Pamela Geller ("Fearless, intelligent, beautiful -- Pamela Geller wears her Supergirl costume well ... is a dynamo of energy and a paragon of courage and fearlessness." Spencer about Geller) and Robert Spencer ("Robert Spencer is the leading voice of scholarship and reason in a world gone mad. If the West is to be saved, we will owe Robert Spencer an incalculable debt." Geller about Spencer) (Yes, we cackled too!) have cancelled their trip to Cologne.
Politically Incorrect says that the withdrawal was due to Charles Johnson’s of LGF infame attacks on Pro-Köln, as a "fascist" organization. Wow!
What could have cyber-Charlemagne done to them? Send them a cyber curse for cyber-fascists? Cyber-clobber them with a cyber-fascism-cudgel? Cyber-drown their cyber-rubber duckie? Seriously, there is only one sensemaking reason for them to continue to defend their wannabe-hosts when they have cancelled their attendance, namely that they've gotten cold feet in the face of the many information on Pro-Köln they have gotten from serious Islamcritics in Germany (some of which I have seen) who know a thing or two more about their own country than our Innocents Abroad. And being the unprincipled attention seekers they are, they are now blaming CJ for it, so as not to close any doors to potential future appearances. (Yes, I know, the latter is an assumption.)
DISCLAIMER START
At this point, a disclaimer is called for: We do NOT deny Pro-Köln the right to host such an anti-Islam event. The way the city of Cologne is handling this shows that they have not yet arrived at democracy and probably never will. They do everything to marginalise, even foreclose, Pro-Köln's, a legal party's, activities, for example by banning a march to the building site of the gigantic DITIB-mosque, while they are tolerating next to the magnificent Cologne cathedral a permanent vile Israel-baiting exhibition. Such a march can not be "protected", or so Cologne police chief Klaus Steffenhagen says, which is unquestioningly repeated by the media. Gudrun Eussner says: Many events licensed by the authorities, which do not need to be protected, take care that the anti-Islamisation congress can not be protected." And:Is it radical Left anarchists who are deciding now who is allowed to rally here and who isn't? Are they allowed to break the monopoly of the state on the use of force and does the police take it for granted?
The answer is: yes.
DISCLAIMER END
However, legal as Pro-Köln may be, a few questions regarding their legitimacy may be in order.
First and above all, their criticism of Islam is opportunist. Markus Beisicht, co-founder and chairman of Pro-Köln and Pro-NRW confirms in an Interview with the Junge Freiheit that "Islamkritik" is for Pro-Köln and Pro-NRW not more than part of a right-wing party project. Islamisation has become such a crucial topic for so many people and basically fits into a catalogue of "rightwing" issues that they picked it up and had been amazed how well it was received. "Specifically in big cities one can score here." They have, as Beisicht puts it, claimed a "market niche" and thus reached voters who wouldn't have elected them otherwise.
In other words and as Gudrun Eussner puts it: While looking for befitting issues for a party-project, Pro-Köln has found Islamisation. Therefore it might have been a different topic as well, had it only served the purpose of attracting voters.
Many "nationalist" European parties are, also, not quite the knights in shining anti-Islamic armour as which American Islam critics are fond of seeing them. Front National and FPÖ, for example, have nothing against Islam as such as long as Muslims are safely staying in their own countries. The Pro-movement shares this point of view, therefore their catchphase is "Against Islamisation and Überfremdung(1)", two terms, often used together. It is typical that both, left- and rightwing extremists, have nothing against Islam as such because of their natural affinity to a totalitarian polit-ideology like Islam. If it comes push to shove, rightwingers will club together with Muslims, be it against the Serbs or against the Jews, thinly veiled as anti-Zionism. Case in point: March 1999, Manfred Rouhs, later to become a Pro-Köln co-founder, supports the terrorist UCK in the Kosovo, who are - for him - liberation nationalists.
What says Robert Spencer in his own words at Jihad Watch?:
Meanwhile, I am not going to the Cologne conference, contrary to Johnson's claims; still, however, he is trying to defame me with it. From here is the claim that I am "defending" Manfred Rouhs of Pro-Köln, whom Johnson claims is a Nazi, because I posted his pro-Israel statement here. (You know you're in Johnson's Bizarro world when posting a pro-Israel statement gets you accused of being a Nazi.) Rouhs, says Johnson, is a Nazi who sells Nazi literature at his website -- and therefore I must be a crypto-Nazi, right? (Buckley's sage advice to Gore Vidal comes to mind at this point.)This is so incredibly, intransigent, rock-hard, impermeably and unforgivingly dumb that it almost left me speechless. That and the fact that it saves a lot of gastric acid to be prepared for either, those innocent, wide eyed requests for "proof" from those who then nick my information to post it as their own wisdom elsewhere (you know who you are), or those who think that Europe is just the 51st state of the US of A and are miffed when told that "right wing" has a somewhat different meaning at this side of the Atlantic, makes this entry a bit belated, but the open questions are still as topical as they were a week ago.
Anyway, about Rouhs' book selection at his website: Rouhs sells material, as you can see, by the noted neo-Nazis Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Samuel Huntington, Norman Finkelstein, and Clausewitz.
Ah, but all that is just a cover for the Nazi literature that he sells, that Charles has found, right?
Such as: Does Spencer really not know for what Chomsky, Moore and Finkelstein stand? No, they are not "Nazis". In that he is right. Two of them are even Jewish and don't we all know that Jews can't be Nazis? They don't wear a black or brown uniform and they are not goosestepping around, brandishing swastika-ed banners. Should the truth be really too subtle to be understood by Robert Spencer and his likes?
Maybe. Let's start with Noam Chomsky. Maybe it was really too much trouble to find out that he is published by the Italian Neo-Nazi-publisher Barbarossa, right between the vilest Nazi scum, such as Jacques Isorni, the lawyer of Robert Brasillach:
Il Processo Brasillach - Jacques Isorni - € 6,20More from Barbarossa:
Il Controllo dei Mass Media. Le spettacolari conquiste della propaganda - Noam Chomsky - € 7,00You got the gist?(2)
La Menzogna di Giuda. I perché di un libro scomodo - Centro Studi Orion - € 5,16
Rivolte e Guerre Contadine. Storia non romanzata degli Stati Uniti d’America - Aa. Vv. - € 13,00
La Rivoluzione Fascista. Antologia di scritti politici a cura di A. Cucchi e G. Galante; in appendice articoli di J. Evola e R. Farinacci - Berto Ricci - € 8,00
Now Norm Finkelstein: The German translation of this upright anti-fascist's oeuvre is, for example, sold at the Neo-Nazi online shop Weltnetzladen, between books that reveal the genocidal and perverted nature of the bible, or those of Dr. Claus Nordbruch ("Machtfaktor Zionismus") who is fond of drooling over Germans as genocidal targets of Britain and America when he isn't stridently demanding "reparations" for a wronged Germany who was dealt a marked card in WWII and next to titles like "Ami go home!" or "Zwölf gute Gründe für einen Antiamerikanismus" (i.e. twelve good reasons for, you've guessed it, antiamericanism).(3)
But without doubt, Chomsky and Finkelstein are no Nazis and we all know how much Michael Moore loves America.
Even a superficial dig like this reveals such a cesspool of totalitarianism, antiamericanism, antisemitism, history revisionism and God knows what -isms, that it seems -- and indeed is -- totally irrelevant whether one labels it Nazi, or left or right or center or whatever. It is a kraken with countless tentacles obsessively feeding on its sole fodder, the hatred for America, the Ersatz-Jew and Israel, the Über-Jew. And it reaches far into the realms of other groups and parties as well, groups and parties much more respected and important than hapless Pro-Köln.
I have written about it countless times. It is the core topic of this blog. So what else is new?
The question remains whether it is asked too much from Robert Spencer to do some research. Brief, basic research, as I just did, in the Internet, would suffice. Nobody expects a crash-course of twothousand years of European and German history and culture from him. His Wikipedia entry tells us that he holds a Master's degree in the department of Religious Studies from an American university, so we can assume (or is it hope?) that he knows how to do research, to tell apart the important from the unimportant, not to let his personal opinions get in the way of the truth, and that he is able to perform a critical appraisal of his sources. That is not even intellectual integrity, that are the very basics of academic armamentarium, science 101. But the urge to be right when Charles Johnson is wrong is so overwhelming that Spencer, dumb and dull like the moron he isn't, happily commits intellectual suicide just not to be thrown out of his fool's paradise of feeling superior to Charles Johnson.
What an achievement.
(1) "For years Austrians have been warned about foreigners, indeed, about an inundation of foreigners. In 1993 the word "Überfremdung" - being overrun with foreigners - was declared the non-word of the year in Germany. Yet in 1999 a successful election campaign could be conducted in Austria with the slogan "Stop the excessive immigration." The word "Überfremdung" is hardly translatable, because the German language does not know the differentiation found in English, Italian, or Spanish between stranger and foreigner." See here.
(2) It is all available on the web. Dr. Gudrun Eussner, a political scientist, writes about it at her invaluable website for years now.
(3) Or, for example, a "conservative" book on bringing up children by Christa Müller, the wife of one of the leaders of the post-Communist party DIE LINKE, Oskar Lafontaine. By Spencer's logic, the entire shop would be above board on the strength of such immaculate leftist credentials.
I wouldn't hesitate to make the case that Obama is indeed a Muslim on the available evidence. He almost certainly "converted" to Islam early in his life and was raised in Islam (whether or not he was technically converted, and it's hard to make a plausible case that he wasn't). His only claim to not being a Muslim is his membership in a "Christian" church...which church is openly based on "Black Liberation Theology", a movement drawn almost entirely from Islamic Nation and socialist thought with the thinnest gloss possible of biblical terminology.
By the Koranic injunction against judging anyone to be an infidel so long as they give an Islamic greeting and revere the name of Allah, Obama definitely qualifies as a fellow Muslim.
Whereas by the common Christian test of expressing a definite faith in the unique redemptive power and divinity of Christ and His teachings, Obama totally fails to qualify as a Christian.
With all of that being said, it really wouldn't bother me that he's far more Muslim than Christian if he were just honest about it. I don't regard Islam as being any more false than Shinto...and frankly I think it would be kinda awesome to have a Shintoist for President of the United States.
Of course, Shintoism, because of its hyper-polytheism, is naturally tolerant of other religions, while Islam is rather less so. But the Presidency doesn't have a religious test, and it really shouldn't need one. As long as the guy means it when he swears to uphold the Constitution, I don't care if he privately would rather this or that be different.
But when he has so little personal honor that he feels the need to rely on bald-faced lies about his religious beliefs to get into power, and then aggressively oversteps every Constitutional limitation on his office in the active pursuit of abolishing the role of the Constitution as the foundation of American law...well I find it hard to believe that he's taking that oath of office very seriously.
Man...now I really wish there would have been a Shintoist running for President. That would have been so awesome.
April 8, 2009 12:08 AM
Well, I'm just trying to give the poor b*stard the benefit of the doubt. Lord knows he needs it about now, and things most assuredly will not get any better for him.
That Hussein is sympathetic towards Islam, and that he has ties to Islam has always been enough (though hardly the only factor) to disqalify him from the presidency as far as I'm concerned, and in spite of what Colin Powell believes to be authentic Americanism. And speaking of Colin Powell, why is it that every time I think of him lately I begin to be filled with righteous indignation?
April 8, 2009 3:40 AM
I've always believed that totalitarianism, not Islam, was the real danger to liberty. Of course, Islam is clearly a totalitarian philosophy as much or more than a serious religion.
Clarification, by religion I mean a path towards God (or gods, in the case of Shintoism). Many people do use the teachings of Islam as a way towards the divine. But I sense that more use it as a justification for unlimited rule.
Of course, most Muslims use it for neither. Sadly, many people are too busy with "life" to examine it and, happily, many aren't really interested in devoting themselves to oppressing others beyond what's personally convenient.
But while Islam is clearly totalitarian, it isn't the philosophy that most endangers Western Civilization. Fascism, then Communism, both far more significant threats, have been cast on the dust-bin of history (only kooks dig them out and dust them off anymore). Islam would inevitably suffer the same fate if it weren't for the resurgence of Progressivism.
Progressivism is different from other totalitarian philosophies. See, the other philosophies were exclusionary and competed with each other, often fiercely. But Progressivism has always been friendly to every identifiably totalitarian philosophy. That is because those other philosophies viewed totalitarianism as a means to some end.
Progressives understand, whether implicitly or explicitly, that totalitarianism is the end. Communism, Fascism, and Islam all hate and fight each other and Progressivism, but Progressivism loves and fosters each of them in return.
Because Progressives understand the great secret of totalitarianism, revealed by the ancient question, who shall watch the watchmen? Once you get into power, the theory that justifies your power doesn't matter. Nobody is in a position to question, or even know, your actions. You can do whatever you want at that point.
It only costs you your soul.
April 8, 2009 4:47 PM
I agree with everything chiu_chunling said. Just let me relativize this detail:
"But when he has so little personal honor that he feels the need to rely on bald-faced lies about his religious beliefs to get into power, and then aggressively oversteps every Constitutional limitation on his office in the active pursuit of abolishing the role of the Constitution as the foundation of American law...well I find it hard to believe that he's taking that oath of office very seriously."
I don't think that "personal honour" is something a Muslim cares much about or even understands. Obama is clearly well-versed in taqqiya. The much-hailed Europe trip has frightened the living daylight out of me and I am not easily frightened. That man is clearly aiming to drive your country up against the wall to the fervent acclaim of the world. I hope I am wrong.
April 10, 2009 2:55 PM
Terry & all,
I have reservations about questioning anyone's claim to Christianity. That said, I couldn't help noticing, however, that in the early days of his campaign, Mr. Obama's conversion to Christianity was couched solely in terms of it's advantage to him as a community organizer, in that it gave him access to the Christian networks of volunteers to help his cause(s).
Also, I'm sure that most Muslims would find my comment about converting them all to be more offensive than Anonymous' statement. Good! Perhaps it would cause some of them to think about their current faith and perhaps come to the conclusion that they must resolve the inherent logic flaws in their view that Jesus Christ was only a prophet.
Editrix, You said "I don't think that "personal honour" is something a Muslim cares much about or even understands."
Why do you think that? I'm just curious.
April 10, 2009 3:26 PM
"Taqiya", the practice of denying that one is a Muslim when confronted with possible persecution, is one of the pragmatic tenants of Islam. The term is Arabic for "prudence".
That Islam teaches such doctrines, along with convenient betrayal of treaties and agreements with infidels, tends to create two standards of honor which are distinct and contradictory. It may become a Muslim's religious duty to do things that are abhorrent to ordinary personal honor. For instance, telling a bald-faced lie about one's beliefs to gain the trust of an infidel, then betraying that infidel to death. That makes having personal honor very difficult for Muslims who take Islam seriously as an ethical system.
America, by the way, is overwhelmingly non-Muslim...you can draw your own conclusions about what that implies even if it weren't for all the Muslims constantly chanting "Death to America" and calling us "the Great Satan".
I would be more concerned about that aspect of Islam if I sensed that Obama had any personal honor to sacrifice to his Islamic faith. But he clearly doesn't. To quote Darth Vader, "There is no conflict."
Judging from his statements, Obama is a Christian only in the sense that every Muslim is also a Christian. He believes that Jesus Christ was a good man who taught many moral truths. Such is an official tenant of Islam, found right in the Koran.
April 11, 2009 1:21 AM
All,
I've defended Hussein Obama against accusations of his being a covert Muslim. My only basis for defending him in this way has been his word. Since I believe in freedom of conscience, the fact that he was raised a Muslim during his formidable years does not mean to me that he is necessarily a Muslim anymore than my being raised a Oneness Pentecostal during my formidable years means I am one now. Yes, I am an apostate from that branch of the faith which seems to doom me eternally in the eyes of some. (Happily none of them think I should have my head cut off as a just reward for my apostasy. Perhaps that's because there's nothing in the book of Acts requiring such a return on my deeds? Hmm.)
But I have to say that taken as a whole Hussein Obama's actions speak louder than his words. The recent obeisance he paid to the king of Saudi Arabia (right in front of God and everybody!) is very troubling indeed. As I said in another post above, his intimate connections to Mohammed's religion have always been enough in and of themselves to disqualify him from the presidency in my view. Everything else aside, I could never have voted for him on that basis alone ... not for dog catcher, much less POTUS.
Irrespective of that, I'll not be defending Hussein Obama against these accusations again. If it walks like a duck and all that, it probably is one.
April 11, 2009 1:57 AM
"Editrix, You said "I don't think that "personal honour" is something a Muslim cares much about or even understands."
Why do you think that? I'm just curious."
Mom, isn't "personal honour" a thoroughly Western thing? Our personal honour is not the loudmouthed, cocky 'honour' Muslims are claiming. Islam, like any totalitarian world view, doesn't know the individual, just string puppets to further the cause of Islam. Can we compare our understanding of honour with one that asks for the killing of erring daughters and sisters?
Honour is the outward expression of what we call our conscience. It is defined as the moral sense of right and wrong. It was born at Mount Sinai with Moses as birth attendant. The Decalogue pretty much still covers everything we need to know about ethics and morality. Is this, our, personal honour comparable to the honour of killing for Allah?
Not to speak of Buddhism which snares mankind in reincarnations in a world of suffering or Hinduism where they are trapped in reincarnation due to ignorance and karma, whether one sees those belief systems as another expression of totalitarianism or some sort of perverted individualism with its concept of individualistic salvation.
As an aside: I believe that the modern attraction those alien belief systems hold for many Christians is a symptom not of a failure of Christianity but of the inconvenient burden of conscience with which we Westerners are, depending of one's personal view, lumbered or blessed.
Here is a statement by chiu_chunling with which I clearly disagree:
"But while Islam is clearly totalitarian, it isn't the philosophy that most endangers Western Civilization. Fascism, then Communism, both far more significant threats, have been cast on the dust-bin of history (only kooks dig them out and dust them off anymore). Islam would inevitably suffer the same fate if it weren't for the resurgence of Progressivism."
That is wishful thinking. Both, fascism and Communism, are ideologies based on Western concepts, one being a perverted idea of social justice, the other a similarly perverted concept of traditional national identity and values. Islam is something entirely different. Islam has conquered already a considerable part of the world, a part that never had any defense mechanisms. Peversely, as long as the Cold War lasted and Western (and Eastern) defense mechanisms were up, there was no room for too obvious Islamic expansionism. Now, where we are all supposed to get along with each other (but don't), Islam's hour has come. Don't you see what is happening in Turkey, the once stalwart of secular values? It has been re-conquered by Islam already. Islam was once stopped at the Gates of Vienna, at Tours and Poitiers, at Roncesvalles. Muslims have never forgotten that. Every spot where Muslims once trod is Muslim ground forever. What about the re-Islamisation of the once pretty well assimilated Turks in Germany? Yesterday, I listened to the discussion on the wireless about the re-introduction of religious instruction in Berlin schools. Although it wasn't about Islam at all, they had invited a Muslima (but not a Jew), a highly articulate young woman with a Turkish name and without any foreign accent, who dominated the entire discussion and the entire discussion became one about Islam with the representatives of the Christian denominations totally in the defensive. They are creeping in our heads now, so we will hardly notice or mind anymore once they have conquered us physically.
Sorry to rain on all the righteous conservatives', eager to point out the similarities between the current and the last president, parade: The partly helpless, partly opportunist, politically correct bull Bush talked about Islam has nothing, but NOTHING, to do with Obama's active promotion of it. If I say that every spot where Muslims once trod is Muslim ground forever that applies to Obama's mind and soul as well.
April 11, 2009 4:53 AM
I agree. Personal honor in the Western/American sense, and personal honor in the Arabic/Muslim sense are two different, even opposing concepts.
I'm mindful here of George Washington's admonitions (which I'm going to quote from memory since I'm too lazy to look it up right now):
"Where is the security for life, for liberty, for property when the sense of religious obligation deserts the oaths, which are the objects of investigation in the courts of justice?"
That statement emanates from a Western worldview and applies particularly to those who possess a Western worldview. It does not apply to Muslims in the same sense that it applies to Westerners, and I suspect that George Washington was very aware of this.
This is also the reason that wherever we find Muslims in significant numbers they ultimately begin to make demands on the host society for the establishment of sharia courts where they can adhere to the dictates of Muslim style personal honor.
April 11, 2009 6:27 AM
I feel to point out a fact about the origins of Islam which, whether you regard it as praise of Mohammed or not, is important to understanding the "Muslim problem."
The Arabs living in the area where Islam was initially founded had not achieved civilization before Mohammed. They were living in between patriarchal tribalism and barbarism. There was no ethical system in place that encouraged principles of fair dealing with strangers, meaning anyone that a man hadn't known pretty much from childhood.
Islam represented a giant leap in ethical development, taking the Arabs from the clan system to the ethical level capable of forming an empire within a single generation. All the other great moral teachers to whom we typically are encouraged to compare Mohammed built on an existing foundation of civilized ethical principles. His achievement is actually quite singular, possibly unparalleled.
That said, Islam hasn't come very far since. In point of fact, all the available historical evidence indicates some pretty severe backsliding. Between the inculcation of terrorist values in the youth and the long-standing divisions over authority and validity in Islam, many Muslims today are no better (from an ethical perspective) than their pre-Islamic forebears.
It is necessary to understand this because we sometimes are tempted to judge Muslims by civilized standards of ethical behavior, which is just not workable. Forget questions of fairness, aside from the tiny minority of Muslims raised in civilized society who later converted to Islam, Muslims just haven't been raised with any of the concepts we associate with civilization.
Watch any of these Islamic children's shows for a few minutes and you can see it in action. It's like episodes of Sesame Street written by cave-men. Or, more accurately, tribal desert nomads with almost no pre-existing ethical concepts.
As much as this horrifies the modern sensibility, it helps explain why Muslims are such piss-poor soldiers. Israel won every battle they fought with the Muslim nations before we started bribing them to ease up. It wasn't because the Israelis have some magical Jewish indestructibility (though they are pretty tough compared to a lot of other folks). It's because the individual Muslim soldier is, when push comes to shove, willing to sacrifice others for his own self-interest.
The reliance on suicide bombers is actually an example of this. The talent which makes the bombs is entirely separate from the poor fools brainwashed or blackmailed into carrying out the bombing. The Muslim nations inculcate in their population from the time that they are little children the idea that the most certain path to heaven is "martyrdom". They feed sexually repressed youth on fantasies of unlimited gratification if they'll accept one of these missions. And even at that, they can't get enough volunteers, so often they resort to taking families hostage in order to coerce someone into doing the job.
But the central point of using suicide bombers is that you know that your fighters will typically run away the moment things get scary, so you arrange for them to blow up before that happens.
This is why Islam has no hope of victory over civilization...except insofar as civilization falls to a more powerful and insidious enemy.
Progressives are not pre-civilization, but post-civilization. They have no ethics, not because they have never been taught them, but because they consciously disdain them as being personally disadvantageous. They understand our society, and have patiently worked for more than a century now to bring it under their control.
They plan to co-opt Islam just as they co-opted Fascism and Communism, simply seducing the leadership to abandon their nominal goals while deceiving their followers by abusing their unlimited power. The modern environmental movement is yet another victim of Progressives, who sell the rank and file on scientifically unsound models of climate as a means of justifying their totalitarian control.
Islam probably wouldn't even be a serious enemy of the West if it weren't for progressives selling them on the hierarchy that separates the suicide bombers from the leaders. The difference between the way in which the American advisers cultivated Afghan resistance to the Soviet Union and the way that Soviet advisers cultivated Arab resistance to America is very telling. The Americans taught Muslims to be better soldiers, the Soviets taught the leaders to make ever more callous use of their followers.
The Northern Alliance, former resistance fighters against the Soviets who had resisted Taliban rule for decades, were an alliance because they were formed of disparate ethnic minorities without a unifying ideology other than resistance to the Taliban. And yet, despite being outnumbered, out-gunned, and out-supplied for decades since the end of the proxy war against the Soviets, they held onto a significant patch of the country and were still there when the Americans returned.
They weren't happy about being abandoned before, but they didn't turn on us either, despite being Muslims. They still don't have the capability of fighting a Taliban supplied and sheltered by Pakistan (with the support of oil-rich Arab nations), but if we left today they'd pull back to what they could defend on their own and hold that without our help. It wouldn't make them happy, but they'd do it.
They are what Islam might be, if not for the hand of global progressives guiding Muslim nations for the last fifty or sixty years (ever since it became clear that the Middle East would be important).
And where do progressives come from? They used to be concentrated in Germany, before their influence completely destroyed that country twice. For the last half century they've been heavily concentrated in the United States, particularly in your educational and media institutions. There they use their influence to teach the world to hate America and America to hate itself.
Islam is an enemy of America, but not because of anything intrinsic to the Muslim faith. It is true that Islam does not provide the moral valuation of conscience which is implicit in Christian teachings, but Islamic nations and empires have practiced a degree of practical religious tolerance in the past. We need not, and should not, defeat Islam.
We must destroy progressivism.
April 12, 2009 12:28 AM
"Islam probably wouldn't even be a serious enemy of the West if it weren't for progressives selling them on the hierarchy that separates the suicide bombers from the leaders.
...
Islam is an enemy of America, but not because of anything intrinsic to the Muslim faith. It is true that Islam does not provide the moral valuation of conscience which is implicit in Christian teachings, but Islamic nations and empires have practiced a degree of practical religious tolerance in the past. We need not, and should not, defeat Islam."
That is a naive and potentially suicidal (and very American) misconception. It wasn't "progressives" who jammed the airliners into the WTC on 9/11 and it would have happened even if America'd have taken the toughest of stands against Islam. Maybe even earlier. Muslims hate the West for what it IS (progressives included) and they have been a threat to the West before "progressives" were invented (or America was discovered, for that). I mentioned Tours and Poitiers in a previous comment. 732, that was. Only 100 years after Muhammad's death and 765 years before the first Christian set foot on American mainland. And it took even longer for the first "progressives" to appear. And you SERIOUSLY believe that a few pissy "progressives" are responsible for the condition in which we find us in the West? That the power and the violence that made Islam conquer much of the then known world literally only years after its invention by the epileptic, child molesting thief Muhammad is NOT inherent to this totalitarian death cult, but the fault of "progressives"? What "progressives"? The only culture that was able to withstand Islam over the centuries was the West, based on the progressive teachings of a man from Nazareth.
And I am stunned that somebody who is obviously critical of Islam should fall for the tolerance myth. (One of those progressive inventions, by the way!) There is plenty of serious information around dispelling that myth. Have you ever taken the trouble to read the Koran or, if you can't read Arabic, a reliable translation? They are there. Everything Muslims do (but EVERYTHING!) is written in that book. Of the long list of literature, I recommend to read Andrew Bostom first because he seems to possess the most realistic point of view of all the many who have covered that topic.
John Derbyshire (who is, by the way and tellingly, not born American) wrote on September 13, 2001: "A common word for Europeans in the Arabic language is feringji, from "Frank," i.e. crusader. Arabs don't hate us because we support Israel. They hate us because we humiliated them, showed up the gross inferiority of their culture. To them, and similarly humiliated peoples, we are the other, detested and feared in a way we can barely understand. Things got really bad in the 19th century. When European society achieved industrial lift-off, Europeans were suddenly buzzing all over the world like a swarm of bees. They encountered these other cultures, that had been vegetating in a quiet conviction of their own superiority for centuries (or in the case of the Chinese, millennia). When these encounters occurred, the encountered culture collapsed in a cloud of dust. Some of them, like the Turks, managed to reconstitute themselves as more or less modern nations; others, like the Arabs and the Chinese, are still struggling with the trauma of that encounter. . .
The 1991 Gulf War showed how little has changed since those first encounters. Here were the armies of the West: swift, deadly, efficient, equipped and organized, under the command of elected civilians at the head of a robust and elaborate constitutional structure. And here were the Arabs: a shambling, ill-nourished, shoeless rabble, led by a mad gangster-despot. (That was their Arabs. There were also, of course, our Arabs — the Kuwaitis and Saudis, cowering in their plush-lined air-conditioned bunkers being waited on by their Filipino servants while we did their fighting for them.) Final body counts: the West, 134 dead, the Arabs, 20,000 or more. The superiority of one culture over another has not been so starkly demonstrated since a handful of British wooden ships, at the end of ten-thousand-mile lines of communications, brought the Celestial Empire to its knees 150 years earlier. The Chinese are still mad about that: They are still making angry, bitter movies about the Opium Wars. A hundred and 50 years from now, the Arabs will not have forgotten the Gulf War."
Derbyshire makes the mistake to equal Islam with other backward ideologies, but otherwise his analysis is sound, or at least it was when he wrote it. In the 7 1/2 years since John Derbyshire wrote that, Turkey has been already re-conquered by Islam. The fault of "progressives"?
No doubt, the current liberal political correctness weakens the defenses of the West, as does the stance of those on the right who think that the Muslims will at least free the world from the Jews. But did they cause the inherent violence of Islam? It's inbuilt zeal to conquer and rule the world? It's cruelty and ruthlessness?
For heaven's sake, if I have ever seen somebody barking up the wrong tree it is here and now. I visit Webster's because I admire America and her best ideals, which are so beautifully explained here, but sometimes your Americanocentric views makes me sick. I wish you'd have to live, like we have, 2500, and not (from the geographical center) 7500 miles from Mecca with Islam rubbed in our faces every day. I guess the frightening radical re-Islamization of the relatively well-adjusted Turks in Germany was the fault of "progressives" as well and not of the inherent power-hunger of Islam.
April 12, 2009 3:48 AM