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Bakri sez he'll be back
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Fifth Column
Fitzgerald: Why don’t Muslims integrate into Western societies?
Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses the vexing problem of Muslim integration in Western countries:

Islam itself is entirely responsible for the failure of Muslims in Infidel lands to integrate.
And here is why:

1) Islam itself teaches Muslims to be suspicious of, to hate, to refuse to trust, to offer only feigned friendship to, all non-Muslims. There are passages all over the Qur'an and Hadith about this. "Take not the Christians and Jews for friends, for they are friends only with each other." "Smite the Unbelievers wherever you find them." Not much room for nuance there. The stories in the Hadith about the triumph over, and the killing of, and the seizure of women and property from, non-Muslims whom Muhammad believed he and his men were entitled to attack (even if those in question had done nothing to them) further encourages such an attitude.

Then there are all the stories about Muhammad himself. What does it mean to someone to learn that Muhammad watched with satisfaction as 600-800 members of the Banu Qurayza, bound and helpless, were decapitated one by one? Does that encourage peaceful co-existence, or that famous "convivencia" that supposedly was such a heart-warming feature of Islamic Spain -- which for some has become the model of what they apparently see as an inevitably-islamized Europe? If so, they should read a little more deeply into the history of Islamic Spain (hint: do not believe a word from that sentimentalist Maria Rosa Menocal, "Director of the Whitney Center for the Humanities" at Yale University -- ca en dit long about the state of American education).

It may be quite hard to work for Infidel employers, or to get along well with Infidel fellow-workers, if one is constantly offering only ill-concealed -- or at times well-concealed -- hostility. Nor does the Muslim sense of Muslim entitlement make it easy for Muslims to endure, or to endure with good grace, such an arrangement: Islam by right should dominate, Muslims should rule, it is contra naturam, against all that is right and just, for Muslims to have to accommodate themselves to non-Muslim customs and laws and ways of behaving. If they must, they should only do so temporarily -- until Muslims are sufficiently powerful, which can happen long before they are an absolute majority. Just look at all the demands made constantly, so that Infidels begin to behave, even when they need not, as dhimmis: willing to placate, to make excuses for, to bend over backwards for, Muslim outrages in deed or in word or in attitude – outrages that may be obvious to all those who have kept their wits about them.


2) Inshallah-fatalism. The deep belief in the will of Allah, of Allah ta'ala (Allah Knows Best), of references in every greeting, paragraph, sentence,
3) The habit of submission -- of mental submission -- does not encourage skepticism, liveliness, "thinking outside the silly box" and so on. The habit of mental submission encourages -- the habit of mental submission. This can limit entrepreneurial activity, just as the sullen dislike of one's status, of the status of Muslims who do not lord it over non-Muslims but must adjust, can help to explain the difficulty of employing Muslims in a non-Muslim workplace.

4) Why should Infidels wish to employ Muslims? Why should they wish to create an unpleasant work environment for themselves? Fetish-worshippers of diversity may wish to do so: a newspaper, say, that thinks the "best way" to cover Muslims is to hire a Muslim (which is, in fact, probably the worst way, if it amounts to the usual apologetics and misinformation). Sometimes, of course, one is dealing with those who either hide very well, or may in fact not feel -- as "Muslim-for-identification-purposes-only" Muslims -- the hostility toward non-Muslims that Islam inculcates. But even those who never go to a mosque may at times engage in a sudden flaring-up, a sudden note of hysteria, when the subject of Islam is even tangentially raised -- as if it is simply a subject completely off-limits for Infidels. And nowadays, how can one discuss anything in the world's news without discussing Islam? One sees this reaction even in some of the seemingly most Westernized, most sophisticated, and suavest of Muslims -- a sudden rage, a sudden rush of furious defensiveness that overcomes the truth, that makes even someone who a minute ago was so calm, so rational, so seemingly part of the smae moral and intellectual universe -- and who a minute before might have been attacking aspects of Islam himself -- will, if an Infidel agrees with the attack, or dares to add his own two-cents' worth to the discussion, will withdraw into a circling-the-wagons mode.

5) Muslims through time and space lived in the lands they conquered through the loot acquired from non-Muslims, and they continued to exploit those non-Muslims thorugh the jizyah, and in other ways. As historians of India well know, the Hindus were initially subject to mass execution and mass enslavement. Some of those enslaved converted. Others did not wait to be enslaved, but converted after witnessing the realities of life under Muslim rule. But the Mughal -- and even the earliest Muslim rulers from the initial conquests -- realized that if the only possible choices open to Hindus -- as non-People of the Book (ahl al-kitab), they were not permitted to live and practice openly their religion -- were death or conversion, then there would ultimately be no non-Muslims left to be exploited economically for the purposes of the Muslim state. This could end the fabled Mughal luxury, the famed Mughal magnificence that so entrances certain writers (as the upscale, and more scholarly, Barbara Cartland of Mughal India, William Dalrymple). Hindus were accorded "honorary" status as dhimmis, not because of Muslim mercy, but because by so doing, the ruling Muslims could economically exploit them through the jizyah (which the tolerant, syncretistic Akbar managed to temporarily suspend -- one more reason why Akbar is remembered fondly by Hindus, and despised by Muslims).

Another way of finding loot, or slaves to exploit, were the constant series of slaving raids. Islam created slave societies -- slaves on horseback, slaves in the harem, slaves to build the palace of Moulay Hasan or the Taj Mahal. Everywhere, slaves from non-Muslim lands -- from black Africa by the tens of millions, slaves from the Slavic lands and Georgia and Circassia, by the many millions, and slaves taken over centuries by raiding parties that landed, destroyed villages, and seized villagers up and down the coasts of Western Europe. This too was a source of wealth, and in fact the corsairs that left ports in North Africa, especially Algiers, continued to raid Christian shipping until two things -- the American military response to the Barbary Pirates, and then the seizure, by the exasperated French, of Algiers in 1830, which put an end to the corsairs and their officially-sanctioned raids on Christian cargoes and enslavement of Infidel sailors.

The corsair-piracy has stopped, or found new means of expression, but the jizyah, in disguised forms, has continued. Arab and Muslim states have economies that depend heavily on one of two things:

1. The oil and gas-rich Muslim states depend on this manna from Allah -- which is exactly how they see it. They do not regard this accident of geology as an accident of geology, but as a sign of Allah's favor -- why else should so much of the oil lie under the lands of dar al-Islam?

2. The Arab and Muslim states that do not possess oil wealth, instead of having the oil-rich Muslim states share that wealth, have managed to get on the Infidel list of countries deserving of foreign aid. Suddenly that supposed loyalty of the umma al-islamiyya seems to disappear when it comes to oil money, save for the sums given to reward suicide bombers among the "Palestinians," and of course for any significant arms projects. No matter how corrupt, how full of anti-Americanism and antisemitism these societies may be, Western money keeps pouring in: to Egypt ($60 billion from America alone), to Pakistan, to Jordan, and to the shock troops of the Jihad against Israel, the local Arabs who after 1967 were carefully renamed as the "Palestinian people" so as to disguise the essential nature, and ultimate aims (not exactly concealed, by the way) of the Arab war on Israel, an Infidel sovereign state in the midst of dar al-Islam that must, in Arab and Muslim eyes, go -- sooner or later. It is a matter of pride. It is a matter of self-esteem. It is a matter of how the Arabs and the Muslims see themselves. What else could possibly matter?

The $9 billion pledged by the G-8 at Gleneagles to keep afloat a non-viable state, or a state that will only be viable at the expense of tiny Israel, because for some reason everyone has ignored the real history of that area, the demographics, the nature of land ownership, and as well has decided to apply rules about territory either captured from an aggressor, or if not captured directly, assigned to one of the winning members in a coalition -- rules that have been applied after every war. For how else did Italy acquire the Alto Adige, which when it was handed over had a population that was 97% German-speaking and ethnically part of Deutschtum? Yet who among us thinks Italy was not entitled to, and should return to Austria, the Sudtirol it possesses? And what of all the changes in borders after World War II, and the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia (3 million Sudeteners), from Poland, and elsewhere, not to mention land taken (Kaliningrad was once Kant's Koenigsberg)?

Yet the Americans and Europeans pay the jizyah to the "Palestinians" and are fearful of stopping, just as they continue to pay Pakistan, the supporter and promoter of the Taliban, the supporter and promoter of Dr. A. Q. Khan (without whom North Korea would not be the problem it is today). We continue to engage in bribery instead of reading Pakistan the riot-act, threatening to destroy not only its military (withholding all parts, all future deliveries) but also its economy (no one has to buy the child-labor textiles and rugs of Pakistan, and while that economy -- that is, while its zamindars -- are prospering, that can be ended in a minute).

Within Europe, the Muslims have the same attitude. The property and women of the Infidels belongs to them. There is nothing wrong with taking Infidel property. There is nothing wrong with raping Infidel women. It is not an accident that 70% of the prison population in France is Muslim; that 70% of the rapes of women in Scandinavia are by Muslims; that the drug traffickers in Holland, and the spacciatori di droga in Italy, are Muslims -- no, this should not surprise.

What does surprise is the failure of the non-Musli world to understand that this all fits into, and can be explained by, a coherent ideology that makes it virtually impossible for Muslims -- to the extent that they remain full believers, or turn into full believers -- to ever comfortably fit into, or ever accept, Western or other non-Muslim societies, mores, manners, laws, or ever to accept the idea of living in a society where the Infidel ways, the Infidel understandings, are to be permanent. This rankles Muslims. This is not right. The world belongs in the end to Allah, and to his people. It is to them that the property and women of others belongs. Not every Believer feels this, but in the canonical texts, and the tenets logically derived from them, and in the attitudes and atmospherics to which those tenets and the whole system of Islam gives rise, these views are not strange but natural and familiar.

And then there is another problem: the problem of the "moderate" Muslim -- which is to say, the relaxed, or unobservant Muslim, the Muslim who may not act according to the tenets of Islam today, but may suddenly acquire a deep psychic need to return to Islam, for whatever reasons. When one is in mental disarray, and happens to be a Muslim, provided with a Total Explanation of the Universe, and a Complete Regulation of existence, one can quite easily come to view the universe through the prism of islam.

And it need be nothing political -- nothing in the newspapers -- that sets one off. A death in the family, the loss of a job, the failure to get into a certain school, the perception that others do not share one's worldview and see no reason to accommodate themselves, and of course the depression that can come upon so many of us, Muslim and non-Muslim, at any time -- are all cause for alarm. But non-Muslims provide their own answers, their own home remedies, as they can, and those answers, and their affixing of blame for their problems, can be as various as their parents, their spouses, their children, their siblings, their employer, The System, the stars, Fate, their cholesterol level, their serotonin level, even -- at times -- themselves. Muslims have only to look to the one thing that always presents itself to be blamed: the Infidels. Their wiles, their whisperings of Shaytan, their decadence, their indifference, their whateveritis of which Infidels are guilty. And once a non-Muslim Muslim, a "Muslim-for-identification-purposes-only" Muslim, begins to redsicover Islam, to return to Islam, he can turn into that other thing -- a Muslim Muslim. And that is the problem, the permanent problem for Infidels, who have done nothing to deserve this ever-ready, this omnipresent blame.

There is no solution. Reducing Muslim numbers, and Muslim power, and ensuring that the Infidel lands do not engage in some kind of attempt to win Muslims by changing their own laws and customs, but remain implacably themselves, or perhaps deliberately Islam-hostile rather than Islam-friendly, so that those who now claim that they are "thinking of leaving" really do leave -- would anyone wish to stop them -- should be the goal of Infidels, engaged only in defending themselves against the carriers of Jihad, all over the world.
Posted by: anonymous5089 || 08/09/2005 08:42 || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  If you look at Muslem "countries", you'll see that Muslims do not get along with each other either. You can't really have a society (above the level of a few dozen's members band) organized on the basis of kin selection (rather than reciprocity as our own).
Posted by: gromgoru || 08/09/2005 11:53 Comments || Top||

#2  Not entirely fair. Most Moslems in the west are 1st and 2nd generation. As is typical with immigrants, the 1st generation still live in the old world, and want what it offered. 2nd generation are neither here nor there, and frequently go bad, forming gangs and mafias. In this case, the vast majority of the 2nd generation Moslem immigrants only give lip service to their religion, selectively choosing the parts they like, such as thinking they can do what they want to other people, and if other people fight back, then they are "oppressing" them. Only a tiny minority embrace the fanatical kind of Islam, that is, if it expects them to do something they wouldn't otherwise want to do. Like kill themselves or get thrown in prison for life.
N.B.: British prisons are filled with nominal Moslem young men, who really don't know squat about their religion. Toughs who drink, do drugs, and like the idea of having more than one girlfriend at a time. That, to them, is Islam.
Posted by: Anonymoose || 08/09/2005 18:16 Comments || Top||


Home Front: Politix
NCAA - "nicking ourselves to enfeeblement "
Page forward to Page 16 at the link. Reprinted in its entirety.

When Teddy Roosevelt helped assemble a bunch of cowboys and others to fight in the Spanish American War, they did not get called the Cowardly Cusses or the Horseback Hobos. The name that stuck was the Rough Riders, and we all know why, don’t we? The name suggested toughness and heroism, the qualities that Roosevelt, other military men and the public hoped the soldiers would exemplify on the battlefield.

Sports teams operate the same way. When organizers pick a nickname, a logo and a mascot, they are not aiming to insult the team. They are usually seeking out a symbolic way of suggesting the virtues they hope will be manifested in the games the team plays. That intention is one reason it is so incredibly silly that the NCAA is going to war against the use — by some university teams — of American Indian nicknames, logos and mascots that it considers racially “hostile” and “abusive.”

You are soon going to have to get those nicknames off uniforms in post season tournaments, the NCAA says. You won’t be allowed to show the logos. Let one of those mascots prance across a basketball court on such an occasion, and there will be serious penalties to contemplate. The ban doesn’t apply to the regular season, it’s reported, because the NCAA doesn’t think it has the authority to enforce it Is that a clue? and it doesn’t apply to football games because there is no post season NCAA football tournament. But a committee that recommended the changes would like to see all American Indian nicknames disappear in all NCAA competition. What? The wool blankets didn't go far enough? Now the names hafta go, too?

According to an Associated Press story, the committee says schools should imitate Wisconsin and Iowa by shunning games with teams that call themselves Seminoles, Chippewas, Braves, Indians, Fighting Sioux and the like. What’s that? A sarcastic chuckle? One is due because Wisconsin and Iowa are among those states — almost half the total — that are named after Indian words and sometimes tribes. If you are going to say the University of Utah cannot have “Utes” on uniforms in future NCAA tournaments, as the NCAA does, why allow “Utah?” Both words refer just as surely to the same Indian tribe. And why would the simple use of a tribe’s name be regarded as hostile or abusive, anyway?

I will grant there might be a couple of team names that are objectionable, such as the Southeastern Oklahoma State Savages, and that some mascots may overdo it. Yet most of these names, logos and mascots are no more disrespectful than references to America as the land of the free and the home of the brave. What we have are simply romantic, adulatory generalizations, which are not so horrible. Even when the mascots seem warlike, the evocation isn’t of bloodshed, but of daring, defiance and valiance. Holding these images in mind is not a way of saying a whole people is thus summed up. It is a way of referring to a strong, positive impression out of our history. Florida State, which wants to keep its Seminole name in all games, is said to be considering a suit against the NCAA.

I don’t blame the university, but can’t help thinking that here we Americans go again, nicking ourselves to enfeeblement over petty matters. It too often seems that somewhere, in the vast social change of recent decades, we Americans have misplaced our common sense, thereby opening the doors to would be morality dictators who consistently make false analogies to real issues. There are indeed real issues facing Indians in America today and there are real solutions. Cracking down on nicknames is not one of them.
Posted by: Bobby || 08/09/2005 08:09 || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Here in Wisconsin we recently saw a major tempest in a teapot when Marquette went through a name changing episode. We continually see this issue come up with Illinios and Chief what'shsiname. There are a lot more things to worry about than this kind of crap. IIRC Florida State actually has the permission of the Seminole tribe to use the name so just WTF business is it of anybody else?

But the best take on the whole thing was the intermural basketball team at North Dakota (?) that called them selves the Fighting Whites/Whities
Posted by: Cheaderhead || 08/09/2005 11:50 Comments || Top||

#2  "The fightin' Whities" were a group of non-white students trying to make a political point. Of course, no one cared about the supposed negative connotations, and instead started buying merchandise. And, of course, capitalism suddenly seemed to be more important to our young world changers than their original point.
Posted by: Doolittle || 08/09/2005 12:08 Comments || Top||

#3  Florida State, which wants to keep its Seminole name in all games, is said to be considering a suit against the NCAA.

Actually, Florida has two Senators and 23 Representatives in Congress. Wonder how many the NCAA has? Hope they already have their travel and hotel reservations [heh] made for Washington. This could be far more entertaining than the Roberts nomination.
Posted by: Flash Hupomoling8954 || 08/09/2005 12:26 Comments || Top||

#4  Why don't the teams form a new league, and tell the NCAA to go take a flying leap?
Posted by: mojo || 08/09/2005 12:32 Comments || Top||

#5  Why don't the teams form a new league, and tell the NCAA to go take a flying leap?

And get cut out of the BCS in football and March Madness for basketball? That ain't gonna happen.
Posted by: Dreadnought || 08/09/2005 12:48 Comments || Top||

#6  Update / reminder - FSU will fight back (linky from Sat's thread).
Posted by: Raj || 08/09/2005 14:27 Comments || Top||

#7  Wetherell says - quote - "This university will forever be associated with the "unconquered" spirit of the Seminole Tribe of Florida."

Hmmmm... Ya think anybody at NCAA knows the Seminole Nation was never defeated? Maybe that's why FSU likes the name, and the Seminoles don't mind!
Posted by: Bobby || 08/09/2005 16:30 Comments || Top||

#8  Seminoles were beaten in battle - but never defeated as a "nation". The tribe itself has voted to support the name of the FSU mascot associateion with thier tribe. Maybe its because they never surrendered that the Seminole nation doesn't play the "Victim" card.

The PC idiots at the NCAA just bit off more than they coudl chew on this one. FSU and the Seminole tribe will chew the NCAA up.

And I still got my "Fightin Whities" T-Shirt from the last bout of PC-ness in mascots.
Posted by: OldSpook || 08/09/2005 17:51 Comments || Top||

#9  Hmmmm... Ya think anybody at NCAA knows the Seminole Nation was never defeated? Maybe that's why FSU likes the name, and the Seminoles don't mind!

Best to understand the meaning of Seminole :> Runaway slave is close, Outlaw works too.
Posted by: Shipman || 08/09/2005 18:17 Comments || Top||

#10  my alma mater San Diego State just went through this shit with Mexican/Raza activists opposing the "Aztecs" name and "Monty Montezuma" mascot. The socio-liberal arts depts brought out some frootloop in "authentic" plumage to define "Aztec warriors" as an Official Mascot©. He was jeered and booed at every event, and eventually we alumni responded with our own mascot and bought his tickets so the school couldn't eject him. Result - we f*&king won with our alumni $ (threatened to be withheld), students' support, and ridicule of the activists
Posted by: Frank G || 08/09/2005 19:13 Comments || Top||


Home Front: WoT
Muslim ‘leaders’ distancing themselves from extremism
By Khalid Hasan
While Muslim community leaders, most of them self-styled with questionable, if any, followings of late have been making statements distancing themselves from jihadist interpretations of Islam, the average Muslim is not so persuaded.
We haven't thought they were since we saw the jubilation after 9-11...
Every conversation on the subject produces the standard observation of the West being at war with Islam. There is openly-expressed admiration for those who are seen to be committing daring acts of sacrifice for the “greater glory” of the cause. When pressed, the response remains nebulous. The average sermon in the average mosque is either utterly unrelated to the problems of today or full of pious and simplistic solutions for the challenges facing Muslims today. The most common explanation offered is that since Muslims have “turned their back on Islam” and moved away from the “correct path,” they are being punished for their transgressions. Little attempt is made to offer practical advice on how to face the present challenges and what to do. Instead of stepping out, Muslims are tending to withdraw into themselves, which can only increase their isolation and stand between them and a realistic understanding of the problems that they face.
Hmmm... Not a lot of substance to that paragraph. I'm not even sure it applies to "all Muslims" or only to the author's circle of friends and acquaintances. I kinda sorta get the idea that if they were real leaders they wouldn't be distancing themselves from jihad...
However, according to a report run by the Washington Post on Monday, “alarmed by the London subway bombings, US Muslim activists are taking a series of steps aimed at preventing young people here from embracing extremist ideas.”
Not wanting to get dumped might provide an incentive...
The article speaks of “soul-searching in mosques and in Muslim groups since the London attacks. The writer claims that Muslims in America are better educated and more assimilated than their European counterparts. The report quotes Mahdi Bray, a “senior figure in the Washington-based Muslim American Society”, as saying, “We don’t want to give the opportunity to extremists to get a hold of our kids.” Bray’s group, according to the report, has started working with psychologists to design a pamphlet on how to identify young people who could be susceptible to violent extremism.
Try this simple test. If the child posses at least three of the following, he's susceptible to violent extremism: 1. a turban 2. curly-toed slippers 3. an automatic weapon 4. a scraggly-assed beard 5. bomb making materials 6. a burnoose
The pamphlet will be distributed to Muslim parents, mosque leaders and others. What good that will do, only Bray can tell. He told the Post that the Muslim American Society will encourage mosques to sponsor more Boy Scout and Girl Scout troops. The report goes on to quote one Bano Makhdoom, “a Muslim activist in Montgomery County,” who considers the idea that Muslim youngsters could become Islamic extremists “remote.”
Either Bano doesn't read the papers or he's part of the problem...
The report recalls that one group from the Washington suburbs was convicted of attending a training camp run by Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan. Last week, a 30-year-old D.C. taxi driver living near Baltimore, Mahmud Faruq Brent, was charged in a similar case. In an even more dramatic case, a 24-year-old who grew up in Falls Church, Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, has been accused in an Al Qaeda plot to assassinate President Bush. He has pleaded not guilty. The Muslim American Society has vigorously defended Abu Ali.
"Frisk 'em for automatic weapons, Danno!"
"Just the guys with the burnooses, McGarrett?"
Asked by the Post correspondent whether that contradicted his group’s new campaign against extremism, Bray replied in the negative.
"We're Muslims. We're not long on logical consistency..."
His group he said, was concerned that Abu Ali’s rights had been violated since he had been held in a Saudi prison for more than a year without charges.
"He's really lucky he didn't get incinerated!"
Several area Muslim leaders told the newspaper that since the London bombings, they are warning youngsters “even more explicitly” about any ideologies that glorify violence or portray non-Muslims as “infidels.” A Ghanian Muslim, the Post reported, had recently lectured to a small group gathered for a Quranic lesson at the Dulles Islamic Centre that hating people “is not part of our religion.”
Then his lips fell off, of course...
According to the report, “One major group, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), is planning a special session on fighting terrorism and extremism at its annual convention in Chicago next month. The issue is also a central theme at a parallel youth conference, expected to draw thousands of people.” ISNA and its affiliated organisations, which are well financed and well organised with large memberships are also conservative in their views. It is rare to see a woman at their conferences who is not wearing a hijab.
Posted by: Fred || 08/09/2005 00:00 || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  He told the Post that the Muslim American Society will encourage mosques to sponsor more Boy Scout and Girl Scout troops.

yeah those are the guys I want influencing my kids. Girl scouts too? hmmm I thought to be a Boy Scout you had to believe in God. This will be interesting.
they seem more concerned about Abu Ali’s situation than all of the terror that recently occurred in London.

Bano Makhdoom, “a Muslim activist in Montgomery County

strange language, is being an activist similar to terrorist? What exactly is being a muslim activist?
Posted by: Jan || 08/09/2005 0:34 Comments || Top||

#2  He told the Post that the Muslim American Society will encourage mosques to sponsor more Boy Scout and Girl Scout troops.

Don't tell the ACLU.
Posted by: DMFD || 08/09/2005 5:45 Comments || Top||


Iraq-Jordan
Chris Hitchens: "Losing the Iraq War - Do the Left Really Want Us to?
Another request in my in-box, asking if I'll be interviewed about Iraq for a piece "dealing with how writers and intellectuals are dealing with the state of the war, whether it's causing depression of any sort, if people are rethinking their positions or if they simply aren't talking about it." I suppose that I'll keep on being asked this until I give the right answer, which I suspect is "Uncle."

There is a sort of unspoken feeling, underlying the entire debate on the war, that if you favored it or favor it, you stress the good news, and if you opposed or oppose it you stress the bad. I do not find myself on either side of this false dichotomy. I think that those who supported regime change should confront the idea of defeat, and what it would mean for Iraq and America and the world, every day. It is a combat defined very much by the nature of the enemy, which one might think was so obviously and palpably evil that the very thought of its victory would make any decent person shudder. It is, moreover, a critical front in a much wider struggle against a vicious and totalitarian ideology.

It never seemed to me that there was any alternative to confronting the reality of Iraq, which was already on the verge of implosion and might, if left to rot and crash, have become to the region what the Congo is to Central Africa: a vortex of chaos and misery that would draw in opportunistic interventions from Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. Bad as Iraq may look now, it is nothing to what it would have become without the steadying influence of coalition forces. None of the many blunders in postwar planning make any essential difference to that conclusion. Indeed, by drawing attention to the ruined condition of the Iraqi society and its infrastructure, they serve to reinforce the point.

Rest here
Posted by: Captain America || 08/09/2005 19:47 || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  "Does the Left Really Want Us To?"

I assume you meant that as a rhetorical question, Mr. Hitchens, but in case you didn't, the answer would be a big Yes. Nothing could please them more.
Posted by: Matt || 08/09/2005 20:44 Comments || Top||

#2 
Losing the Iraq War - Do the Left Really Want Us to?
Yes.
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut || 08/09/2005 21:25 Comments || Top||

#3  Which Demoncat pissed in his cereal? All of a sudden Chris Hitchens is RightWinger.

Oh! I remember who it was, the ballerina boy, Ron Reagan.
Posted by: Poison Reverse || 08/09/2005 23:44 Comments || Top||


Israel-Palestine
The Stark Contrasts
A few days old, but the writer makes a nice point, though it's redundant for most RB readers.
When a Jewish terrorist kills Arabs - and let's be clear, this one's a terrorist - Jews condemn him for it. When an Arab terrorist kills Jews, Arabs celebrate.
When an Arab mob savagely lynches a Jew for killing Arabs, the world yawns. When highly trained and disciplined Israeli operatives target a Palestinian terrorist who is literally in the act of terrorism, it's highly "controversial".
After a horrific terrorist attack committed by a Jew, it's just kind of expected that Arabs will violently riot. When Arabs commit the most unthinkable crimes, bombing civilians and then the medical personnel who come to help them, Israelis are urged to consider the day after.
Mired in their own victim-hood, Israeli Arab organizations are of course calling for a full strike. In far more serious situations - with civilian murders sanctioned at the highest Palestinian levels - Israelis were always urged to make one more painful concession for peace.
And of course, the biggest difference is that when a Jewish terrorist kills Arabs, Jews call him a terrorist. When an Arab terrorist kills Jews, he's something else.

[Cross-posted on IsraPundit]

UPDATE: It's also worth noting, as emailer Hillel does, that this guy was a loner and not acting on behalf of any organization - let alone an organization recognized by (or worse, who negotiates with) the international community.

ANOTHER UPDATE: It looks like Natan-Zada was a member of Kach. Maybe not a lone, deranged lunatic after all. Something to keep an eye on, either way.
Posted by: anonymous5089 || 08/09/2005 08:49 || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  A terrorist is a terrorist is a terrorist. I don't care what/who/why he precieves him/herself to to be fighting for.
Posted by: Cheaderhead || 08/09/2005 17:42 Comments || Top||

#2  true - this is more a commentary on teh lowered expectations placed on Arabs/Paleos/Muslims. They are excused from any and all atrocities for all the BS reasons we've noted here at RB. Seething? Rioting? Honor Killing? Why, of course, they do that
Posted by: Frank G || 08/09/2005 18:59 Comments || Top||


Home Front: Culture Wars
Most Recent Air America Payroll Days Late
The Radio Equalizer has all your one-stop shopping needs on the unfolding Air America scandals (note the plural). It's a blog so I've put this into 'Opinion'.
Posted by: Steve White || 08/09/2005 00:24 || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  I've worked for a few months as a payroll person for a company like this. In my case, it worked like this: The owner (my boss) was a boy toy for a rich woman. She sent him off to run this swankly little chic hotel, probably to get him out of her hair. He'd buy expensive $80,000 rugs and lease a jaguar "company car" for his new salesman (read his hunky new boy toy with zero skills) but when payroll would come around he was more often than not a little short. The excuses were ..um creative. But what can you do? Quit? It's not always that easy. So you wait a few days extra for your check to arrive and then when it does, you deposit it quick and hope it doesn't bounce. But eventually it clears. Better than no check at all, right? Besides, it always worked out in the end, cause eventually the Mrs. would pony up a forty grand or so influx to save the day.

He was embezzeling from the Mrs. too. Who knows if she knew or cared.

But the bottom line was that the staff was willing to roll the dice for one or two pay periods cause it was all that they had going on for the moment. The owner went through staff like kleenex at a funeral. But, like Franken, there was a few key players that always got paid first, got bonuses and stuck around for years. Everyone else could easily be replaced for some other sap in need of a paycheck.
Posted by: 2b || 08/09/2005 5:25 Comments || Top||

#2  Franken says he's been working without pay for a while. Since his is a political show, does that mean he's been making contributions to the Democrats?
Posted by: Robert Crawford || 08/09/2005 14:20 Comments || Top||

#3  #snicker# The end is looking pretty near.
Posted by: Secret Master || 08/09/2005 15:07 Comments || Top||

#4  2b,

It's unfortunate that you had to go through that. I just pray and keep up my skill level so I have the ability to work in any city.
Posted by: Poison Reverse || 08/09/2005 16:20 Comments || Top||

#5  Air America is 2 Legit 2 Quit.
Posted by: Chris W. || 08/09/2005 23:47 Comments || Top||



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Mon 2005-08-08
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