'December 30, 2007
"Jihad: war against non-Muslims to convert them to Islam"
Pop quiz! Who said that? Me? Andy Bostom? Serge Trifkovic? Greg Davis? Must have been one of us "Islamophobes," no?
Whoops! Nope! It comes from a book, Islam and Christianity , printed by a Muslim publishing house, Waqf Ikhlas Publications, and distributed by the modern, moderate, secular Turkish government to non-Muslims who come to work in Turkey. It's on page 316 of the 7th edition.
I expect that Ibrahim Hooper and Salam Al-Marayati will be on the phone to Waqf Ikhlas Publications forthwith, explaining to them that they're misunderstanding Islam and jihad. Oh, those Turkish Islamophobes! '
Posted ( by Robert Spencer) December 30, 2007 1:52 PM
The Bhutto Assassination and Islam's war on Pakistan
(30 Dec 07) "I am what the terrorists most fear" says Benazir Bhutto in an interview to be published now posthumously in the January 6 Parade Magazine . Sounds good to American ears. But she was grasping and self-interested, a beneficiary of Saddam's Oil for Food scam. Parade , in the kind of unvarnished look only possible before the assassination quotes Bhutto's own niece saying, "She has no legacy of her own except for corruption and violence." ...Bhutto's return to power, greased by an "amnesty" from Musharraf's government which triggered the release of as much as $1.5 billion from Bhutto's frozen Swiss bank accounts, would have brought tens of thousands of her Pakistani People's Party supporters into government..... None of the key players have anything near clean hands. Bhutto since 9-11 made much of opposing al-Qaeda and the Taliban. As Prime Minister Bhutto and Sharif both presided over the arming and rise to power of the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan ...” The Bhutto Assassination and Islam's war on Pakistan , Andrew Walden, American Thinker “....There are claims that Sharif met numerous times with Osama bin-Laden and accepted money from bin-Laden to topple Bhutto in 1990.... When President George Bush after 9-11 announced "you are either with us or against us" his remarks were aimed directly at Musharraf . Musharraf wisely chose to side with the US , but many elements of the ISI and the broader Pakistani military have not come along. As a result Musharraf has faced several al-Qaeda assassination attempts and the Pakistani military is unwilling to root out al-Qaeda and the Taliban from areas along the Afghani border . .... Whereas the presence of American military power has allowed Afghanis, and in recent months Iraqis, to live in relative peace, there is no force in Pakistan prepared to consistently and violently defeat the terrorists. Bhutto's democratic dreams were just that --- dreams.... Pakistani reality is not so dissimilar to that of pre-9-11 Afghanistan , Iraq before the surge, Somalia , Gaza , Chechnya , Sudan , or other failed Islamist states. The only difference is that the state has not yet failed. If the PPP is knocked out of the picture, the end is a lot closer than many realize...”
The Bhutto Assassination: Not What She Seemed To Be
(30 Dec 07) “...For the next several days, you're going to read and hear a great deal of pious nonsense in the wake of the assassination of Pakistan's former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto. Her country's better off without her. She may serve Pakistan better after her death than she did in life.... She was a splendid con, persuading otherwise cynical Western politicians and "hard headed" journalists that she was not only a brave woman crusading in the Islamic wilderness, but also a thoroughbred democrat. In fact, Bhutto was a frivolously wealthy feudal landlord amid bleak poverty. The scion of a thieving political dynasty, she was always more concerned with power than with the wellbeing of the average Pakistani....” The Bhutto Assassination: Not What She Seemed To Be , Ralph Peters, New York Post “...From its founding, Pakistan has been plagued by cults of personality, by personal, feudal loyalties that stymied the development of healthy government institutions (provoking coups by a disgusted military). When she held the reins of government, Bhutto did nothing to steer in a new direction - she merely sought to enhance her personal power.... In killing Bhutto, the Islamists over-reached (possibly aided by rogue elements in Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, one of the murkiest outfits on this earth). Just as al Qaeda in Iraq overplayed its hand and alienated that country's Sunni Arabs, this assassination may disillusion Pakistanis who lent half an ear to Islamist rhetoric. A creature of insatiable ambition, Bhutto will now become a martyr. In death, she may pay back some of the enormous debt she owes her country....”
(30 Dec 07) “....To finish out 2007, we shall examine carbon, mostly in the form of carbon dioxide—a gas second to oxygen in importance to all life on earth—so that anyone can understand the insanity of being told that carbon dioxide will bring about a massive “global warming” unless all forms of human activity are severely curtailed. It helps to understand that all life on earth exists because of the protection afforded by the earth's atmosphere. It is composed of 78% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.038% carbon dioxide, with trace amounts of other gases and a variable amount of water vapor. Environmentalists refer to it as “greenhouse gases” while the rest of us call it “air.”... The Shakespeare of Science , Alan Caruba “....Nature both initiates and takes life, and carbon reflects this duel character. There are two prominent oxides of carbon. One is the silent killer while the other is the giver of life. They are carbon monoxide , a common cause of death by poisoning and carbon dioxide , the sole source of the food chain. Every item of nutrition you consume started out as atmospheric carbon dioxide.”.... The self-appointed chief inquisitor of the atom in question is Al Gore. Armed with a towering disregard of reason, truth or evidence, he preaches the coming Armageddon with all the fervor of an Old Testament prophet.”.....Before carbon was turned into a bugaboo for purposes of religious propaganda, school children learned about the carbon cycle. Carbon moves continuously between four reservoirs—the biosphere, geosphere, atmosphere, and hydrosphere....”
Where do you stand in the new culture wars?
(24 Dec 07) “....jeans-clad leftists are horrified that one of their own could possibly have anything in common with the dreaded neocons. Christopher Hitchens is a rock star among atheists, most of whom oppose the Iraq war. Last weekend, he travelled to Wisconsin to receive an award from the Freedom from Religion conference for his book God Is Not Great. “In my acceptance speech I upbraided the audience by saying I could easily have got the impression that they thought the only threat to our society came from the Christian Coalition and possibly the odd Israeli settler,” he says. “You would not have known from anything on sale, any T-shirt, any peaked cap, any book or pamphlet, that there was such a thing as Islamic fundamentalism.” They didn't like it. “I got the usual lame and bleating replies that, to the extent that if there was such a thing, it's been created by us,” Hitchens says....” Where do you stand in the new culture wars? Sarah Baxter, TimesOnLine “...One of the most indulgent forms of western narcissism is that everything is “all about me” – or, in this case, the West. Myopic liberals find it impossible to believe that radical Islam may have a dynamic of its own that threatens their values.... “The name of the problem is religion, and there is only one religion that threatens us with this kind of thing . . . There is a reason people look askance at a mosque in their neighbourhood, and they are not mad or cruel or stupid or selfish or bigoted to worry about it.” Nick Cohen, whose book What's Left? has just been published in paperback, identifies progressives as antitotalitarian internationalists who subscribe to “some kind of universal values”, as he puts it. “The left are like old-style Tory imperialists, who believe rights are all very well for western Europe but not for Johnny Foreigner, and that the liberation of women is essentially for white-skinned women, not brown-skinned women,” Cohen says....”
Man-Made Global Warming: 10 Questions
(23 Dec 07) The subject of man-made global warming is almost impossible to discuss without a descent into virulent name-calling (especially on the Internet, where anonymity breeds a special kind of vicious reaction to almost any social or political question), but I'll try anyway. I consider myself to be relatively well-read on the matter, and I've still come down on the skeptical side, because there are aspects of the issue that don't make a lot of sense to me. Though I confess to have written none-to-reverentially on the subject, I want to try to put all that aside and ask ten serious questions to which I have been unable to find definitive answers: What is the perfect temperature ? Just what is the average temperature of the earth? What factors have led to global warming in the past, and how do we know they aren't the causes of the current warming trend ? Why is there such a strong effort to stifle discussion and dissent? Man-Made Global Warming: 10 Questions by Pat Sajak
(20 Dec 07) “...The lights are going out on liberal society – and it is the most liberal societies with their fingers on the ‘off' switch. The thesis of Mark Steyn's book America Alone , that Europe was succumbing to an Islamist takeover, has been proved spectacularly correct -- in Canada, and with himself as the designated victim. The New York Post reports that both Steyn and Macleans magazine, which reprinted a chapter of his book, are to be hauled before two Canadian judicial panels to answer the charge that they have spread ‘hatred and contempt' for Muslims. And what was the heinous view Steyn vouchsafed to occasion such a charge? “ …the notion that Islamic culture is incompatible with Canada's liberalized, Western civilization...” The Blood Runs Cold , Melanie Phillips, Spectator “....The irony, of course, is that by this action Canada is thus demonstrating that if any culture is incompatible with liberalised western civilisation, it is clearly Canada's. The idea that certain arguments must not be made, and that to do so is to find oneself arraigned before a judicial tribunal, is the very antithesis of a liberal society. It is a symptom of totalitarianism.... in seeking to suppress the view that the Islamic world is incompatible with liberalism, it is demonstrating with the starkest possible clarity the truth of that proposition...If a writer who tells the truth about Islamists spreading hatred and contempt for the west is himself hauled before a court charged with spreading hatred and contempt by telling such a truth, then the Orwellian nightmare has well and truly arrived....the real threat to civilisation comes not from acts of terror, appalling though these are; it comes from the fact that Islamists are progressively making slaves out of us in our own countries...”
(20 Dec 07)“...The most consistent theme running through liberal-left opinion since September 11, 2001, has been concern for the well-being of the enemy.... The first instinct of responsible members of Congress is to fulfill their duty to protect Americans from attack. Now they are pushed by ideological zealots to not only accord foreign adversaries "rights" that will protect them from effective U.S. counteraction but to harass their countrymen on the front lines in this deadly conflict.... Abu Zubaida's interrogation tape was one of those destroyed. Mr. Kiriakou argued that the harsh technique of "waterboarding" used to break abu Zubaida provided intelligence that "probably saved lives." Information gained led to the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, mastermind of the September 11 attacks....The other destroyed tape was of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who planned the 2000 attack on the USS Cole, which killed 17 U.S. sailors. Unlike their victims, both abu Zubaida and al-Nashiri survived their ordeals and are held at Guantanamo Bay....” Treating enemies as equals , William Hawkins, Washington Times “...E veryone is to be accorded equal treatment simply because they meet the lowest common denominator of being "human." This is the notion in play when presidential candidates say they would not authorize "torture" of a foreign terrorist even if it meant saving American lives. The well-being of the terrorist is no less precious than the lives of Americans, because all are equally human, part of a single extended family descending from some common origin....Liberals have a longstanding reputation for being "soft on crime." The victims of crime fade from view and the criminals become the focus of benevolent concern. The inability of liberals to deal harshly with terrorists is an extension of their inability to deal harshly with felons.... The effort to blur distinctions is explicit in the debate over immigration, as terms like "undocumented resident" are substituted for "illegal alien."... Why should citizens feel any loyalty to a government that by doctrine rejects expressing any loyalty to them?
(20 Dec 07)“.....When the story of our time is written -- as soon as future historians can stop laughing -- Al Gore will be Exhibit #1 for the unprecedented nuttiness of our politics.... In Florida in 2000, Al Gore just knew he was destined to win the presidency, just like Mom and Dad told him all those years ago. The Big Media were actually convinced that Gore had won before the votes came in, based on their usual dubious polls... In Bush v Gore the US Supreme Court finally decided enough was enough, by a vote of 7-2. You don't get to replay the game until you win....If you're allowed to deal the deck over and over again until you win, you're not playing poker, but some sort of childish game of self-delusion... The trouble is that Algorism has now invaded science.... “ The Al-Gorism of Global Doom by James Lewis, American Thinker “...Science Magazine just published another Global Doom Scenario . This one predicts for the nth time that Australia's Great Barrier Reef is really, really doomed for sure this time. Where have we heard this before? There are now more than twenty Global Warming models -- we never hear about the ones that don't predict Global Doom, because Science magazine isn't interested.... Global Dooming has a very simple explanation. There's nothing new about it. It is just the human desire to create a millenarian narrative that fits our political biases, whipped on by the Politically Correct elites of this world, fed by a huge infusion of money into climate modeling and other dubious science, plus unprecedented media hype, and finally, the intimidation of thousands of rational skeptics.... In real science the deck is never stacked against the skeptics....this is not a scientific debate any more. Like the real estate bubble, the sub-prime mortgage bubble, the Year 2000 bubble and all the rest, there are billions of dollars riding on the outcome of the Global Doom scenarios...”
Science, Corrupt new religion called environmentalism
(20 Dec 07) “....I have been witness to the complete subversion of science in the service of an utterly corrupt new religion called environmentalism....In the Middle Ages the Church determined what “truth” was. Today the Green Church seeks the same power. From the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century to the beginning of the Renaissance in the 15th century, civilization experienced a period of ignorance and superstition. Globally, via the media and the classroom, a distorted and debased science is being used to advance the fraud of global warming....The challenge is to say “no” when everyone else is saying “yes” to global warming.... climatologists will tell you that CO2 increases follow, not precede, warming cycles. They are not a trigger. They are a response .... A science that can barely predict the weather next week is being perverted for purely political purposes….” Science, Corrupt new religion called environmentalism by Alan Caruba, Canada Free Press “…An Associated Press report said that the draft and coming IPCC report “is intended to launch a political process on international cooperation to control global warming.” How do you control something that is not happening? Why do all of the proposed controls aim at crippling the industrial advances that underwrite the success of Western nations in particular and improvement of human civilization everywhere? If I were to devise a plan to destroy the greatest economy, creator of wealth, center of innovation, and exemplar of individual liberty that has ever existed in human history, I would patiently create fear of a global disaster involving the one thing over which humans never had and never will have control, the earth's climate. I would then propose a “solution” that would cost that economy billions in “carbon credits” to keep it from occurring….What the former Soviet Union and its failed Communist system could not achieve in some 45 years of the Cold War, the environmental movement is seeking to achieve in its place….”
For other interesting features be sure to visit November 2007