Robin Williams On Jihad

Definite Proof The Iraq Surge Is Working And Other Oddities

Iraqi grave diggers income falls.

 At what’s believed to be the world’s largest cemetery, where Shiite Muslims aspire to be buried and millions already have been, business isn’t good.

A drop in violence around Iraq has cut burials in the huge Wadi al Salam cemetery here by at least one-third in the past six months, and that’s cut the pay of thousands of workers who make their living digging graves, washing corpses or selling burial shrouds.

Arab world capitals are tense, with huge demonstrations expected. Apparently, cutting into grave digger incomes is yet more proof of the infidel assault on Muslims.

Yet another assault on self esteem

A robbery suspect who stumbled into a swarm of police officers while leaving a bank with a bag of loot dashed back inside the bank and berated tellers for tripping the alarm.

”You ruined my life!” he said in Spanish. “I told you not to call police.”

Fathers and sons.

A Foster City man is being held for allegedly hitting his father in the head with a hammer because he mistakenly thought the 81-year-old man had to be hospitalized before he could be admitted to a nursing home, prosecutors said Monday.

Jayantibhai Patel, 57, is being held on $500,000 bail, despite requests from Patel’s father and other relatives that he be released.

Patel lived with his father but wanted to return to India, where has lived off and on, Foster City police Capt. Jon Froomin said. The father, who uses a wheelchair, did not want to move, authorities said.

Patel then decided to place his father in a nursing home. “He was under a belief, we don’t know why, that you can’t go straight into a nursing home without being in the hospital,” said Steve Wagstaffe, San Mateo County’s chief deputy district attorney. “He thought, ‘I can overcome that problem. I’ll put him in the hospital. “

Only in America.

Field Of Bad Dreams

As the American push for a Middle East peace, starring Condaleeza Rice takes to the stage, we are once again hypnotized- and immobilized- with the dream of peace in that troubled part of the world.

Tragically, that dream will turn into another in a long line of nightmares.

No matter how well meaning, no matter how well intentioned, there will be no peace in the region just yet. Why? Because peace is not just a political state of mind. It is also a moral and ethical state of mind. The Israelis and Palestinians can come to political terms and lines drawn on a map. For now however, they cannot come to moral and ethical terms.

The issue is not that of a Palestinian-Israeli political rift. The Palestinians understand that the politics of their plight for over 60 years has been a disaster, with a succession of corrupt leaders who cared little for them. The Palestinians also know they are reviled in an Arab world that cares little about them. They know they are pawns and they know that the Arab world regards a real peace deal with Israel as a far greater naqbah, catastrophe, than the creation of the state of Israel. The Palestinians also know that for them, a peace deal with Israel is their best hope for any kind of national salvation. A peace deal means a Niagara Falls of foreign aid, trade and employment opportunities with Israel, a first world nation nation in a sea of backward, broken and failed nation states and the opportunity to set the standard for Arab successes.

Why then, do they reject peace? Simply stated, those things are less important to them than the ideas that reject peace. In other words, their values are not those of a free and healthy nation. Instead, they are bound together by a morality that embraces failure.

The Americans and Israelis will be attending a peace conference with a group who has no concept of peace. In fact, the Palestinians and Arab world do not even have an ideology that can encompass peace. For them, ‘peace’ is the absence of hostilities, no different than the ‘time-out’ between rounds in a boxing match.

Melanie Phillips, in Britain Thrilled By Offer To Submit Or Die:

The open letter from 138 Muslim scholars to the Pope and the leaders of other Christian churches on the subject of peace between the faiths has got the British establishment purring with pleasure…

First and foremost, it purports to be a plea to Muslims and Christians to make peace with each other. But this implies that both are at war with each other. This is untrue. The Islamic world — or part of it — has waged war on the Christian (and Jewish) western world. The Christian world is merely responding in self-defence. It is the Islamic world which says it wants to conquer the Christian. The Christian world does not say it wants to conquer Islam, merely that Islam should stop trying to conquer it. Yet the Islamic world pretends that the Christian world is engaged in an act of exterminatory aggression against it.

That lie is the motor of the jihad. That lie is fundamental to the absence of peace between the religions. Yet this letter fails totally to acknowledge this seminal fact. It says:

The future of the world depends on peace between Muslims and Christians.

Very true; but for this piety to be any more than a meaningless truism, the Islamic world has to end its aggression. The letter makes no acknowledgement of this. All the emphasis is on the Christian world altering its behaviour. So its inescapable implication is that for peace to occur, the Christian world must abandon its own self-defence. In other words, there can be no peace without the Christian world surrendering to Islam.

Gagdad Bob examines reality with his usual clarity and intellectual precision. In Occidents Just Don’t Happen, he notes

In America we have a culture war between those who value our deep structure and those who merely wish to take advantage of its unique values in order to undermine our system from the foundation up. For some reason we call these hungry tenuremites “liberal,” when their value system is illiberal to the core. For example, this accounts for the all-lieance all the time between the holy warriors Islam and unholy pacifists of the left:

“Hence it wasn’t surprising for viewers around the world to see the Islamist militants in Europe taking to the streets alongside the ‘bourgeois Neo-Marxists’ to protest the governments that supported the War on Terror…. The jihadi manipulation of the bourgeois-Neo-Marxist ’struggle’ has played a central role in the so-called ‘mass demonstrations’ in the West since 2002, and the demonstrations themselves are an important component of the War of Ideas against democracy. On campuses, both in North America and Western Europe, the jihadi-antiwar axis has planted deep roots, and thanks to the skills of university-based anarchist groups, the jihadists have found a cover they can hide under, instead of simply becoming members of the typical Wahabi-contolled Muslim Student Unions…”

Or take this fine example today from Dr. Sanity. The Diagnosista’ writes that “For the last 100 years, Islam has abandoned any of the precepts that may have once made it a vibrant and positive force in the world. Today’s Muslim leaders for the most part, have hitched their religious wagons to a variant of Marxist ideology, infused by a powerful religious fanatacism and funded by oil.” Whatever else it is, Islam is “a religion that justifies and glorifies the abuse and death of children; a religion that enslaves, oppresses and humiliates women; and a religion that justifies slaughter and martyrdom as a way of life is not even in the same moral universe as any of the other major religions on this planet…”

Gagdad Bob examines cultural, moral and ethical values:

…The metaphysics of the English Crown rested on the divine right of kings — a bad, blood-based metaphysic that was taken for gruntbrains then as now, because, as Dennis Prager emphasizes, most human beings have always valued blood over morality. In this regard, nazi metaphysics are more or less embraced by most people who are not specifically infused with and shaped by the alternate view — that blood is not only unimportant, but meaningless. One is not an American based upon blood, but based upon whether one assents to a common set of immaterial ideals. This was an entirely new psycho-spiritual, evolutionary development in the world, one that the world continues to resist, most conspicuously among the blood-worshipping savages we are fighting in the Arab Muslim world [emp- SC&A]

For example, the Palestinian objection to Israel is not “physical.” Rather, it is purely metaphysical, rooted in their nazi-like metaphysic that objects to a single drop of Jewish blood “polluting” their blighted nobohood. Consider how a normal human being would react to the Jewish presence in the Middle East: “Of course we want the Jews here! They bring knowledge, education, technology, wealth, prosperity, liberal ideals, jobs, human rights, democracy, comedy, decent delicatessens. Who wouldn’t want them?”

Indeed, who wouldn’t want them? Someone who — like the vast majority of human beings in the past — values blood and tribe above all else. This is the all-consuming metaphysical and existential problem for the Arab Muslim world. They are obsessed with it. It is their metaphysical dream (or nightmare). All else can wait, but the liquidation of Israel is of the utmost urgency.

What the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world cannot abide is a level playing field with recorded wins, losses and penalties for infractions. In a culture where shame is the dominant and underlying motivator, humiliation by the undeniably successful free nations of the west and Israel is intolerable. In every single field of endeavor, from the classrooms to the battlefields, the hated westerners. personified by the Israelis in their neighborhood have outperformed the Arab world in every single field of endeavor, in a way that is crystal clear.

(As we have often noted, the only Arab world class achievement has been in the arena of Jew hatred.)

As far as the Arabs and Palestinians are concerned, peace with Israel cannot be tolerated because peace with Israel will level the playing field- and expectations. If signing a ‘peace treaty’ is politically expedient for the Palestinians, that treaty will have as much gravitas as the treaty signed by Molotov and von Ribbentrop.

As far the Arab world was concerned, the establishment of the Jewish state, in their neighborhood and on their watch, was indeed a cataclysmic event, because the establishment of the State of Israel was undeniable evidence that the illusion of Islamic superiority, led by the Arabs was put to rest in a very public and final way. Notwithstanding successive Arab world failures for over a thousand years, the establishment of Israel was a truth that not even the Arab world could deny.

The catastrophe worsened as Israel ascended into the first world and they fell even further behind. In the same way that Da Vinci and Galileo were to stun the church with scientific truths, Israel stunned the Arab world with the successes that could only serve to highlight a millennium of Arab failure and darkness. The divine law, given by God Himself, that gave Muslims dominion over all mankind was upended- and by Jews, no less. The magnitude of the event cannot be understated.

In a shame culture, the success of the other only deepens the sense of failure and humiliation. In most cultures, in order to overcome a sense of shame, huge efforts are expended to correct and then exceed and excel.

For virtually all of the civilized world (and even in Pacific Rim Islamic nations) pride and dignity are restored or found with great commitment and effort. Education, hard work and achievement become matters of national pride. None of those things are applicable to the vast majority of the Arab world. Indeed, the UN Human Development Report notes that the Arabs are at the bottom of the educational barrel, save for the sub Saharan Africans. Can anyone imagine Israelis, Asians, Europeans or citizens of any western nation tolerating that kind of situation?

Given the obscene wealth of the oil rich nations, an investment in textbooks for grade school kids would hardly break the bank. That said, how is it that while there is a plethora of news stories on Al Arabiya, Al Jazeera, et al, about the secret evil American and Israeli conspiracies directed at the Arab, there are no stories decrying high illiteracy rates and schools that are monuments to failure on the global level?

Peace will not be had now or in the forseeable future because in the Arab world, pride can be had or regained, not by excelling or achieving, but rather, by destroying.

In the broken Arab cultures, if the source of humiliation is no longer visible, then the humiliation no longer exists. No matter the cost to the society, culture, individual or community, destruction is preferable to achievement. Why? Because success and achievement come about as the result of failure and the acknowledgement of failure.

That is the undeniable price of achievement- decades, and sometimes a lifetime of hard work. That is a formula is true for nations, cultures and individuals.

These truths remain a mystery to most Arabs in the Middle East because if they acknowledge these, they must acknowledge both a level playing field and real commitment to the future. They would have to acknowledge the real reason for the success of the State of Israel has nothing to do with the humiliating losses on the battlefields of the region, but rather, the commitment to success and hard work of the Israelis.

There will be no peace because the Palestinians and Arab world believe they are entitled to the successes that elude them. The idea of competing head on with the Israelis- qand maybe not making the grade right away- horrifies the Palestinians. They understand that in the process of nation building, they will have to face their not so past identity.

Dr Sanity, in This Says It All, quotes VDH on the relationship between the Palestinians, Saddam and the west.

Nothing was more evident of the moral impoverishment of the Palestinians than their collective lamentation over the fate of this mass killer of the Kurds and Arabs. We gave the Palestinian Authority hundreds of millions of dollars for housing, schools, and security and they hate us; Saddam gave them a few thousand dollars as bounty for suicide murderers and they loved him.

Success, in the material and spiritual sense, comes about as a result of that delicate balance that is life.

To know the delight of laughter is to know and feel tears of despair. To understand true success is to understand failure. To be deserving of success is to learn humility and the real dignity that comes from overcoming failure.

It is only when accepting responsibility for ones past and committing to learn from those mistakes can a nation or individual be built.

None of these things are realities for the Palestinians and the Arab world. They have been brutalized by some of the most dysfunctional leaders in the history of man. The tragedies are not defined a broken religion, cultures or societies. The tragedy is in the truth that Arab world will pay the price with the future of each and every child born who has no hope of knowing freedom and a world in which that child is not taught to hate.

That tragedy is incalculable- and until things changes, there will be no real peace in the Middle East- and that real peace has noting to do with the Arab and Israeli populations.

The Arabs and Palestinians are no less capable of tremendous success and achievement than anyone else. What stands in their way are not external impediments, but rather psychological and cultural impediments.

In a post about how things work in the real world (and yet more proof of how great minds really do think alike) Dr Sanity notes of the Palestinians

The ubiquitous unwillingness to look within themselves or their cultural and religious practices to understand the serious defects that keep them among the most backward and ignorant people on the planet, despite their access to great wealth, is the psychological foundation of their dysfunction.

The indoctrination into cultural idiocy starts young and continues throughout life, but the good news is that there is little evidence that the rampant idiocy found in Islam is biological or genetic. On the contrary, all evidence points to the fact that the underlying ideology embraced by the Islamic world deliberately ensures the “dumbing down” of the intellectual and moral functioning of its adherents.