A Reminder

It IS a victory mosque:

Moonbattery: Proximity of Ground Zero Victory Mosque to 9/11 Human Remains: "The site of the Victory Mosque the Muslim–liberal alliance is planning to erect in triumph is not merely near Ground Zero, it is at Ground Zero. The Burlington Coat Factory building this shrine to evil would replace was damaged when the landing gear from United Airlines Flight 175 fell through its roof 9 years ago today. Via the New York Post, here's how close human remains were found to the planned site of the mosque:"

It's Not That The Mohammedans Don't TRY To Patent Anything

clipped from www.qando.net Barack Obama recounted the contributions of Islam yesterday during his speech in Cairo. This may not have been what he was talking about: German media outlets reported last week that a Saudi inventor’s application to patent a “killer chip,” as the Swiss tabloids put it, had been denied. The basic model would consist of a tiny GPS transceiver placed in a capsule and inserted under a person’s skin, so that authorities could track him easily. Model B would have an extra function — a dose of cyanide to remotely kill the wearer without muss or fuss if authorities deemed he’d become a public threat.

For some extra calibration, Jews have won 184 Nobel prizes from a population hovering around only 12 million worldwide. Muslims have won only 9 Nobels from a population now hovering around 1.4 Billion -- and one of them [Arafat] was a blood drenched ruthless killer. The shock never ends.

This means that on a per capita basis, the average Jew is approximately 2,400 times -- for the numerate, that's over 3 orders of magnitude! -- more likely to win a Nobel prize than the average Muslim. Put another way, there would be over 24,000 Muslim Nobel prize winners if the average Muslim was as likely to win one as the average Jew.

Perhaps O Duce isn't quite up to the latest facts on Muslim enlightenment? Ya think?

French Car-b-que Update

"Anti-Sarkozy protests turned violent overnight in France’s second city of Lyon, in Lille, Toulouse, Nantes and Rennes.

More than 500 cars were set alight in cities and suburbs across the country, according to police reports gathered by AFP, many more than the 70 to 100 vehicles that are attacked on an average night in France." [ So let's make sure we've got this straight. If we scaled this up to U.S. demographics (multiply by 6x population), we would have 600 car-b-ques on an average night and 3,000 when the "youths" became especially unhappy. All the smoke and fire engine sirens would make this take over virtually all the big city nightly news. But since it's France and France must be portrayed in unrelentingly positive terms as what we Americans should aspire to be when we recover from our long fascist nightmare, it goes nearly unreported in the U.S. And of course, it's not a scandal that the French themselves are trying to cover up what everyone can smell and hear. (Ah, yes ... that's why they elected Sarkosy in the first place! Even the French tire of bullsh** when it's up to their eyeballs!) I guess it's a lot like the dirty little secret that the French produce most of their electricity from nuclear plants. It doesn't fit the MSMeme... -ed. ]

Problem? What Problem?

"A soccer game bringing Muslim imams and Christian priests "shoulder to shoulder" on a field in Norway was cancelled Saturday because the teams could not agree on whether women priests should take part.

The game was to mark the end of a day-long "Shoulder to Shoulder" conference in Oslo that encouraged religious dialogue between the two faiths.

Church of Norway spokesman Olav Fykse Tveit said differences began when the imams refused to play against a mixed-gender team of priests because it would have gone against their religious beliefs in avoiding close physical contact with women." [ Yes. They might have to behave like gentlemen. And learn not to attempt to cut off the women's clitoris when they rightfully kick their pea-brained imbecilic asses. -ed. ]

Obama CW Watch From Mickey

"Old CW: Not Black Enough; New CW: What's All This Black Business? Tom Maguire wonders why Jodi Kantor's front-page NYT piece on Barack Obama's pastor, Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, hasn't generated more controversy. Having now read it, I tend to agree. I'd certainly be more comfortable with a presidential nominee whose main spiritual man 1) hadn't visited Col. Qaddafi (even back in '84); 2) talked less about "oppression" and "this racist United States of America;" 3) when discussing the solution to poverty, talked more about individual achievement and less about the role of "community"--including maybe even celebrating "middleclassness" instead of using it as shorthand for selfishness; 4) in general wasn't so obsessed with race--as evidenced most negatively in talk of "white arrogance" and derogatory reference to the "Great White West." ... I suspect Rev. Wright is going to be a bigger problem for Obama's campaign than has been conventionally perceived. When Obama declared "we worship an awesome God in the blue states," were voters expecting this?...

P.S.: The attack on "the pursuit of 'middleclassness'" referred to by the NYT and in this Freeper post doesn't seem to appear on the church's web site. At least doesn't appear to be where bloggers once said it was. Has it been expunged? I don't know. ... Update: Several emailers point to this Web Archive site. ...

P.P.S.: Obama's views aren't necessarily his pastor's, as he points out. But Obama himself seems to have embraced the idea that poverty is "rooted in societal indifference and individual callousness"--reflecting Wright's Disturbing Tendencies #2 and #3. Do you think poverty is rooted in "individual callousness"? I don't. ...

[How does Wright's "Black Value System" talk differ from the parallel semi-tribal sentiments you might hear, say, in a synagogue?--ed Relevant question. Further discussion required. I don't think many synagogues rail against "gentile arrogance," for one thing. But I haven't spent a lot of time in synagogues.] 2:15 A.M. link"

MI-5: There's Too Many Of Them...

"When people argue that the War on Terror "cannot be won by military, only by political means" they often exclude from consideration any political decisions which would deprive threats of their force-generation mechanisms or their means of command and control. Jihadi cells were allowed to flourish; operatives allowed to come and go; recruitment was permitted, sometimes openly in mosques because political considerations required that these activities not be impeded. Operational necessity often creates contradictions with the most cherished political institutions of a democracy that are very hard to reconcile. But that does not mean the contradictions are not real.

The "political" challenges facing the West are not only about setting up "democratic institutions" in the Middle East, or forcing Israel to accomodate Palestine. They also have to do with finding ways to shut down enemy force generation mechanisms without instituting an authoritarianism or creating a domestic tyranny. But the problem won't be solved until it is squarely recognized as needing a solution.

One of the most worrisome effects of the political decisions that the Counterterrorism Blog regrets is that it may have allowed terror groups to obtain "authority supremacy" within the Muslim communities in Britain, which occurs when a group of citizens fears and respects a shadow government more than it does the legitimately constituted and elected authorities." [ Bingo. -ed. ]

On (Ethnocentrically) Availing Ourselves Nought

"Do you remember that little difficulty a few months back over the Pope’s indelicate quotation of Manuel II? Many Muslims were very upset about his speech (or his speech as reported on the BBC et al), so they protested outside Westminster Cathedral in London demanding “capital punishment” for the Pope, and they issued a fatwa in Pakistan calling on Muslims to kill His Holiness, and they firebombed a Greek Orthodox Church and an Anglican Church in Nablus, and they murdered a nun in Somalia and a couple of Christians in Iraq. As Tasnim Aslam of the Foreign Ministry in Islamabad helpfully clarified, “Anyone who describes Islam as a religion as intolerant encourages violence.” So don’t say we’re violent or we’ll kill you. As I wrote in National Review at the time, quod erat demonstrandum.

But that’s a debating society line. Islam isn’t interested in winning the debate, it’s interested in winning the real fight – the clash of civilizations, the war, society, culture, the whole magilla. That’s why it doesn’t care about the inherent contradictions of the argument: in the Middle East early in 2002, I lost count of the number of Muslims I met who believed simultaneously (a) that 9/11 was pulled off by the Mossad and (b) that it was a great victory for Islam. Likewise, it’s no stretch to feel affronted at the implication that you’re violently irrational and to threaten to murder anyone who says so. Western societies value logic because we value talk, and talks, and talking, on and on and on: that’s pretty much all we do, to the point where, faced with any challenge from Darfur to the Iranian nuclear program, our objective is to reduce the issue to just something else to talk about interminably. But, if you don’t prize debate and you merely want to win, getting hung up on logic is only going to get in your way. Take the most devastating rapier wit you know – Oscar Wilde, Noel Coward – and put him on a late-night subway train up against a psycho with a baseball bat. The withering putdown, the devastating aphorism will avail him nought."

Stopped Clock At The BBC!

"Showing Islam the benefits of democracy, eh? That will go down well with Democrats in Congress. Maybe the idea will fare better in Europe. After all they have already retreated to their home ground and find they don't have enough "boots on the ground" even there. BBC Newsnight reports on how Islamic attacks on the United States and Europe originated in large part in London itself. (Hat tip: LGF)"



[ Watch the whole thing. This is a jaw-dropper even if it didn't come from the BEEB. Wretchard is rocking this week. -ed. ]

"No Kuffar Is Innocent"

But don't worry, MPAC ends the piece by pointing out that "he isn't really an extremist". It's fascinating to speculate on what it would take to make him one, isn't it?

Are You Still In Denial?

"Polling data just released (April 24, 2007) in a rigorously conducted face-to-face University of Maryland/ WorldPublicOpinion.org interview survey of 4384 Muslims conducted between December 9, 2006 and February 15, 2007—1000 Moroccans, 1000 Egyptians, 1243 Pakistanis, and 1141 Indonesians—reveal that 65.2% of those interviewed (almost 2/3, hardly a “fringe minority”) desired this outcome (i.e., “To unify all Islamic countries into a single Islamic state or Caliphate”), including 49% of “moderate” Indonesian Muslims. The internal validity of these data about the present longing for a Caliphate is strongly suggested by a concordant result: 65.5% of this Muslim sample approved the proposition “To require a strict [emphasis added] application of Shari’a law in every Islamic country.”

Notwithstanding ahistorical drivel from Western Muslim “advocacy” groups such as the Muslim Association of Britain, which lionizes both the Caliphate and the concomitant institution of Shari’a as promulgators of “a peaceful and just society,” the findings from the University of Maryland/ WorldPublicOpinion.org poll are ominous."

COIN Down The Gravity Well

"The measure of an insurgency's gravity well is its drawing power: its gravity. This takes two forms. It's the form of the people under the threat of insurgents at the end of the day, as Kilcullen noted when he said that insurgents won when, "the Sun goes down and the insurgents show up saying, 'If you’re not on our side, we’re going to kill you.'"

The other form is when people who are not under threat of the insurgents are drawn to them, because they think the insurgents are the wave of the future, or the forces of right. These people don't have to join the insurgency out of fear. They do it willingly, because they want to fight America.

The measure of the gravity of an insurgency is those two things added together. We want to reduce that gravity.

So, we want to do two things.

1) We want to lessen the mass of the yellow-red "star," and therefore decrease the size and power of its gravity well.

2) We want to pull the green and blue objects away from it.

How do you do it?

Goal One:

The first goal is the province of military and clandestine/covert intelligence operations. You have to build intelligence on where the insurgents are, who they're dealing with, and so forth. The clearest model here is how we captured Saddam. Our military engagement allowed us to start gathering intelligence. We put every scrap of intelligence into a database, not just on what we knew, but on how people we encountered were related to each other. We were building a map of the gravity well.

Once we had the map, we found Saddam. He was, you might say, right at the center of it.

Where we engage the enemy directly, whether with military or civilian intelligence forces, this is the method. You map the insurgency with databases of this kind. Once you begin to have a clear picture, you start breaking up the mass. Killing and capturing yellow/red nodes is part of this.

But it's not the only part. Yellow nodes are easily replaced with red ones; red ones can be replaced with blue ones. More important than killing the members is breaking its myths. Organizations like this are built on stories: powerful stories, that everyone around it believes. Stories like, "America is weak and decadent, and the faith of the pure will defeat her Marines." Break those stories, and you radically decrease the mass of the insurgent star.

Do that, and its pull becomes weaker. It gets smaller, it weakens, it starts to die away.

Goal Two:

If an object is in the gravity well of a star or a planet, you can pull it away. You just need an object with a much deeper gravity well. You need a competitor.

Imagine if we had a star a whole lot bigger than the sun, a lot denser. We can pick it up and move it around. Let's say we set it down on the mattress, right by our solar system, so that it sank in deep.

What would happen is that all the objects currently in orbit around the sun would begin to drift in its direction. They would start rolling that way. If our huge star was big enough, and close enough, it would even tear off the outer layers of the sun.

There are many places in the world where our enemies might go for shelter, and try to set up new networks. In those places, we need to build opposing, competing gravity wells.

What would these look like? Probably they would already exist, and therefore have an in-built legitimacy. They would be Muslim organizations for the most part, because the insurgency is so heavily committed to Islam. They would be able to reach out to the networks of young men who might otherwise be drawn into terrorism.

Maybe they would look like the Nahdlatul Ulama.

The NU is a gigantic Muslim organization in Indonesia. It has fully forty million members. While it is religiously conservative, and therefore able to speak to the deeply religious Muslims that might be drawn into al Qaeda or Jemmah Islamiyah, it is not hateful. It even has a paramilitary organization, the Banser, that defends Christian churches on Christmas Day, and at other times they seem in danger of attack by radicals." [ Blackfive just got added to the classics. RTWT. And where do you think the Dems come out re breaking Islamist myth building? I know what I think... -ed. ]

Only One Mentioned It

"The fact that hundreds of children die in Africa every day would be of no relevance to a committed Islamist. In the extremist mind the plight of the tiny Palestinian nation is more important than the deaths of millions of black Africans. Let them die, they’re not Muslims, would be the unspoken line of argument. As an Islamist it was only the suffering of Muslims that had moved me. Now human suffering mattered to me, regardless of religion.

Faye and I were glued to the television for hours. Watching fellow Londoners come out of Tube stations injured and mortified, but facing the world with a defiant sense of dignity, made me feel proud to be British.

We met Sultan and his wife at an Indian restaurant near the British Council. Sultan was in his early thirties and his wife in her late twenties. They had travelled widely and seemed much more liberal than most Saudis I had met. Behind a makeshift partition, the restaurant surroundings were considered private and his wife, to my amazement, removed her veil.

We discussed our travels.

Sultan spoke fondly of his time in London, particularly his placement at Coutts as a trainee banker. We then moved on to the subject uppermost in my mind, the terrorist attacks on London. My host did not really seem to care. He expressed no real sympathy or shock, despite speaking so warmly of his time in London.

“I suppose they will say Bin Laden was behind the attacks. They blamed us for 9/11,” he said.

Keen to take him up on his comment, I asked him: “Based on your education in Saudi Arabian schools, do you think there is a connection between the form of Islam children are taught here and the action of 15 Saudi men on September 11?”

Without thinking, his immediate response was, ‘No. No, because Saudis were not behind 9/11. The plane hijackers were not Saudi men. One thousand two hundred and forty-six Jews were absent from work on that day and there is the proof that they, the Jews, were behind the killings. Not Saudis.”

It was the first time I heard so precise a number of Jewish absentees. I sat there pondering on the pan-Arab denial of the truth, a refusal to accept that the Wahhabi jihadi terrorism festering in their midst had inflicted calamities on the entire world.

In my class the following Sunday, the beginning of the Saudi working week, were nearly 60 Saudis. Only one mentioned the London bombings." [ Read. The. Whole. Thing. -ed. ]

What Occupation?

"I have been screaming for years about the arab occupation of the berbers, coptics, kurds & yes JEWISH lands of the moab...

it's time to turn the scream "occupation sucks" back on the arabs, where it should be...

as we speak, israel is 1/650th of the middle east, and has 20% arabs

the arab occupied middle east (not counting turkey or iran, since turks and perisans are not arabs) is 649/650 of it's land mass..

how much is stolen?

where did the arabs COME FROM when they invaded in 640 ce?" [ And don't forget Ethiopia... -ed. ]

The Line In Eurabia's Sands?

"When the outcome of a tragedy is known in advance, it finds ways of occurring earlier than expected. In this case, the fate of 100,000 Serbian Christians who remain in Kosovo may pre-empt the debate over Europe's eventual absorption into the Muslim world. ... If Serbia and Russia draw a line in the sand over the independence of Kosovo, we may observe the second occasion in history when a Muslim advance on Europe halted on Serbian soil."

Of Cucumbers And Tomatoes

"Benedict started a brouhaha when he argued that faith in the end had to be reconciled with beauty and truth. He recalled the debate between the Byzantine Paleologus and his Muslim interlocutor. 'God will not demand what is rejected by reason,' argued Paleologus. God or Allah was not such that he would arbitrarily require us to torture children.

The Islamic fundamentalists have a book in which cucumbers and tomatoes must be separated; the Jew hunted down, the Infidel dispatched. It is a faith without doubt, when in fact faith requires doubt in order to exist.

And because we are sometimes unsure what God wants of us, we listen to reason. We use our freedom not to consort with the demons but to listen to our angels. The smiles of our children, the counsel of the truly holy, the message of the sunrise.

We are men because we can think; just as we are angels or devils because we are free. Never settle for being half a man, but choose the kind you will be."

I Am Sam Of Horrible Ham

"Indeed. In fact, this malignant positioning of a ham steak can’t help but escalate into something like, say, the firebombing of mosques, or the videotaped beheadings of Muslim students filmed in the AV room of the Junior high.

Of course, Kosher-keeping Jews who’ve assimilated into public schools have been subjected to sightings of the unholy alliance of meat and cheese, the arrogant parading (by unclean Goyim) of ham sandwiches—even, in some cases, the presence of breakfast sausages!—for what seems like decades.

But then, they control the world. So a bit of religious inconvenience is a small price to pay in exchange for ownership of world’s banks, the western media, the Hollywood and New York entertainment industries, and having practically cornered the market on orthodontics.

Whereas Muslims? They must be treated like exotic plants. And sometimes you have to squash a few bugs if your goal is to keep the soil around the protected plant “pure.”

Think of it as horticultural dhimmitude—helped along, of course, by PC puppets and a multicultural ethos in which bureaucrats have become increasingly risk averse, and are willing to criminalize anything that could possibly give offense, provided the offense is against certain protected groups.

Let’s just hope criminal prosecution follows. Because I relish the image of a 14-year old doing federal time alongside hardcore white supremacists for “illegally positioning a ham steak.”"

Bye, Bye Brown

"In other words, what we will get from this process of multiculturalism is precisely the kind of "separate but equal" facilities struck down by the Supreme Court in Brown v Board of Education in 1954. These Muslim activists want to create a separate society within the United States for Muslims, and they want the US to provide them the facilities with which to create it. Separate dorms, separate cafeterias, Muslim-only physical-education classes -- they want a separate Muslim college at MCTC and everywhere else. It's self-initiated apartheid.

Forty years ago and more, we had segregationists insisting that different peoples could not live within the same area without dividing lines. They used the same excuses as multiculturalists do today, too; each culture feels more secure when they can exclude others. We heard it from white supremacists and from black separatists -- and we proved them wrong. We made sure that people knew America stood for peaceful integration and not for Balkanization, even for what seemed to be good reasons to some.

Now we have Muslims who want to reopen the argument in order to create a closed society for themselves within the US. We have no problem with Muslims who integrate into our society and become Americans in deed as well as in name. If Muslims want to open their own universities to ensure the proper exercise of their religion, well, that works too. But if Muslims want us to recreate the French banlieus and an homage to Jim Crow so they can get even more insular than they already are here in the US, then we need to put our foot down -- washed or unwashed -- and say, "Enough!""

How A State Rots...

"Shiraz Ahmed was tending his music store in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, when a group of 15 bearded young men walked in bearing bamboo poles and a chilling message. Politely but firmly, they instructed him to take down the colourful array of Bollywood and bhangradance tunes on display and to restrict his business to Islamic music. “They told me I had to change my business,” said Mr Ahmed, 25, whose family has run the store for 15 years. “I am so confused. I don’t know what to do.” Until last week he might not have worried about these men from Islamabad’s Lal Masjid (Red Mosque). After all, his shop is legal and within walking distance of Pervez Musharraf’s presidential palace. But this was just one of several signs in the past ten days that a creeping campaign to “Talebanise” Pakistan has spread from tribal areas on the Afghan border right to the heart of the capital. And to judge from the Government’s response, even here it is reluctant to confront the radical clerics who openly preach jihad (holy war) and defy the writ of the state."

Oooops

"WHY DO THEY HATE US HIM? Al Qaeda targets the Dalai Lama. But I thought they were only mad at us because Bush wouldn't ratify Kyoto or something?"

Gramscian Pelosian Damage

"As a Muslim, I fully understand respect of our religion by visiting US officials and I applaud that respect. Had Speaker Pelosi worn the Hijab inside a Mosque, this would have indicated respect but for Pelosi to wear it on the streets of Damascus all the while she is sitting with the self-imposed Baschar al-Assad who has come to symbolize oppression and one of the reasons why women are forced to wear the Hijab as they turn to religion to express their freedom is a statement of submittal not only to oppression but also to lack of women’s rights in the Middle East. Pelosi just reversed the work of the Syrian civil society and those who aspire for women’s freedom in the Muslim countries many years back with her visual statement. Her lack of experience of the Middle East is showing.

Assad could not have been happier because Syrian women, seeing a US official confirming what their husbands, the Imams in the Mosques tell them, and the society at large imposes on them through peer pressure will see in her wearing a Hijab as a confirmation of the societal pressures they are constantly under. No one will ever know how many women took the Hijab on after seeing Pelosi wearing it. The damage Speaker Pelosi is causing with her visit to Syria will be felt for many years to come."

UPDATE: "You know, Syria? The puppet government of the Islamic Republic of Iran? Supporters of Hizballah? Insane hatred of Israel and America? The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a TV series? Nazi fugitives harbored for years? Am I ringing any bells?"