Category Archive 'Burning the Koran'
27 Feb 2012

Apologizing to the Afghans

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You don’t apologize to these barbarians, you simply shoot them.

The Obama Administration has chagrined and embarrassed rational Americans once again by issuing all sorts of apologies (including one at a Virginia mosque) for the confiscation and destruction of copies of the Koran used by detainees to forward covert communications encouraging extremism.

Let’s try imagining the Roosevelt Administration, during WWII, apologizing to the German Reich for confiscating and burning copies of Mein Kampf used by members of the SS detained as prisoners of war to forward communications of National Socialist ideology.

Government today in Western democracies is terribly liable to falling into the hands of members of our contemporary establishment intelligentsia, a group of pantywaists and imbeciles so infatuated with wishful thinking, sanctimony, and cant that they are capable of operating in a continual state of self-hypnosis in which enemy regimes and populations are transformed into friends and allies and Islam, the insolent superstition which licenses limitless bloodshed and aggression, is turned into “the Religion of Peace.”

Compare the puerile drivel emanating from the Obama White House or the New York Times these days with a much older, but still perfectly accurate description of the culture and the mores of the Afghan.

Winston Churchill, in 1897, describes the inhabitants of Afghanistan in terms which remain accurate and appropriate over a century later.

The inhabitants of these wild but wealthy valleys are of many tribes, but of similar character and condition. The abundant crops which a warm sun and copious rains raise from a fertile soil, support a numerous population in a state of warlike leisure. 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, inherited in all human beings, has in these valleys been preserved in unexampled strength and vigour. 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 honour 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 honour 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 honour to stand by him, and when it was their honour 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.

I remark with pleasure, as an agreeable trait in the character of the Pathans, the immunity, dictated by a rude spirit of chivalry, which in their ceaseless brawling, their women enjoy. Many forts are built at some distance from any pool or spring. When these are besieged, the women are allowed by the assailants to carry water to the foot of the walls by night. In the morning the defenders come out and fetch it—of course under fire—and are enabled to continue their resistance. But passing from the military to the social aspect of their lives, the picture assumes an even darker shade, and is unrelieved by any redeeming virtue. We see them in their squalid, loopholed hovels, amid dirt and ignorance, as degraded a race as any on the fringe of humanity: fierce as the tiger, but less cleanly; as dangerous, not so graceful. Those simple family virtues, which idealists usually ascribe to primitive peoples, are conspicuously absent. Their wives and their womenkind generally, have no position but that of animals. They are freely bought and sold, and are not infrequently bartered for rifles. 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. 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 coloured 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. 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.


“Apologies!”

07 Apr 2011

Reid, Graham, and Petraeus Criticized the Guy on the Left

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The cartoon seems to suggest equivalency, but it also makes it perfectly clear who is doing what.

Hat tip to Mark Scott.

07 Apr 2011

Ann Barnhardt Totally Demolishes Lindsey Graham

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Then burns her own copy of the Koran, page by page, using bacon for bookmarks. She is a bit too fond of coarse language. She gets a little too moralistic for my personal taste. And these videos are way too long, but she is hard-core and decidedly cute. She gets extra testosterone points, too, for supplying her Colorado address for the convenience of any offended Muslims. (Gosh, do you suppose she might possibly own a gun?)

She ought to move to South Carolina and run against that pansy for the Senate.

Hat tip to Roger Kimball.

06 Apr 2011

Afghan Savages, Western Cowards

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You couldn’t hope to frame a better demonstration of the characteristic intellectual and moral confusion of the Western establishment leadership class than occurred over the last weekend.

In the United States, an absolute nobody, the Rev. Terry Jones of the ludicrously named “World Dove Outreach Center” in Gainesville, Florida, obviously feeling neglected since he had graciously canceled a burning of the Koran last year, got himself back into the news by putting the Islamic holy book on trial, finding it guilty, sentencing it, and carrying out his own Koran barbecue.

In the aftermath, in a variety of locations in Afghanistan, mobs of howling savages threw temper tantrums in response, blocking a main highway with burning tires, attacking US soldiers, storming a UN compound and brutally murdering seven innocent people with no connection whatsoever to Reverend Hookworms, and even immolating a effigy of Barack Obama.

The Encyclopedia Brittanica, one hundred years ago, described the same Afghan primitive:

The Afghans, inured to bloodshed from childhood, are familiar with death, and audacious in attack, but easily discouraged by failure; excessively turbulent and unsubmissive to law or discipline; apparently frank and affable in manner, especially when they hope to gain some object, but capable of the grossest brutality when that hope ceases. They are unscrupulous in perjury, treacherous, vain and insatiable, passionate in vindictiveness, which they will satisfy at the cost of their own lives and in the most cruel manner. Nowhere is crime committed on such trifling grounds, or with such general impunity, though when it is punished the punishment is atrocious. Among themselves the Afghans are quarrelsome, intriguing and distrustful; estrangements and affrays are of constant occurrence; the traveller conceals and misrepresents the time and direction of his journey. The Afghan is by breed and nature a bird of prey. If from habit and tradition he respects a stranger within his threshold, he yet considers it legitimate to warn a neighbour of the prey that is afoot, or even to overtake and plunder his guest after he has quitted his roof. The repression of crime and the demand of taxation he regards alike as tyranny.

The British of a century ago did not apologize for outbreaks of insane violence on the part of hirsute barbarians. They punished them and got on with it.

Today, any occurrence of native violence, proving all over again that we are dealing with the kind of people who are half-devil and half-child, instead of prompting the despatch of a useful punitive expedition to set an example long remembered among the hills instead produces a epidemic among our own elite of chin-stroking, grovelling, and bed-wetting.

Michael Walsh was appropriately indignant in the New York Post.

In a series of disgraceful statements, Sens. Harry Reid and Lindsey Graham, along with Gen. David Petraeus, have laid the blame for the unrest where it doesn’t belong: at the feet of the US Constitution.

Reid, the feckless Senate majority leader, said the body would “take a look” at Terry Jones’ actions in burning a copy of the Islamic holy book, and threatened hearings, as if the Senate didn’t have far more pressing issues — such as passing a budget and tackling the country’s fiscal problems.

Even more disgraceful was Graham, who said on “Face the Nation”: “I wish we could find a way to hold people accountable,” referring to Pastor Jones. “Free speech is a great idea, but we’re in a war. During World War II, we had limits on what you could do if it inspired the enemy.”

This is jaw-dropping in its ignorance and stupidity. Graham is arguing against freedom of speech — why else should an American citizen exercising his First Amendment rights, however offensive to some, be “held accountable” for the reactions of superstitious goatherds half a world away? — and equating an insult toward the religion that explicitly animated the 9/11 hijackers with the Bund marchers who supported Hitler.

But the prize for disappointment goes to Petraeus and NATO Ambassador Mark Sedwill, whose statement read in part: “In view of the events of recent days, we feel it is important . . . to reiterate our condemnation of any disrespect to the Holy Koran and the Muslim faith. We condemn, in particular, the action of an individual in the United States who recently burned the Holy Koran.

“We further hope the Afghan people understand that the actions of a small number of individuals, who have been extremely disrespectful to the Holy Koran, are not representative of any of the countries of the international community who are in Afghanistan to help the Afghan people.”

To this we’ve come: Bogged down in an increasingly ineffectual military operation in Afghanistan that should have ended years ago after we defeated the Taliban and routed al Qaeda, we are instead apologizing to the very people who are killing American soldiers, and treating their holy book better than we do any other.

Petraeus’ statement can perhaps be excused on the grounds that his job is as much diplomatic as martial — but that, of course, is precisely what’s wrong with his current mission. He shouldn’t be “helping the Afghan people.” That’s a task for after the Islamist threat to the West has been eliminated.

26 Nov 2010

15 Year Old Girl Arrested For Burning Koran

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A 15-year-old school girl resident of the multiracial Sandwell Council homes neighborhood in the West Midlands near Birmingham was arrested recently on charges of inciting religious hatred. The teenager had posted on Facebook two weeks earlier a video in which she burned on school property an English-language edition of the Koran in front of an audience of schoolmates.

On Tuesday, a 14-year-old boy was also arrested for posting threats on Facebook in response to the video.

Both teenagers were released on bail, and their Facebook accounts were eliminated.

The British press quoted an Islamic organization’s spokesman who advised readers that burning Korans was one of the most offensive acts imaginable in the eyes of more than a billion Muslims worldwide.

Reported by the Guardian and the BBC and the Sun.

It’s not the Koran which is sacred to British authorities, of course, it is political correctness which trumps freedom of expression. You can still insult Christianity as much as you like.

20 Sep 2010

Liberals and Islam

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Mark Steyn rants over the elite’s response to Koran-burning-that-never-took-place as well as to the plight of the latest victim of cartoon jihad, Molly Norris.

He didn’t burn any buildings or women and children. He didn’t even burn a book. He hadn’t actually laid a finger on a Koran, and yet the mere suggestion that he might do so prompted the President of the United States to denounce him, and the Secretary of State, and the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, various G7 leaders, and golly, even Angelina Jolie. President Obama has never said a word about honor killings of Muslim women. Secretary Clinton has never said a word about female genital mutilation. General Petraeus has never said a word about the rampant buggery of pre-pubescent boys by Pushtun men in Kandahar. But let an obscure man in Florida so much as raise the possibility that he might disrespect a book – an inanimate object – and the most powerful figures in the western world feel they have to weigh in.

Aside from all that, this obscure church’s website has been shut down, its insurance policy has been canceled, its mortgage has been called in by its bankers. Why? As Diana West wrote, why was it necessary or even seemly to make this pastor a non-person? Another one of Obama’s famous “teaching moments”? In this case teaching us that Islamic law now applies to all? Only a couple of weeks ago, the President, at his most condescendingly ineffectual, presumed to lecture his moronic subjects about the First Amendment rights of Imam Rauf. Where’s the condescending lecture on Pastor Jones’ First Amendment rights?

When someone destroys a bible, US government officials don’t line up to attack him. President Obama bowed lower than a fawning maitre d’ before the King of Saudi Arabia, a man whose regime destroys bibles as a matter of state policy, and a man whose depraved religious police forces schoolgirls fleeing from a burning building back into the flames to die because they’d committed the sin of trying to escape without wearing their head scarves. If you show a representation of Mohammed, European commissioners and foreign ministers line up to denounce you. If you show a representation of Jesus Christ immersed in your own urine, you get a government grant for producing a widely admired work of art. Likewise, if you write a play about Jesus having gay sex with Judas Iscariot.

So just to clarify the ground rules, if you insult Christ, the media report the issue as freedom of expression: A healthy society has to have bold, brave, transgressive artists willing to question and challenge our assumptions, etc. But, if it’s Mohammed, the issue is no longer freedom of expression but the need for “respect” and “sensitivity” toward Islam, and all those bold brave transgressive artists don’t have a thing to say about it. …

It is a basic rule of life that if you reward bad behavior, you get more of it. Every time Muslims either commit violence or threatens it, we reward them by capitulating. Indeed, President Obama, Justice Breyer, General Petraeus, and all the rest are now telling Islam, you don’t have to kill anyone, you don’t even have to threaten to kill anyone. We’ll be your enforcers. We’ll demand that the most footling and insignificant of our own citizens submit to the universal jurisdiction of Islam. So Obama and Breyer are now the “good cop” to the crazies’ “bad cop”. Ooh, no, you can’t say anything about Islam, because my friend here gets a little excitable, and you really don’t want to get him worked up. The same people who tell us “Islam is a religion of peace” then turn around and tell us you have to be quiet, you have to shut up because otherwise these guys will go bananas and kill a bunch of people. …

Look at how liberal progressives protect their own. Do you remember a lady called Molly Norris? She’s the dopey Seattle cartoonist who cooked up “Everybody Draws Mohammed” Day, and then, when she realized what she’d stumbled into, tried to back out of it. I regard Miss Norris as (to rewrite Stalin) a useless idiot, and she wrote to Mark’s Mailbox to object. I stand by what I wrote then, especially the bit about her crappy peace-sign T-shirt. Now The Seattle Weekly informs us:

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

On the advice of the FBI, she’s been forced to go into hiding. If you want to measure the decline in western civilization’s sense of self-preservation, go back to Valentine’s Day 1989, get out the Fleet Street reports on the Salman Rushdie fatwa, and read the outrage of his fellow London literati at what was being done to one of the mainstays of the Hampstead dinner-party circuit. Then compare it with the feeble passivity of Molly Norris’ own colleagues at an American cartoonist being forced to abandon her life: “There is no more Molly”? That’s all the gutless pussies of The Seattle Weekly can say? As James Taranto notes in The Wall Street Journal, even much sought-after Ramadan-banquet constitutional scholar Barack Obama is remarkably silent:

    Now Molly Norris, an American citizen, is forced into hiding because she exercised her right to free speech. Will President Obama say a word on her behalf? Does he believe in the First Amendment for anyone other than Muslims?
20 Sep 2010

City of Gainesville Bills Pastor Jones For Police Protection

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Talk about exercising your First Amendment rights in this country and if you’re threatened by the Saracens, government will march its forces up the hill and down again and then send you a bill for protecting you.

CNN:

The city of Gainesville, Florida, plans to send a bill estimated at more than $180,000 to Pastor Terry Jones for security costs surrounding his controversial threat to burn Qurans on the anniversary of the September, 11, 2001, attacks, a police spokeswoman said Friday.

Police agencies spent more than a month working on security plans to ensure the community surrounding Jones’ Dove World Outreach Center — the planned site of the burning — was safe, according to Gainesville police spokeswoman Cpl. Tscharna Senn. …

The Gainesville Police Department said it spent more than $100,000 while the Alachua County Sheriff’s Office spent an estimated $80,000 during the weekend of the planned demonstration.

“We have 286 sworn officers and almost everyone was working either at the Dove Center or at other soft targets,” Senn said. “Unless you were sick or injured you were working” the day the burning was to take place.

Officers secured malls in the region, the University of Florida’s football stadium and areas around the church in the days leading up to the planned event.

Jones said Friday that the church was “not aware that we would be billed for security.”

“If we had known this in advance, then we would have refused to have security,” he said.

18 Sep 2010

The Muslim Blame Game

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Jonah Goldberg examines the liberal notion that you are to blame for people’s deaths if you do something Muslims do not like, like burn a Koran or draw a cartoon image of Mohammed, and Muslims riot and kill someone or get killed.

When Pope Benedict delivered his Regensburg address in 2006, he suggested that Islam had a link to violence. In response, many Muslims rioted. It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad.

When Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer was asked in an interview about Koran-burning, he brought up former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ famous comment that the First Amendment “doesn’t mean you can shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater . . . Why? Because people will be trampled to death. And what is the crowded theater today? What is the being trampled to death?”

There are a number of grave problems with the crowded-theater cliche. First, you can — even must — yell “fire” in a crowded theater: It just has to be the truth.

But more to the point, fires are not human beings. Fire has no choice but to burn because that is what fire does. Humans have choices. Yet in this formulation (from which Breyer has somewhat retreated), Muslims are akin to soulless, unthinking flames. Taken seriously, this comparison suggests rational people have every reason to fear Muslims in much the same way they fear fire.

There are complex issues here. But the simple truth is the Islamist extremists who behead and riot do have a choice. They want to murder. What they want is an excuse, and they’ll find one no matter what.

Read the whole thing.

15 Sep 2010

Koran Burner Fired By New Jersey Transit

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In its 1989 Texas v. Johnson decision, The US Supreme Court ruled that burning the American flag constituted “expressive conduct” protected by the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee.

Burning the Koran, on the other hand, gets you detained and questioned by New York City police, and fired by your employer, if you work for NJTransit.

NY Daily News:

The protester who burned pages from the Koran outside a planned mosque near Ground Zero has been fired from NJTransit, sources and authorities said Tuesday. …

“Mr. Fenton’s public actions violated New Jersey Transit’s code of ethics,” an agency statement said.

“NJ Transit concluded that Mr. Fenton violated his trust as a state employee and therefore [he] was dismissed.”

Fenton was ushered from the protests by police on Saturday and questioned, but he was released without charges.

Mr. Fenton has the grounds for a successful law suit against NJTransit.

10 Sep 2010

Which is More Incendiary? Koran-Burning or Islam Itself

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Andrew McCarthy makes some excellent points.

‘He’s going to burn a Koran? Quick, let’s go join a terrorist organization that mass-murders people.’

According to Obama, Jones’s “stunt” (a fair description) is already “a recruitment bonanza for al-Qaeda.” That’s absurd. No sensible person joins a terrorist organization dedicated to mass murder simply because somebody torches a Koran.

If the president, who is principally responsible for American national security, actually believes what he says, what is his excuse for not confronting Islamist regimes? These are not Looney Tunes pastors with followings smaller than the First Lady’s traveling caravan; they are governments that confiscate and destroy Bibles, crucifixes, Stars of David, and other articles of profound religious substance and symbolism to non-Muslims. That goes on, systematically, every single day — although still not as often as you’d imagine, because Islamic societies are so innately intolerant that there aren’t a lot of non-Muslim religious items to be found in, say, Saudi Arabia.

Jones is going to burn a Koran; sharia calls for killing human beings who renounce Islam. Does the president have an explanation for why Christians and Jews are not forming terror cells with the bonanza of recruits that must come forward on a daily basis given the “stunts” that, in Saudi Arabia, are known as law enforcement? …

I wish Americans would trip over themselves with a fraction of the zeal on display here to condemn the torching of the American flag — a symbol of freedom and sacrifice. But that’s beside the point. Burning a book sacred to Muslims is a stupid, provocative thing to do. Yet it is conscious avoidance — okay, willful blindness — to claim that Jones is causing the threat to our troops, in addition to the threat of other attacks and riots by Muslims (of the sort we’ve seen with the Danish cartoons, the false claims of Koran-flushing at Gitmo, the school teacher who named a teddy bear Mohammed, etc.).

Those are all pretexts. The cause is Islamist ideology, which is dehumanizing of non-Muslims (or, in the case of the Ahmadi, even of Muslims who reject parts of mainstream Islamic doctrine). It is the ideology that puts the world’s Muslims on a hair trigger. …

Wouldn’t it be nice if, while they publicly chide an American citizen for striking the match, our public officials took the occasion to chide the ideology that turns cultures into dynamite?

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Michelle Malkin observes that it isn’t easy to avoid offending a religion with the kind of anger management problem Islam has.

Shhhhhhh, we’re told. Don’t protest the Ground Zero mosque. Don’t burn a Koran. It’ll imperil the troops. It’ll inflame tensions. The “Muslim world” will “explode” if it does not get its way, warns sharia-peddling imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. Pardon my national security-threatening impudence, but when is the “Muslim world” not ready to “explode”?

At the risk of provoking the ever-volatile Religion of Perpetual Outrage, let us count the little-noticed and forgotten ways.

Just a few months ago in Kashmir, faithful Muslims rioted over what they thought was a mosque depicted on underwear sold by street vendors. …

(numerous examples)

The eternal flame of Muslim outrage was lit a long, long time ago.

10 Sep 2010

Double Standards on Endangering US Troops

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The American left is in the hypocritical position of applauding and giving journalism awards for publishing Intelligence leaks and out-of-context military reports inciting Islamic hostility toward the United States, while at the same time wringing its hands and piously denouncing burning a Koran or voicing opposition to locating Islamic victory-monuments-cum-recruiting-centers within the footprint of the 9/11 NYC attack.

Wikileaks is preparing another major dump of US classified documents, this time from Iraq.

A massive cache of previously unpublished classified U.S. military documents from the Iraq War is being readied for publication by WikiLeaks, a new report has confirmed.

The documents constitute the “biggest leak of military intelligence” that has ever occurred, according to Iain Overton, editor of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a nonprofit British organization that is working with WikiLeaks on the documents.

The documents are expected to be published in several weeks.

Will the New York Times editorialize against “endangering US troops” or will the Times again be one of Wikileaks’ collaborators and outlets?

Is President Obama going to plead publicly with the major news outlets and Julian Assange to stand down?

Will General Petraeus publish an editorial condemning the reckless action?

I doubt it. Endangering US troops is just ducky when the left is doing it to attack and undermine the US cause.

09 Sep 2010

Roland Was Right and Palin is Wrong

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Alphonse de Neuville, Count Roland Behaving Insensitively at Roncesvalles, 1894

Or guart chascuns que granz colps,
Que malvaise cançun de nus chantet ne seit!
Paien unt tort e chrestiens unt dreit.

Now must we each lay on most hardily,
So songs of shame shall ne’er be sung of us.
Pagans are wrong and Christians are right.

Chanson de Roland, 1013-1015

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Sarah Palin says that burning a copy of the Koran on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks is “insensitive and an unnecessary provocation” and reminds us of the Golden Rule.

I don’t think Golden Rule applies to foreign enemies in time of war, and I’d say that Sarah Palin is clearly getting too close to Washington and sounds more and more like a conventional politician.

The FBI is warning that a backlash and retaliation is likely.

Pastor Jones may be a crank, and burning the Koran is neither genteel nor the most attractive choice of gestures, but here we are.

We are in a situation in which the obscure minister of an insignificant local congregation proposes an action insulting to Islam, and consequently find ourselves threatened and warned of bloodshed and massive violence if we don’t stop him.

Meanwhile, the leadership class of the country is responding by urging him to cease and desist, openly acknowledging fear of Islamic violence. Mere squeamishness and discomfort with being placed in the position of defending a gesture which is just not nice is additionally at work in rendering the American leadership class hors de combat.

Most of the same people ran, rather than walked, to defend Imam Abdul Rauf’s project constructing and Islamic Cultural Center, originally named for one of Islam’s most prized European conquests, within the zone of impact of the 9/11 attacks.

Personally, I’m completely fed up with the intelligentsia’s culture of utilitarian calculation and its cowardly inclination to shrink from direct opposition and open conflict with a hostile and insolent alien superstition. At this point, Pastor Jones burning that Koran is just like knocking off the chip that the town bully has placed on his shoulder.

Knock it off and then clean his clock for him, or prepare to bow and scrape and cringe in perpetuity is the real choice. We already have the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Yale University Press practicing self censorship in response to Saracen sensibilities with respect to the Danish cartoons featuring Mohammed. We have Harvard University introducing sexual segregation in its gymnasium to accommodate Islam.

Where does accommodating and appeasing of Islam stop? With dhimmitude (subjection of non-Muslims to Islam) and with payment of the Jizyah, the Islamic tax on non-Muslims.

[T]he Jizyah shall be taken from them with belittlement and humiliation. The dhimmi shall come in person, walking not riding. When he pays, he shall stand, while the tax collector sits. The collector shall seize him by the scruff of the neck, shake him, and say “Pay the Jizyah!” and when he pays it he shall be slapped on the nape of the neck.

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