have wanted to slaughter Muslims, instead?

Norway’s ruling Labor Party is friendly to Muslim immigration, which, in light of the demonstrated purposes of such immigration, to impose Sharia law on Western nations, is prima facie an irrational policy. Breivik attacked the ideological offspring of the Labor Party. But, if Breivik hated Muslims, why did he not attack Muslims, instead? Why mow down nearly a hundred liberal-left Christian children? This answer may or may not come out during his trial.

Norway has gun control laws. How did Breivik procure his automatic weapon? How did he acquire explosives? If he rigged the bomb or bombs that created so much devastation in Oslo, where did he get instructions? From Inspire, the jihadist online magazine? From whom? Through whose weapons network? An M16 ammo clip does not hold enough ammo to mow down 84 people. Was he wearing an ammo belt of clips? Who procured the policeman’s uniform? How did he travel from Oslo to Utoya Island loaded with weaponry and not have been noticed? Where was Norwegian security at the camp? Was there any? Was there a second, or even a third gunman?

Jihadists apparently helped Timothy McVeigh blow up the federal building in Oklahoma City. Is this some kind of diversionary terrorism, organized by jihadists, to shift attention away from Islamists? Is this a form of taqiyya – an orchestrated pointing of fingers at the other guy?

Is Anders Behring Breivik an example of cool reason, calm reflection, and fealty to reality? You be the judge:

In his first comment via a lawyer since he was arrested, 32-year-old Anders Behring Breivik expressed willingness to explain himself in court at a hearing likely to be held on Monday about extending his custody.

"He has said that he believed the actions were atrocious, but that in his head they were necessary," lawyer Geir Lippestad told independent TV2 news, adding that his client admitted to both the shootings and the bombing….

Breivik hated "cultural Marxists," wanted a "crusade" against the spread of Islam and liked guns and weightlifting, web postings, acquaintances and officials said. A video posted on the YouTube website showed several pictures of Breivik, including one of him in a scuba diving outfit pointing an automatic weapon.

But the incident will work to the advantage of Islamists everywhere.

Adrian Morgan, editor of Family Security Matters, details the beginning of the smear of critics of Islam and jihad. I left this comment on his article.

In short, Mr. Morgan is describing the attempts by the MSM to link Anders Breivik with a number of legitimate and coolly reasoned anti-Islamist websites and blog sites whose sponsors and writers would never condone the mass slaughter of anyone or the bombing any government buildings. That the MSM is attempting to pull this Three-Card-Monte switcheroo reveals just how morally and intellectually bankrupt the MSM is and how desperate its minions are to discredit and not refute any and all criticism of Muslims and Islam. It is called “guilt by association.” This is tantamount to accusing Hitler’s mother of influencing the murderous content of her son’s mind because she taught him how to tie his shoelaces.

But, perhaps more importantly than diverting attention away from the legitimate concern with Islamic jihad, is the blank check the MSM is handing our government to monitor and perhaps repress legitimate criticism of Islam. Many of these “Islamaphobic” websites are sponsored, edited and written for by Christians. Because Breivik is alleged to be a “fundamentalist Christian,” ergo, would go the “reasoning,” all Christian critics of Islam are potential mass murderers and must be reined in.

If censorship comes to this country, it will be by the invitation of the MSM and the left-liberal political and intellectual establishment.

This whole thing smells of a frame-up, and Breivik more and more to me looks like a fall-guy. I do not doubt there are Christian fundamentalists who would resort to murder to “spread God’s word.” I will remind readers here of the murders of abortion doctors .

Whatever the Norwegian authorities find, they are going to be reluctant to release any information that might implicate Islamists and Muslims. It might rile up the immigrant “Norwegian” Muslims, provoke them to stage “spontaneous” demonstrations, and step up their spiraling rape spree of non-Muslim Norwegian women.

Norway police officials gave the gunman’s name as Anders Behring Breivik at a news conference Saturday morning. Norway’s national broadcaster, NRK, and other news outlets in the country also posted pictures of the blond and blue-eyed Norwegian.

“What we know is that he is right wing and he is Christian fundamentalist,” said Roger Andresen, a deputy police chief. “We have not been able to link him up to an anti-Islamic group.” He said that Breivik had not been arrested before.

But wait. Some funny business has occurred on Breivik’s Facebook page. Who has been altering it to better frame the “fall guy”? Go here for details and images.

The Washington Post not surprisingly contributes its nail to hammer into the coffin of “Islamaphobia.”

Norwegians trying to make sense of the bombing and shooting attacks here turn again and again to the one example that seems to fit: Oklahoma City.

Here, as there, a quick assumption that Muslims were at fault proved to be erroneous. Norwegians now know that a 32-year-old Christian, who railed against tolerance and diversity, is the principle and perhaps only suspect. A Norwegian newspaper reported that he had recently bought a large quantity of fertilizer, which can be used to make bombs — as Timothy McVeigh showed in 1995.

There will be a chorus of hammering by the MSM, and calls for “responsible” speech. Which is not the same thing as free speech.

Oh, yes, let us bring up Timothy McVeigh ad nauseum. Link him to Anders Breivik. And to Waco, the Branch Davidians and David Koresh. To Charles Manson. To the Symbionese Liberation Army. And to other conspiracy theory fruitcakes, who must also be “neo-Nazis.” Then very, very subtly point fingers at Adrian Morgan, Robert Spencer, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Pamela Geller, Wafa Sultan, Steven Emerson, and so many more individuals who have provided ample and irrefutable evidence that Wilmer and the liberal-left guy pointing a finger at him are both guilty.

Wilmer and his friends in the MSM and our Marxist-dominated academia and intelligentsia are not “fall-guys.” They are the guys. They are the punks.

And Islam? That ideological prescription for religious and political tyranny is best represented by Brigid O'Shaughnessy, the duplicitous, lying, victim-card-happy dame and Spade’s true nemesis who committed the original murder.

Anyone who has a problem with Islam being represented by a murderess, well, deal with it.

All in the Islamic Family

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 04:29:00 +0000

Twenty years before 9/11, when Saudi nationals hijacked American passenger planes and used them as suicide bombs, the West was warned by one of our main enemies of things to come. The warning was announced in an unsigned Reuters article which appeared in April, 1981, in The New York Times: “Saudis Shield Islam From ‘Alien Values.’”

The headline sums up one half of the truth. A subheading may as well have read: “Values Alien to Islam to be Liquidated.”

A page-two heading could also have paraphrased Vladimir Lenin: “Westerners will sell us the rope with which we will subjugate them.”

The physical rope is the oil-production capacity which the barbarians nationalized (pioneered by Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, which then helped to form OPEC in 1960), which the West refrained from reclaiming. The ideological rope is multiculturalism and cultural relativism. Their ultimatum was and remains: If you Westerners insist there is no difference between our cultural and politics and yours, then it can make no difference to you if we take over and set the terms of your existence. You are willing to tolerate the intolerant and the intolerable. That will be your epitaph. We are intolerant of the tolerant. That will be the message of our victory.

The Times article is a fawning puff piece about our less than benevolent extortionist, the royal kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and about its pseudo-angst over how Western values are no match for a medieval, totalitarian ideology that is insulated from any and all threats from Western civilization.

Saudi Arabia's economic planners believe they can successfully link the West's technology and the Islamic faith without rending society, but acknowledge they face a challenge.

The text of the country's economic plan recognizes that there is concern in the Government and among the populace that ''alien values and the spirit of materialism'' may threaten religion, adding that this is a difficult problem.

''I am an optimist,'' Deputy Planning Minister Faisal Bashir said in an interview. ''I think we came out of the 1970's very well. But we must not compromise our basic principles. I would call those Islam and our belief in the family.''

It is not much of a challenge. Islam is safe. It faces no peril from the West. It has forgotten, abandoned, or disparaged the principles that made it possible. But, to better grasp this point, let us begin by translating the disingenuous opening paragraphs.

The West’s technology and the Islamic faith are not successfully linked. That is, they are not “partnered” or “married” or joined together in holy matrimony. Islam is by nature a parasitical ideology which cannot allow its adherents to create, innovate, or think outside the suffocating box of blind faith. islam cannot allow its elect or anyone else freedom of thought without sabotaging itself. It will not abide criticism ranging from cartoons of its prophet to examination of its central tenets. So, it must feed off the West, which does allow freedom of thought, and freedom of action.

It is not Saudi, or even Iranian, Pakistani, Egyptian, Malaysian, or Indonesian or any other dominantly Islamic society that is being rent by the conflict between Islam and the West. It is the West’s societies, in virtually every Western nation, that are being torn asunder thanks to their pragmatic, tolerant, non-judgmental, and politically correct perception of Islam as just another religion. Europe is experiencing this dissolution first hand.

What are the “alien values” that the Saudis wish to keep – and have successfully kept for decades at box-cutter’s length? The supreme value of the individual. The idea that it is the individual who is the prime mover of his own life, responsible for his own values and actions. The value of that individual to be free to act in his own self-interest. The value of the idea that his rights to exist and to act do not emanate from society, or the state, or any monarchy, but from his nature as a being of volitional consciousness beholden to no dogma or faith.

The “spirit of materialism”? What is meant by that? Ostensively, an overriding concern for one’s material comfort and happiness at the expense of intangible “spiritual” or moral values, which, in the case of Islam, is unquestioned submission to the theology and pseudo-ethics of Islam. However, blind, unquestioning acceptance of any morality is not a moral action. And one does not witness the sacrifice of “material values” in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Dubai, or any other oil-windfall Arab regime. Like the ancient Egyptians, the Saudis have embarked on an “economic plan” which consists of building monumental skyscrapers, housing developments, and other neo-pyramids, all of which, funded by petrodollars, are white elephants that can never earn back their enormous investment. They represent the siphoning off of genuine, productive wealth from the West into unimaginable money pits.

Where did the Saudi planners get their economic and business ideas? In the West’s left-wing dominated universities. Are the Saudis, Kuwaitis, and other Arab regimes outside the usual scale of political economy? Judge for yourself. The Times article contained this revealing confession:

''There are also not very many Saudis - perhaps not more than five million -so it is easier to spread the wealth around,'' a West European diplomat remarked.

The 1980-85 economic plan envisages investments of about $300 billion for social improvements, defense, agriculture and gas-based petrochemical plants to earn foreign exchange when oil income eventually tapers off.

A recent visitor, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain, heard the Minister of Planning, Hisham Nazer, declare that all Saudis were entitled to free education and health care, unemployment and injury benefits. Prices for some essentials are subsidized.

''It may sound as if the Saudi Government is following a policy of handouts,'' he told Mrs. Thatcher, who is a vigorous champion of self-reliance and free enterprise. ''But the policy is to insure a minimum standard of living and beyond that the good life will have to be earned.''

“Spread the wealth around”? Where have we heard that before, except most notably from the current, Islam-friendly occupant of the White House, talking down to Joe the Plumber? In terms of economic “planning,” are the Saudis so different from Western socialists, and also have an educated predilection for five-year plans and programs of coercive and extortionate “people management”?

Islam does not discourage making money, provided that the prosperous give alms to the poor. As conservative religious authorities see it, Islam is liable to be at risk when wealthy young Saudis fly off for the summer to London, Paris or Bangkok and cultivate a taste for permissive ways, a diplomat said.

Spiritual values are perceived as further threatened by the presence of many non-Moslems in a foreign work force of at least 1.5 million, required because so far too few Saudis have the technological skills to run a modern economy and very few are inclined to undertake manual labor.

Virtually the only Saudi prince who took Islam seriously – that is, practiced its core, jihadist, Kantian morality of self-sacrifice – was Osama bin Laden, who traded his palaces, limousines, private aircraft, and freedom of movement for the life of a fugitive hobo, living in caves and finally in a rat-trap compound that resembled an abandoned Super 8 motel, courtesy of and with the full knowledge of our “ally,” Pakistan.

The West is on the defensive, Islam on the offensive. As communists in the past have done in pursuit of global socialist state, Islamists are plotting the overthrow of the West and its replacement with a global caliphate right in our backyard. They are quite frank about their ends and means. An Islamic website, Khilafah.com, reported in July 2009:

An international Islamist political group is preparing for its first conference in the U.S. on Sunday July 19th under the theme "Fall of Capitalism & Rise to Islam."

The sponsor of the conference, Hizb ut-Tahrir, is an organization that has been banned in Germany and several Middle Eastern countries because of its views. It is sometimes described as "extremist" and "radical" by analysts and research groups. In a phone interview with CBS News, the conference's deputy spokesperson [Reza Imam] stressed that Hizb ut-Tahrir does not call for violence or spread radical ideas

.
Officially, Hizb ut-Tahrir eschews violence. But violence, or the threat of it, is the only way Islam can spread – unless the West abandons the values of freedom and individualism. Reza Imam’s assurances are mere instances of taqiyya, or Muslim double-talk.

Jeremy Binnie, senior analyst for terrorism and insurgency at Jane's, an information group that provides consultancy on intelligence and strategic issues, says the group advocates ideas that are similar to those of militant Islamist groups like al Qaeda, namely the establishment of a pan-Islamic caliphate state that would be ruled under Islamic law. The difference is that Hizb ut-Tahrir is against achieving this goal through terrorism, says Binnie....

While Binnie says the group is "not very threatening in terms of strategy," he worries that Hizb ut-Tahrir might act as a "conveyor belt." He says members of the group, who are convinced of its worldview, might give up on its strategy, especially given its failure to achieve the goal so far, and decide to join militant groups or engage in violent acts on their own.

Like the Muslim Brotherhood, which our president is cozying up to and which the Saudis are supporting behind the scenes, Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT) has been around for a long time and is determined to achieve its goal of world domination by Islam. It would be interesting to know the funding pedigree of HT. We are certain of the Brotherhood’s basic finances. Front Page interviewed a lone Egyptian intellectual and activist about the “Arab Spring,” and who is for freedom and against “democracy.”

The concept of Khilafah [caliphate] is very much alive and well, and functioning stealthily. Egypt is a Saudi colony; KSA has been trying to ideologically control Egypt by supporting the Muslim Brotherhood since the early 1930′s and in the 40′s the Muslim Brotherhood infiltrated the Egyptian army.

Has HT given up? No. Does it know where it stands in “history”? Yes. While one totalitarian system has collapsed of its own ineptness, another has sprung up to take its place. As the Soviet Union depended on Western largesse and often was actively supported by it, Islamic regimes are emulating the same scenario. This month HT held a conference in Chicago, at the appropriately named Double Tree Hotel.

A radical Islamist group which claims a presence in nearly 50 countries is so confident it can help establish a global Muslim government – or caliphate – that it distributed a draft constitution during a recent conference outside of Chicago.

It calls for the death penalty for apostates and for creating a government department dedicated to jihad. The latest Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT) gathering drew more than 300 people to a Double Tree Hotel ballroom June 26.

HT is an international movement to establish a global Islamic state, or caliphate (Khilafah). Although it is officially committed to nonviolence, HT preaches a virulent brand of hatred for the United States, and for Western democracy in general. Its alumni include such violent Islamists as Khaiid Sheikh Mohammad, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and the late Iraqi jihadist Abu Musab Zarqawi. Hizb ut-Tahrir has been described as a “conveyor belt” of terrorism.

At the conference, activists portrayed Islam as the only real force in the world standing up to the United States and the West. With Soviet communism gone, the West is now confronted with the threat posed by Islam, said a speaker identified as Reza Imam. He has served as spokesman for the organization. "And they see the return of Islam," he warned. "And this, brothers and sisters, is the shaking [of] the thrones." Islam's foes "see the coming revival of Islam, and they know what that means and they know what it means for their policies," Imam said.

The Times-Reuters article of 1981about the Saudis exhibits its penchant for cultural relativism and its unwillingness to pass a moral judgment, a cowardice that would have consequences twenty years later.

The vast desert land was the birthplace of Islam, so what happens here has meaning to all the world's 600 million Moslems. The Government understands the West's concern over a safe flow of Saudi oil, they said, but it resents ill-informed Western criticism of the stricter practices of Islam, as observed here, such as stoning of adulterers and the veiling and seclusion of women.

The continued stoning of adulterers and the veiling and seclusion of women were but overtures to what was to come to the West when the populations of Muslim immigrants began to swell in Europe. That journalistic and politically correct diffidence continues to this day when the “resentment” of Western criticism has graduated to death fatwas on critics and cartoonists, rising sexual assaults on non-Muslim women in Western countries, honor killings of disobedient girls and women, riots and mass car burnings in “no-go” ghettoes in major cities, a resurgence of anti-Semitism spread by Muslim clerics, brazen calls for sedition and the overthrow of Western governments in mosques, the de facto establishment of Sharia courts in contravention of civil law, the meek accommodation of Muslim “needs” such as foot baths, prayer rooms, and halal food, often paid for by non-Muslim taxpayers (yes, it is jizya, or the Islamic tax on conquered infidels), the Ground Zero mosque…and so much more, all abetted, condoned, or ignored by a liberal news media, our leftist/liberal intelligentsia, and often by our judiciary.

Yes. Saudi Deputy Planning Minister Faisal, quoted early in this commentary, had every reason to be “optimistic.” He believes in “the family.” By “family” he meant the Islamic Ummah or “community” or “brotherhood. Suborning and emasculating the West has been a cakewalk.

Our leaders believe in nothing. Basically, the conflict is between one brand of nihilism and another.

A Mohammadan Parable (Unexpurgated)

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 15:57:00 +0000

I begin here with a parable that comes under the heading: You can make this stuff up, and there will be believers.

It seems that Mohammad was an Area 51 junkie centuries before the place was laid out by the U.S. government. He was one of the original Predators (his band of merry acolytes being mere predators), slashing his way through the Arabian Peninsula, beheading and mutilating non-believers wherever he found them, especially if they were caught hiding behind rocks. Now and then, one supposes, he gazed up at the heavens, and wondered if there were others like him in the universe. Then he would rouse himself, leave the side of the captive woman or nine-year-old girl he had just raped, pad over to another partitioned section of his commodious tent, and call for his biographer.

“Take a note, Abdullah,” he commanded when the harried-looking man arrived, slightly groggy with disturbed sleep. “Gabriel just spoke to me again. There are other planets out there! See those stars?” he exclaimed, pointing to the roof of the tent. “They’re really shining planets, and they are home to beings just like us, and they all acknowledge Allah as the one true God. If they don’t, it means war, it means jihad, and righteous conversion. We shall slay the jinns of Satan!”

Abdullah said, “Well, that’s all find and good, but…How do we get there?”

“Get where?”

“Where the infidel aliens live.” The biographer was seated cross-legged on his straw mat, parchment and ink pot at the ready on a low stand before him. His quill was poised in his left hand to take down the words of the Prophet.

Mohammad was too distracted by the novelty of his new message, and did not notice this left-handed and insulting breach of etiquette. “Allah will fly us there, in magic bubbles. Or on carpets, or broomsticks. He’ll think of something. He is all-powerful.”

“Camels and steeds, too?”

“Of course. Or, Allah will just provide them. He wouldn’t expect us to walk into an infidel city and take it over, would he? We’d look pretty silly. We must scare the Beejesus out of the infidel aliens! Our mounts will appear magically on those worlds. They will be magnificent, and be comfortably saddled, and not need water or forage.” Mohammad waxed poetic. “And we will be armed with the finest swords and spears, gleaming with merciless justice, true at every thrust, and we will be garbed in cloaks of invincibility.”

He paced excitedly back and forth before Abdullah, his mind reeling with visions of conquest. He wondered what alien women looked like. Did they wear veils? Or burkas? Maybe they looked like burkas, with mandibles over their mouths and boasting many stringy, handless arms! Oh, well, nothing risked, nothing gained! Women aren’t everything! He imagined that their men-folk had amassed fortunes in gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And an unlimited banquet of dates, nuts, and kosher delicacies. Kosher? No, no, he meant halal delicacies! Allah be merciful and forgive me!

Mohammad pinched himself once as punishment for the unclean thought.

Abdullah busied himself and scribbled away, his tongue lodged firmly in his left cheek. Then he paused and looked quizzical. “Master, there is one thing I do not understand.”

“What?”

“Why would they not come to us? After all, you are the mountain. It would only be proper.”

“It is Allah’s will that we go to them. We couldn’t very well spread the faith if we did not venture forth. What kind of a missionary would I be, if we just sat on our heinies and waited for them to come to Mohammad? Sometimes, compromise is a virtue. It’s in the Koran there. I said so!” He pointed to a mass of pages at Abdullah’s side, next to masses of pages that were the Torah and proof-pages of the Bible. His past biographers had found it necessary to adapt some of the material from those works to spice up the Koran, to give it some momentum and action, and also authority.

Abdullah demurred on this point. He scratched his turban once, then asked, “There is another thing. If Allah is all-powerful, and made all living things, including us and the Jews and pagans and other non-believers, why didn’t he just make us all believers, and save you the trouble of killing them? It seems rather short-sighted of him. And not a little whimsical!” Abdullah shook his head, and added with some indignation, “For a Potentate of the Universe, methinks he has a self-esteem deficiency that does not comport with his reputation. He is against idolatry, but wishes to be idolized himself. It would explain his need to be worshipped, to be the center of attention. It all seems a bit narcissistic to me.” Abdullah smiled. “Pardon me for saying so, but I think many of your lieutenants are also full of themselves.”

Mohammad thoughtfully stroked his beard, causing some lice to change abodes, and cast a baleful eye on the biographer. He held out a commanding hand. “Let me see what you have written.”

Abdullah handed him the new Koranic page.

Mohammad read. He cocked his head in appreciation. Reading was a new skill to him, and he did not understand half the words. But what he read was nebulous and ambiguous enough to be taken any way one wished. It read like a glorious prophecy. Worthy of that upstart, Moses. And of Nostradamus. Or Madame Blavatsky. He had knowledge of these future infidel prophets, for the angel Gabriel had whispered their names to him in his past dreams. Still, he scowled. He hummed in doubt, and glanced down at his biographer.

“What means this, dog??” he barked, holding the page out and pointing to an image Abdullah had absently doodled over the script while the Prophet was careening through the stars. It was a likeness of Mohammad, a fair representation of his visage, and accurate to a fault. There was a prominent mole on his left cheek, and an unsightly sty over his right eye. A long scar also ornamented his right cheek, put there not by an enemy’s sword, but by the nails of an infidel woman who had resisted his urgings. He had slain her on the spot, and felt cheated. But righteous.

Abdullah knew the story, but it meant nothing to him. It was impolitic to mention the Prophet’s less glorious episodes. A strong desert breeze blew. The tent swayed and its supporting poles creaked ominously. He cringed before the silent rebuke of his Master, suddenly regretting his outspokenness. He wished now that he had taken that reporter’s job in Haifa.

The next morning, Mohammad advertised for a new biographer. Abdullah’s head was perched atop a spear planted outside the Prophet’s tent. A sign on parchment hung by a cord from around its neck. It read: “Wanted: Ghost-Writer. Must believe everything I say. Spoils of war to be negotiated. Generous retirement plan (not this person’s). Blasphemers and Irish need not apply.”

Yes, I made up that parable. However, here are some excerpts from serious approaches to the Koran. When it comes to outer space and aliens, Muslims had the West beat by 1,400 years. Don’t “believe” me? Take a gander.

Within Islam, the statement of the Qur’an, "All praise belongs to God, Lord of all the worlds" suggests multiple universal bodies, and maybe even multiple universes, which may indicate extraterrestrial and even extradimensional life.

According to Ahmadyya, Islam as a more direct reference from the Quran is presented by Mirza Tahir Ahmad as a proof that life on other planets may exist according to the Quran. In his book, Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge & Truth, he quotes verse 42:29 "And among His Signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth, and of whatever living creatures (da'bbah) He has spread forth in both...” according to this verse there is life in heavens. According to the same verse "And He has the power to gather them together (jam-'i-him) when He will so please"; indicates the bringing together the life on Earth and the life elsewhere in the Universe. The verse does not specify the time or the place of this meeting but rather states that this event will most certainly come to pass whenever God so desires. It should be pointed out that the Arabic term Jam-i-him used to express the gathering event can imply either a physical encounter or a contact through communication.

In Shia Islam the 6th Imam Ja’far al-Sidiq has been quoted as saying that there are living beings on other planets.

Of course, taking the Koran literally is much like believing that Charlie Sheen, Russell Crowe, and Mel Gibson all got gold stars from their anger management monitors. More likely, because the Koran, like the Bible and the Torah, was a work-in-progress for centuries, some anonymous, bored, and underpaid scribe, and perhaps even Ja’far al-Sadiq himself, had a tad too much spiked date juice, and let his imagination run away with him. And perhaps that alien Jodie Foster met on Vega after a wild ride on an interstellar subway train in Contact was really Allah in disguise (taking a leaf from Zeus). If it was, she was lucky she didn’t get the Lara Logan treatment.

End of story.

Islam the Alien

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 13:41:00 +0000

For me, most science fiction stories have a credibility problem. But the one branch of it whose premise I have always rejected is that alien life could be both malevolent and technologically advanced enough to embark on interstellar conquests. Films such as Predator and Independence Day – just two of the more popular instances of the genre among many – portray aliens stalking man as a species of game or subjugating or extinguishing him. The premise that projects the possibility of these creatures is that a preeminently hostile, anti-life-form could somehow apply reason to create spaceships and sophisticated weaponry.

However, life-forms so malevolent would never rise from the rank swamps that bred them to go zipping around star systems and blasting planets to atoms. Malevolence is not a progenitor of innovation or creation. It is fundamentally a parasite and can thrive only on a passive or willing host. Reason is not an attribute or a handmaiden of evil. Evil in fact can only exploit the products of reason, but never originate them. Evil men or evil aliens may exhibit intelligence, but not reason. They can exploit what reason has caused to exist, but never bring it into existence

Ugly predators and slimy aliens that can invent cloaking devices and disintegrating rays are possible in imagination only because of a fantastic, and possibly even fatal, fallacy. Their creators – and their fans – assume that reason is not the natural antithesis and enemy of anti-reason, but a morally neutral faculty that can ally itself with anti-reason in campaigns of conquest and death.

Not so coincidentally, the fallacy also explains the left’s hostility to freedom and capitalism. Capitalists, they say, have the freedom to employ reason to create things, and then use their profits to establish power and enslave everyone.

Sharks, rattlesnakes, Komodo dragons, wolves, and other predators are not inherently evil. They do what nature has programmed them to do, without any choice in their struggles for existence. No moral decisions are involved in their actions. Their values are predetermined. They lack the attribute of volition, that is, the capacity to think or not to think, to choose what will sustain and improve their lives and what will not.

A malevolent intelligence is not a contraction in terms. Else how to explain all the real and fictional villains in history and literature, from Hitler to Professor Moriarty, from Attila the Hun to Ellsworth Toohey? Or Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his threatened nuclear weapons? But a malevolent adherent to reason, like the aliens in Predator and Independence Day, is a psychological, metaphysical and philosophical contradiction. In nature, the teleology of such alien creatures is impossible.

A malevolent intelligence may succeed in finding comfort in a social and material environment created by reason, and be able to exploit its victims’ innocence, foolishness, or ignorance. But without reason having created such a world, it would remain a miserable prisoner in the dank, fetid jungle it was born in, never able to conceive of anything better, unable by its nature to look up at the stars, content with its surroundings, and concerned only with its next meal. Thomas Hobbes’ notion of man at war is equally and more realistically applicable to the actual existence of would-be predator space aliens in their basic mode: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Which leads me to Islam.

Islam is a malevolent, ideational predator bent on conquest. It demands conversion, submission, or death. Left to its own devices, Islam would have remained contained by and confined to its own impotence whence it came, the Mideast, in Saudi Arabia. It would be a bubonic rat that squeaked but which would otherwise be quarantined by its own irrationality, and by reason.

But what has given Islam its purported potency to wreck havoc in the world? It is a philosophy burdened with the same fallacy that allows science fiction writers to believe that reason can ally with anti-reason and act of its own accord. In past columns I have likened Islam to a drooling beast, to the Borg, to a viral disease, and to other entities closed to reason, proof against freedom, and dedicated to destruction for destruction’s sake. .

Pragmatic policies in the West allowed the nomadic, primitive Saudis and other tribalists to nationalize the oil which Western technology discovered and developed in the barren wastes over which they had been butchering each other and other tribes for millennia. Environmentalist policies that prohibit oil drilling allow smug tribalists to make extortion a practical policy. Pragmatic policies allowed Muslims to immigrate to semi-free, semi-rational cultures and proceed to complete the sabotaging disease of irrationality. Pragmatism sired moral and cultural relativism that forbids moral judgment of Islam’s barbarism and its incipient, cradle-to-grave psychosis. Appropriating the mantle of “religious freedom” – call it a “cloaking device,” if you will – and exploiting the foolishness and irrationality of their enemies, Islamic activists in three-piece suits and armed with unlimited funds work obsessively to erase freedom for all but Muslims.

Pragmatism fosters the growth of a police state whose managers and minions, in the name of political correctness and non-discrimination, will not identify Islam as a predatory ideology (that would be evidence of “Islamaphobia,” and “offensive”), and proceed to subject and inure a country’s citizens to the invasive ministrations of arbitrary searches, seizures, and incarceration on the chance that they might catch a bomber whose motives will not be linked to Islam. Their policy, designed to not offend Muslims but all non-Muslims, is to hope to find a scimitar in an infinite haystack. The Department of Homeland Security is headed by a multiculturalist friendly to Islam, while the TSA is staffed by tens of thousands of non-entities empowered to grope, violate, molest, rob, and hold judgment over private citizens in the name of “safety.”

The anti-profiling policies of the DHS and TSA are anti-reason, and anti-Aristotelian, and as “alien” as the ends of a Predator or shapeless alien piloting five-mile-wide spaceships.

Islam is such a unique, unprecedented peril that one ignores it at one’s own peril. There is the double peril of Obama, Pelosi, et al. (and the generations of collectivist thought behind them) wanting to “transform” the country into a secular State of Servitude (no pun intended), and of Islam, whose spokesmen are at work insinuating its brand of totalitarianism into the country via “religious freedom,” but whose purpose is also to “transform” the country into another kind of State of Servitude. In this teleological end Islamists have a willing ally, the secular totalitarians.

Saul Alinsky, meet Sheikh Ahmad Gad of the Muslim Brotherhood, another malevolent intelligence.

Islam is a radically different matter. None of the other religious groups in America – whether they are composed largely of immigrants or of tenth generation blacks or whites or Asians or Eskimos -- expects the other creeds to defer to it. Muslims and Islam, however, expect everyone to defer to Islam. Islam is an enemy of individualism. Islam is imbued with a code of conduct that is fundamentally barbaric and concrete-bound and too often murderous. Sharia is not just a primitive system of adjudication; it is also, and inherently, political. It does not recognize the world beyond that insular system, except as something to assimilate into its system, or to erase.

The corrupting norms of multiculturalism have vastly aided Muslims in their not having to knuckle under secular law and having to stop murdering wayward daughters and wives and sons who become apostates. Furthermore, feminists, liberals, leftists in and out of academia ignore the outrages committed by Muslims in the name of Islam – the continuing rapes of ‘infidel” women in Europe and the Mideast by Muslims, the stonings, hangings, and executions of men and women who flout Islamic rules, the persecution and murders of Christians, Jews, Hindus in the name of Islam, and so on – because they recognize Islam as a bird of the same feather – a totalitarian system that shares similar premises, methods, and ends. Criticism of rival totalitarians might inadvertently lead to criticism of their own anti-reason and anti-life policies. Call the phenomenon a Collectivist-Islamic Non-Aggression Pact.

Predatory “aliens” need not come from outer space. There are two species of them right here on earth, both exercising their malevolent intelligences to advance their dual agendas of conquest, slavery, and destruction. They are merely rivals, and not antipodes of each other.

As Gilliatt did in Victor Hugo’s compelling novel, Toilers of the Sea, as he was being enveloped by an octopus’s arms, and as the creature’s flesh-tearing beak struggled to strike him, we need to free ourselves from Islamic jihad not by cutting off its arms: but its head. Only reason and rationality can accomplish that end. That done, the arms will go limp and release us to pursue our life-affirming values in freedom without peril or hindrance. It is the ideology that must be damned, renounced, repudiated, and defeated, with no apologies or regrets, and not its surface manifestations.

Then we will have the time to turn our attention to performing the same surgery on the secular totalitarian ideology that also seeks to vanquish this country.

Geert Wilders: Free at Last?

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 11:48:00 +0000

In The Netherlands, a European country least likely to generate good news, Geert Wilders, the outspoken Dutch politician who was on trial for “hate speech,” was acquitted of having committed the alleged crime. We are patiently waiting for such news to emanate from other least likely European countries that are also beset by masses of non-integrating Muslims and the incremental Islamazation: Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, whose crime rates have skyrocketed because immigrant Muslims do not feel obliged to adapt to the countries they invaded or recognize any morality but their own, which is primitive, bestial, and immune from reason.

The Netherlands, like those other besieged-within-their-own-walls countries, established immigration policies that were both expedient and high-sounding. These policies facilitated the importation of cheap labor and the “honor” of being non-discriminatory and open to all comers. These countries were proud to be the templates of multiculturalism and the pioneers of democratic social experiments. Their policies indiscriminately embraced its nascent and then determined conquerors: Muslims. Muslims came, paradoxically, from countries where Islam was the rule and the culture, to countries that were nominally freer. No one asked them why they chose to leave a country in which they would be culturally comfortable, and move to a country whose culture could not accommodate anything that Islam stood for, in practice and in theory, unless its intellectual and political leaders believed they could mix oil and water and produce a everlasting culture palatable to and enjoyable by all.

Perhaps the Dutch policymakers (and their counterparts in the rest of Europe) thought that these people came to their country to escape poverty and persecution. What they are grudgingly conceding now is that Muslims as a rule bring their poverty and persecution with them. They are recognizing that Muslims are not the starry-eyed newcomers it was once assumed they were, “yearning to be free,” but rather the numerous and ever-growing vanguard of an ideology of conquest. They are beginning to acknowledge that Muslims came to their country with malice aforethought, with no intention of adopting or adapting to the moral and political values of their host countries, except to exploit the various welfare programs and multiculturalism – that is, to cash in on the irrational policies of those countries.

Pamela Geller on her Atlas Shrugs site listed the charges against Wilders:

1. Intentionally offending Muslims
2. Inciting hatred against Muslims
3. Inciting discrimination against Muslims
4. Inciting hatred of non-western immigrants

There are many things wrong with the notion of hate speech. But first there is this reportage from the BBC on Wilders’ acquittal.

Amsterdam judge Marcel van Oosten accepted the Freedom Party leader's statements were directed at Islam and not at Muslim believers. They were, the judge ruled, "acceptable within the context of public debate".

It is believed the plaintiffs may attempt to make their case before a European court or the UN. Their lawyer, Ties Prakken, was quoted by Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf as saying they were "deeply disappointed" and believed the right of minorities to be protected against hate speech had been violated.

But suppose Wilders’ statements were not made in the “context of public debate.” Suppose they were private statements uttered by Wilders as a private citizen in a private argument or debate, not intended to be made “public,” but which were reported by eavesdroppers or informants to the authorities. What then? Would the Dutch courts have the moral authority to charge Wilders with “hate speech” or a “hate crime”? Probably. One thing that has been overlooked in the justifiable jubilation over Wilders’ acquittal is that the policy of rights, including the right of free speech, remains and is treated as a privilege granted by the government. The court simply conceded defeat on its own terms, not on any universal premise. It is interesting to note that the government’s prosecutors advised the court not to pursue the trial; one suspects that they knew that the government had no grounds for persecuting Wilders, that they believed the distinction between private and public speech was invalid, superficial and immaterial.

Wilders has repeatedly stated that his statements about Islam were not directed against Muslims, that he was criticizing an ideology, and not the individuals who subscribe to it, i.e., Muslims. He has compared Islam to Nazism and its chief document, the Koran, to Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Certainly Nazis and Muslims are not exempt from criticism to the extent that they, as individuals, subscribe to evil ideologies, and deserve all the criticism they have earned. Ideas do not float in the air and somehow infect and incriminate the helpless, hapless, and blameless minds of such individuals. Religious and political convictions are a matter of conscious, volitional choice.

But suppose one did make statements intended to offend Muslims. Where is the crime? Where is the initiation of force? What should be the rational response of the allegedly offended person? Why should an intention be treated as a crime? Or hatred, or prejudice?

Suppose one did attempt to incite with words hatred against Muslims? The speaker already hates Muslims, and whether in private or in public, speaks to persuade others to hate Muslims. How can speech be construed as assault? Is it aggravated assault, with one’s words treated as a deadly and physically harming weapon? Or simple battery, with one’s words physically harming an individual? Where is the physical contact between the speaker and the alleged victim? There is none.

How can “hateful” words lead to “discrimination”? Discrimination against another person because of his race, gender or religion does not entail the initiation of force. It is a private decision to not hire or associate with persons who meet those criteria. Discrimination may or may not be a rational decision, but to enforce non-discrimination requires the employment of legislative or literal force.

In the case of Muslims, it is particularly ironic that their “defenders” should exploit the “self-esteem” racket concocted by Western sociologists to silence their critics, when Islam commands an abject and total surrender of the self to a ghost. Such submission does not entail or cause “esteem” of any kind. However, they seek to be "protected" against mockery and/or moral condemnation that such submission has earned them.

“Hate speech” is not the equivalent of slander or libel. Slander and libel must make claims of fact about a person before the person can sue the perpetrator of those claims and attempt to prove that they are not facts.

Feelings obviously can be hurt, but a hurt feeling is not an actionable offense that justifies retaliatory force, private or governmental. Unlike a black eye or a broken arm, a hurt feeling cannot be demonstrable in court as evidence of assault. Unlike a physical injury, feelings can be faked. But lawsuits, criminal or civil, have been the weapons used by Muslims to silence the critics of Islam and Muslims, and they are successful only in those countries whose non-objective law has been further corrupted and co-opted by multiculturalism and political correctness in word and deed.

So, while Geert Wilders, a courageous and passionate man, has been exonerated of having committed what the Dutch court has recognized is a non-crime, he has not truly been acquitted of “hate speech.” He has not been freed from the clutches of non-objective law, which still has the power to define, enforce and punish the “crime” of speaking one’s mind. His acquittal is a qualified victory for freedom of speech. In The Netherlands, as well as elsewhere, and as with the status of property rights, it remains a freedom treated as a grant and dispensation originating in government, not in the individual, a grant that may be withdrawn at any time.

Wilders is not “free at last.” He is merely on probation. He will not be free until his right to speak is recognized as an inalienable right, inalienable from his existence as an individual.