Late Night Laugh: It’s All In Your Head
June 6, 2008
Islamist Mayhem In London
June 6, 2008
From The Jewish Chronicle:
A man who sent a letter containing powder to the JC’s offices has pleaded guilty to seven offences, five of them religiously aggravated.
The charges faced by Ashraf Ali, who appeared at Portsmouth Crown Court on Wednesday, related to two offences of blackmail, four counts of racial or religiously aggravated harassment and one count of religiously aggravated intentional harassment.
In October 2001, the JC received an envelope containing white powder and a note saying “All Jews Die”, “World Trade Centre” and “Pentagon”. Police later confirmed the powder was not anthrax or any other dangerous substance.
Ali, 31, also targeted other Jewish organisations, including Portsmouth and Southsea Hebrew Congregation and Southampton Synagogue. He will be sentenced at Portsmouth Crown Court on Friday June 20.
- A 52-year-old man who was last week charged with a communications offence after allegedly sending racist and antisemitic emails to journalists and politicians, including to the JC, has been charged with a further 10 offences.
Seven of the new charges which Maher Khammash now faces relate to the JC, which received 54 separate communications.
One charge relates to the Football Association, which was also a victim.
He was due to appear at Uxbridge Magistrates yesterday.
Poisoning food with feces is detailed as a tactic in the Al-Qaeda manual found a few years ago by British intelligence.
Also, there are precedents, both involving Muslims, as does this story:
UK: Shop-owners sold chocolate cake sprinkled with human faeces
Man Caught On Tape Sprinkling Fecal Matter On Pastries
“Man remanded after ‘urine’ attack,” from the BBC, May 19 (thanks to Jeff):
A man has been remanded in custody charged with spraying urine at two supermarkets, a pub and a book shop.Sahnoun Daifallah, 42, of Bibury Road, from Gloucester, appeared before magistrates and pleaded not guilty to four charges of contaminating products…
Maybe multiculturalism isn’t such a good idea after all…
Tax Dollars At Work, Legal Jihad, God’s Will
June 6, 2008
Indicted Saudi gets $80 Million US government contract
The US military has awarded an $80 million contract to a prominent Saudi financier who has been indicted by the US Justice Department. The contract to supply jet fuel to American bases in Afghanistan was awarded to the Attock Refinery Ltd, a Pakistani-based refinery owned by Gaith Pharaon. Pharaon is wanted in connection with his alleged role at the failed Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), and the CenTrust savings and loan scandal, which cost US tax payers $1.7 billion.
The Saudi businessman was also named in a 2002 French parliamentary report as having links to informal money transfer networks called hawala, known to be used by traders and terrorists, including Al Qaeda.
Arani and Co, whose clients have included hook-handed preacher Hamza, convicted ‘dirty bomb’ plotter Dhiren Barot and three of the July 21 London bombers, was paid £890,922 in the past year. In one month alone, the firm billed almost £400,000 for legal services.
Figures released under the Freedom of Information Act show that in seven years payments from the Legal Services Commission, responsible for funding legal aid, have almost quadrupled.
Miss Arani, who drives a Mercedes and lives in a semi-detached house in west London. Her firm, based in Southall, regularly represents terror suspects.
An Asian police officer who was twice paid compensation for racial discrimination has won another five-figure sum for more mistreatment by the Met. Detective sergeant Gurpal Virdi has been awarded £70,400 after being passed over for promotion for having exposed racial discrimination at Scotland Yard.
Yesterday the 49-year-old Sikh called on Met Commissioner Sir Ian Blair to bring in tough new measures to stamp out discrimination because “no amount of training appeared to be working”.
The payout means he has received more than £300,000 from the Met in compensation for racial persecution.
Last June, Matthew Lincoln was attending an evening service at his nondenominational Tennessee church when he approached the altar where a visiting minister was offering individual prayers for parishioners. Assigned “catchers” were present on the altar in case congregants fainted, fell, or otherwise lost control. When the minister, Robert Lavala, slightly touched his forehead, the Knoxville-area man “received the spirit and fell backwards.” Except nobody was there to catch him, Lincoln charges in a $2.5 million lawsuit filed yesterday against Lakewind Church and its pastors.
Remembering D Day, Remembering A Leader
June 6, 2008
The political history of the 20th century can be written as the biographies of six men: Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao Zedong, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. The first four were totalitarians who made or used revolutions to create monstrous dictatorships. Roosevelt and Churchill differed from them in being democrats. And Churchill differed from Roosevelt — while both were war leaders, Churchill was uniquely stirred by the challenge of war and found his fulfillment in leading the democracies to victory.
Churchill came of a military dynasty. His ancestor John Churchill had been created first Duke of Marlborough in 1702 for his victories against Louis XIV early in the War of the Spanish Succession. Churchill was born in 1874 in Blenheim Palace, the house built by the nation for Marlborough. As a young man of undistinguished academic accomplishment — he was admitted to Sandhurst after two failed attempts — he entered the army as a cavalry officer. He took enthusiastically to soldiering (and perhaps even more enthusiastically to regimental polo playing) and between 1895 and 1898 managed to see three campaigns: Spain’s struggle in Cuba in 1895, the North-West Frontier campaign in India 1897 and the Sudan campaign of 1898, where he took part in what is often described as the British Army’s last cavalry charge, at Omdurman. Even at 24, Churchill was steely: “I never felt the slightest nervousness,” he wrote to his mother. “[I] felt as cool as I do now.” In Cuba he was present as a war correspondent, and in India and the Sudan he was present both as a war correspondent and as a serving officer. Thus he revealed two other aspects of his character: a literary bent and an interest in public affairs.
He was to write all his life. His life of Marlborough is one of the great English biographies, and The History of the Second World War helped win him a Nobel Prize for literature. Writing, however, never fully engaged his energies. Politics consumed him. His father Lord Randolph Churchill was a brilliant political failure. Early in life, Winston determined to succeed where his father had failed. His motives were twofold. His father had despised him. Writing in August 1893 to Winston’s grandmother, the dowager Duchess of Marlborough, he said the boy lacked “cleverness, knowledge and any capacity for settled work. He has a great talent for show-off, exaggeration and make-believe.” His disapproval surely stung, but Churchill reacted by venerating his father’s memory. Winston fought to restore his father’s honor in Parliament (where it had been dented by the Conservative Party). Thirty years after Lord Randolph’s death, Winston wrote, “All my dreams of comradeship were ended. There remained for me only to pursue his aims and vindicate his memory.”
Churchill entered Parliament in 1901 at age 26. In 1904 he left the Conservative Party to join the Liberals, in part out of calculation: the Liberals were the coming party, and in its ranks he soon achieved high office. He became Home Secretary in 1910 and First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911. Thus it was as political head of the Royal Navy at the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 that he stepped onto the world stage.
A passionate believer in the navy’s historic strategic role, he immediately committed the Royal Naval Division to an intervention in the Flanders campaign in 1914. Frustrated by the stalemate in Belgium and France that followed, he initiated the Allies’ only major effort to outflank the Germans on the Western Front by sending the navy, and later a large force of the army, to the Mediterranean. At Gallipoli in 1915, this Anglo-French force struggled to break the defenses that blocked access to the Black Sea. It was a heroic failure that forced Churchill’s resignation and led to his political eclipse.
It was effectively to last nearly 25 years. Despite his readmission to office in 1917, after a spell commanding an infantry battalion on the Western Front, he failed to re-establish the reputation as a future national statesman he had won before the war. Dispirited, he chose the issue of the Liberal Party’s support for the first government formed by the Labour Party in 1924 to rejoin the Conservatives, after a spell when he had been out of Parliament altogether. The Conservative Prime Minister appointed Churchill Chancellor of the Exchequer, but when he returned the country to the gold standard, it proved financially disastrous, and he further weakened his political position by opposing measures to grant India limited self-government. He resigned office i n 1931 and entered what appeared to be a terminal political decline.
Churchill was truly a romantic, but also truly a democrat. He had returned to the gold standard, for instance, because he cherished, for romantic reasons, Britain’s status as a great financial power. He had opposed limited self-government for India becaus e he cherished, for equally romantic reasons, Britain’s imperial history. It was to prove more important that as a democrat, he was disgusted by the rise of totalitarian systems in Europe. In 1935 he warned the House of Commons of the importance not only of “self-preservation but also of the human and the world cause of the preservation of free governments and of Western civilization against the ever advancing sources of authority and despotism.” His anti-Bolshevik policies had failed. By espousing anti-N azi policies in his wilderness years between 1933 and 1939, he ensured that when the moment of final confrontation between Britain and Hitler came in 1940, he stood out as the one man in whom the nation could place its trust. He had decried the prewar app easement policies of the Conservative leaders Baldwin and Chamberlain. When Chamberlain lost the confidence of Parliament, Churchill was installed in the premiership.
His was a bleak inheritance. Following the total defeat of France, Britain truly, in his words, “stood alone.” It had no substantial allies and, for much of 1940, lay under threat of German invasion and under constant German air attack. He nevertheless re fused Hitler’s offers of peace, organized a successful air defense that led to the victory of the Battle of Britain and meanwhile sent most of what remained of the British army, after its escape from the humiliation of Dunkirk, to the Middle East to oppos e Hitler’s Italian ally, Mussolini.
This was one of the boldest strategic decisions in history. Convinced that Hitler could not invade Britain while the Royal Navy and its protecting Royal Air Force remained intact, he dispatched the army to a remote theater of war to open a second front against the Nazi alliance. Its victories against Mussolini during 1940-41 both humiliated and infuriated Hitler, while its intervention in Greece, to oppose Hitler’s invasion of the Balkans, disrupted the Nazi dictator’s plans to conclude German conquests in Europe by defeating Russia.
Churchill’s tendency to conduct strategy by impulse infuriated his advisers. His chief of staff Alan Brooke complained that every day Churchill had 10 ideas, only one of which was good — and he did not know which one. Yet Churchill the romantic showed acute realism in his reaction to Russia’s predicament. He reviled communism. Required to accept a communist ally in a struggle against a Nazi enemy, he did so not only willingly but generously. He sent a large proportion of Britain’s war production to Russia by Arctic convoys, even at a time when the convoys from America to Britain, which alone spared the country starvation, suffered devastating U-boat attacks.
From the outset of his premiership, Churchill, half American by birth, had rested his hope of ultimate victory in U.S. intervention. He had established a personal relationship with President Roosevelt that he hoped would flower into a war-winning alliance. Roosevelt’s reluctance to commit the U.S. beyond an association “short of war” did not dent his optimism. He always hoped events would work his way. The decision by Japan, Hitler’s ally, to attack the American Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, justified his hopes. That evening he confided to himself, “So we had won after all.”
America’s entry into the Second World War marked the high point of Churchill’s statesmanship. Britain, demographically, industrially and financially, had entered the war weaker than either of its eventual allies, the Soviet Union and the U.S. Defeats in 1940 had weakened it further, as had the liquidation of its international investments to fund its early war efforts. During 1942, the prestige Britain had won as Hitler’s only enemy allowed Churchill to sustain parity of leadership in the anti-Nazi alliance with Roosevelt and Stalin.
Churchill understandably exulted in the success of the D-day invasion when it came in 1944. By then it was the Russo-American rather than the Anglo-American nexus, however, that dominated the alliance, as he ruefully recognized at the last Big Three conference in February 1945. Shortly afterward he suffered the domestic humiliation of losing the general election and with it the premiership. He was to return to power in 1951 and remain until April 1955, when ill health and visibly failing powers caused him to resign.
It would have been kinder to his reputation had he not returned. He was not an effective peacetime Prime Minister. His name had been made, and he stood unchallengeable, as the greatest of all Britain’s war leaders. It was not only his own country, though, that owed him a debt. So too did the world of free men and women to whom he had made a constant and inclusive appeal in his magnificent speeches from embattled Britain in 1940 and 1941. Churchill did not merely hate tyranny, he despised it. The contempt he breathed for dictators — renewed in his Iron Curtain speech at Fulton, Mo., at the outset of the cold war — strengthened the West’s faith in the moral superiority of democracy and the inevitability of its triumph.
Historian John Keegan is the defense and military specialist for London’s Daily Telegraph.
Over the last few days, we have been discussing Barack Obama’s carefully crafted appeal designed to appeal to Middle Class American voters (see part one and part two). Obama and the Democrats want America to see themselves as a part of a happy proletariat, misunderstood and abused by conservatives. Obama wants Americans to believe that if only they would unite under his banner, all would be well with America and the world. We had intended to write about common values, but we will leave that post for Monday.
Obama and his supporters also believe that a collective ‘unity’ of beliefs, thoughts and ideologies empower a society. Their strength, they believe, are in the numbers of those who share their ideologies. Obama and many of his supporters also believe that they have every right to design a society based on what they believe is in the best interest of that society. They also believe that an unwillingness to conform to their ideals, poses a threat, and quite possibly, a danger to the society of their creation.
For today’s leftist, it is about ‘the color of one’s skin’ and not the ‘content of character. It is about image and not substance. The deliberate obfuscation continues and the blurring of reality continues. As the left indicts America as self absorbed and drunk with materialistic inclinations, they ignore yet another truth. Over the last few days, we have been discussing Barack Obama’s carefully crafted appeal designed to appeal to Middle Class American voters (see part one and part two). Obama and the Democrats want America to see themselves as a part of a happy proletariat, misunderstood and abused by conservatives. Obama wants Americans to believe that if only they would unite under his banner, all would be well with America and the world. We had intended to write about common values, but we will leave that post for Moneday. Today, we will further examine Barack Obama’s relationship with the Middle Class.
From part one:
For some, Middle Class is defined as the college educated manager/teacher/engineer types. Most doctors, lawyers and accountants see themselves as ‘Middle Class.’ Others see the ‘real’ Middle Class as the small business people who employed others in small offices, factories or retail shops. Still others see the Middle Class populated with skilled tradespeople or unionized factory workers, Still others see the real Middle Class as the highly motivated group of people with pickup trucks who place classified ads stating they will do anything, anytime, anywhere and have enough skills to get the job done. Others clean 2 houses a day, 5 days a week for $150 a day, cash ($1500 a week, tax free- not too shabby).
Then there are the ‘others’ of another and parallel Middle Classes- blacks, Asians, Jews, and so one.
What do these Middle Class groups have in common? Absolutely nothing. They don’t mingle socially, culturally or even politically. This begs a question: To whom is Barack Obama (and others) talking? The answer is simple and unadorned. Obama, et al, are talking to the Middle Class consumers in all of us. What unites the disparate Middle Class is consumerism.
Obama wants you to belive that if he promises a consumer paradise, a political paradise will follow. In fact, he demands it (not unlike the leftists who preceded him). Leftists and populists have always intoxicated populations with promises of wealth, usually extracted from the wealthy. The promise of equal opportunity pales in comparison to the promise of the equal distribution of wealth.
Even as the left and Barack Omaba speak about ‘renewing and repairing’ American influence in Europe and elsewhere, the proposed makeover is designed to appeal to a narrow- and very non Middle Class constituency. Those who loudest demand that America recast herself are the same people who venerate the most self absorbed, materialistic and tyrannical regimes in Africa and the Arab world, places where greed, corruption, excess and deceit are the defining adjectives of those regimes. They are places that abuse their citizens and make a mockery of human rights.
When leftists talk about ‘negotiating’ and ‘diplomacy’ with these regimes, they are asking that we find a way to accommodate and elevate their evil as an acceptable alternative to the values of democracy. They are not demanding that these regimes assume a more democratic stance.
Capitalism, as Dr Sanity points out, is predicated on the diversity of beliefs, thoughts and ideologies:
Capitalism allows the basic nature of man to creatively express itself by mastering the physical world. The instinctual energy Freud spoke of is directed away from the destructive pursuit of power over other people and sublimated toward acts of creation, which further both the individual’s life and all of civilization…
They correctly noticed that the instinctual energy of the proletariat was being harnessed both for the individual’s good as well as the society under capitalism; and yet were unable to appreciate the fact that unless you accept the reality of human nature and give it the freedom to transform all its most negative aspects into something positive for the individual and the culture/society, then you end up crushing all human initiative, creativity, and productivity…
Simply put, totalitarian systems–whether from the left or the right (and that includes Marxism in any of its incarnations, whether religious or secular)– actively promote the most negative, primitive, and immature aspects of human nature. In fact, they give a societal/institutional blessing to such behavior; and thrive on the resulting projection, paranoia, distortion, and denial of reality…
Because nowhere is there more violence, naked aggression, envy, greed, oppression, racism, injustice, slavery, poverty, and misery than in the shining examples of socialism and communism in today’s world…
Therefore they tend to be already invested in the psychological holy trinity: the deification of victimhood; the supremacy of feelings over reason, and the glorification of self-esteem over self-control; and are predisposed to think of a career in psychology as the heroic pursuit of “social justice” for the poor, unhappy and oppressed masses.
As Dr Sanity points out, the entire raison d’etre of the left is wrapped up in identity alone.
This is anathema to the real Middle Class, whose members define themselves by their efforts, work and achievement. That is a very different constituency. If Barack Obama embraced the real (and very capitalist) Middle Class, he will alienate his leftist supporters.
Free societies evolved and political expression advanced when those societies came to tolerate those with different ideas and beliefs. We advanced because we allowed each of us the freedom the opportunity to achieve whatever it was we were capable of in any endeavor we chose. No one told us what to do, what to think or what to invent. In free societies, possibilities were open to all, irrespective of their political persuasion.
The ideal Leftist state today would take a dim view of anyone or group that might demand lower taxes, changes in the state welfare benefits, or demands for any kind of accountability. The lesser burden on the individual and lesser control of the individual by the state, might empower that individual. In the Leftist state, any kind of individualism and real self expression, empowered or otherwise, represents a threat to the state.
Of course, when it is all said and done, the new leftists are driven by one reason and one reason only: to counter the incoming high tide of truth. Revolutions today aren’t about Marxist or socialist agendas. Those agendas are now as they were a century ago- they are about power.
Barack Obama, Jeremiah Wright and their supporters need to upend free societies, capitalism and market economies, because those things empower societies, appeal to man’s higher self and have no room for ‘identity’ based politics and victimhood. An empowered Middle Class stifles their voices and grab for power. They become like everyone else, measured by their character and not their racial. cultural or religious identities.
From Africa to South America to Eastern Europe, the idea of character as defining are the ideas that have liberated and empowered billions of people. The war of ideas is over and the socialist/identity agenda has been soundly defeated on every front. The high tides of freedoms and the aspirations of free men can no more held be back than the high tides of the oceans. Today’s’ leaders of ‘the revolution’ will be forgotten. Their proved excesses in death, destruction and the curtailing of human rights have guaranteed their legacy- and the legacy of their supporters. Barack Obama knows this and therefore speaks in generalites and high minded platitudes. Barack Obama and his supporters believe they don’t need to convince the American public they have better ideas, only that they are better people.
Leftist political voices are not Liberal voices. Where are the voices demanding freedom for oppressed peoples? Nowhere to be heard. Today’s leftists support the oppressors! The failed economies, failed education systems and entrenched failed human and civil rights disasters all scar and identify these nations- and are of no concern to the left. In fact, the despots and totalitarian regimes found all over the world are reflective of what passes for leftist ideological leadership.
The only agenda the left have refused to endorse is the only that has succeeded and the one agenda that is gaining ground, worldwide- capitalism. The real revolutions today are not for socialism, but rather, for political and economic freedoms.
As Barack Obama courts the Middle Class he hates (recall Shrinkrapped’s remarks, “Don’t forget, Obama belonged for 20 years to a church that explicitly rejected “middle classness” in favor of racial solidarity. He is dangerously empty of everything except conventional leftist ideology,”) it bears remembering that we are morally obligated not to get along with those whose ideas are and beliefs espouse oppression and repression. We are morally obligated not to give them a platform from which to preach their hate and we are morally obligated not to equate their values with our own. While we cannot stop anyone from believing what they will, we are morally obligated to deny them credibility.
More on Monday.
