Firing Squads Just Aren’t What They Used To Be

Imaginary Islamist Think-Tanks

From Standpoint, a look at how Islamists game the system:

Despite what the pessimists say, there is one industry that is still flourishing in the UK. It consists of Islamists establishing their own think-tanks and pressure groups. They serve little purpose other than to bestow legitimacy upon ill-informed, extremist Muslim speakers, who can then attend conferences and get media access under the façade of expertise.

This is a surprisingly easy bandwagon to jump on. Come up with an intellectual-sounding name for your organisation, buy a website domain and give yourself an impressive-sounding job title. This was the route taken by Hamas cheerleader Azzam Tamimi. He recently addressed the prestigious UK Defence Academy, is a regular contributor to the Guardian website, and once told the BBC that suicide bombing in Palestine “is the straight way to pleasing my God and I would do it if I had the opportunity”. He describes himself as Director of the Institute of Islamic Political Thought (IIPT). The domain registered to the IIPT says it has a website “coming soon” (it has been coming since 2007), but meanwhile offers you the chance to download Tamimi’s CV. What exactly it is that he is meant to be directing remains unclear. What is beyond doubt is that Tamimi uses the IIPT to try to couch his views in an aura of academic respectability.

Then there is Anjem Choudary, former leader of the banned extremist group Al-Muhajiroun, who according to CNN called the 9/11 terrorist attacks “magnificent” and boasted that “the black flag of Shariah will fly over Downing Street”. Choudary was a regular on the BBC in the wake of 7/7, last year spoke at the National Liberal Club on the need for Sharia in the UK, and calls himself a Principal Lecturer at the London School of Shariah. This consists of Choudary driving around east London trying to find people to preach his version of Sharia to. It is probably the first, and only, school in the world to be based in the back of a van.
However, the group which has probably obtained a credibility most disproportionate to its worth is the Muslim Public Affairs Committee UK (MPACUK). Describing itself as a “unique empowerment system” with a “non-violent focus on Jihad”, MPACUK has propelled its founder Asghar Bukhari into a position of some prominence. He is regularly consulted on Muslim issues by Sky and the BBC, who once even labelled him a “moderate”. MPACUK regularly launches diatribes against the pervasive influence of the insidious “Israel lobby” in Britain and the US. Bukhari himself recently accused “Zionists” of murdering “little children for sport”, adding that “any Muslim who fights against Israel and dies is a martyr and will be granted paradise”.

These groups are taking advantage of a desire to “engage” with the extremist fringe in the spirit of “increased dialogue”. Yet for such extremists, belligerence alone is no longer enough to get their voices heard. It must now be complemented with claims of academic respectability and of representing the Muslim community. No matter how tenuous these claims may be, it is an effective tactic. Increasingly, their views are not being placed under scrutiny; they are being put on a pedestal.

Moses Obama

What Set Bernie Madoff Apart?

The Moderates

Don’t Write Off America

Is America really in decline? Many say yes but it may not be the time to bet the farm on that outcome. A world without America would be a very different place.

Standpoint:

The decline of America has been long predicted, though rarely with such enthusiasm as in recent times. The election of a president seen as embodying hope, not just for America but the West, should moderate the declinists’ fervour, although I doubt if it will. Their will to see America go down is too great, and they can comfort themselves with the hope that the US may be too far gone economically and the rising powers too well advanced for Barack Obama to make too much difference…

What most declinists want is for America to stop being American and for its citizens to transform themselves into full-blown Europeans, with a socialist economy, a pacifist foreign policy and the rest. In other words, the US should recognise itself as a botched enterprise and come home, spiritually speaking, to what the former Secretary for Defence Donald Rumsfeld called “old Europe”. To some, the Obama election will seem a first step in that homebound journey, with his closure of Guantánamo, his readiness to talk to Iran, his nuclear disarmament offer to the Russians, his banning of “water-boarding” and encouragement of stem-cell research. I suspect they are wrong. Culturally, politically and psychologically Obama does not strike as me a European manqué – no one from Chicago ever has.

There is something neurotic in Europe’s view of the US, something perpetually out of kilter. Think of the crush on Bill Clinton felt by many women, the demonising of Bush and now Obamamania. We seem unable to get a cool, factual grip on the country, one that is free of fashion, inchoate historical resentments or delusions of superiority. Neurotic too – in the sense of arbitrary and unstable – is our view of American culture and society. It is possible to say anything and its opposite about the US and still command instant agreement. They are pinched Puritans and simultaneously sexually depraved, religious maniacs sold out to hedonism and materialism. America is a country of individualist greed and self-seeking, a place where egotism has reached the point where philanthropists publicly vie with one another to throw billions at museums, the arts, medical research, charities and international aid. Its popular culture is crass and degenerate except when it is black or radical. And its tendency towards obesity is as imbecilic as its dedication to the gym…

The excesses of America’s home-bred Americanophobes, such as Noam Chomsky or Gore Vidal, are almost rational by comparison, in the sense that a revulsion against the self is a natural phenomenon, a sort of legitimate point of view especially in a guilt-ridden Puritanical psychology…

The attempt to write off democracy in America, one of the greatest achievements of humankind (what other country is capable of mounting an election campaign like the one we have just witnessed?) as a self-evident failure, in contrast to the vibrant new protectionist Europe to come, and to obliterate American successes in science and technology, could be dismissed as so extreme as to be irrelevant to the debate…

For a sane view of the USA you have to look to Americans themselves, just as you look to them for the best science, the best orchestras, novelists, architects, art historians and (so I am told) classicists…

Do America’s critics actively want to see Russia and China pulling more strings in the world, and America fewer?

…In the Middle East, it may be right to talk more to Iran or Syria, although with all due scepticism and caution. After all, Europe’s “wiser-than-thou” diplomacy in the area does not appear to have made a whit of difference to Iran’s nuclear development, apart from buying her time for a bit more uranium enrichment. And while our press runs political glamour pieces on President Bashar al-Assad, he remains hand-in-glove with Hizbollah and shows few signs of reforming an odious regime. How safe would you feel in a multipolar world underpinned in the Middle East by a country avid for a nuclear weapon and whose president has religious visions while addressing the United Nations?

Read it all.

Obama, Even In Private

The PC Cartoonists

One Tired Marine

From Robert A Hall, Marine veteran who served five terms in the Massachusetts state senate.

I’ll be 63 soon. Except for one semester in college when jobs were scarce, and a six-month period when I was between jobs, but job-hunting every day, I’ve worked, hard, since I was 18. Despite some health challenges, I still put in 50-hour weeks, and haven’t called in sick in seven or eight years.. I make a good salary, but I didn’t inherit my job or my income, and I worked to get where I am. Given the economy, there’s no retirement in sight, and I’m tired -very tired.

I’m tired of being told that I have to “spread the wealth around” to people who don’t have my work ethic. I’m tired of being told the government will take the money I earned, by force if necessary, and give it to people too lazy or stupid to earn it.

I’m tired of being told that I have to pay more taxes to “keep people in their homes.” Sure, if they lost their jobs or got sick, I’m willing to help. But if they bought McMansions at three times the price of our paid-off, $250,000 condo, on one-third of my salary, then let the leftwing Congress-critters who passed Fannie and Freddie and the Community Reinvestment Act that created the bubble help them-with their own money.

I’m tired of being told how bad America is by leftwing millionaires like Michael Moore, George Soros and Hollywood entertainers who live in luxury because of the opportunities America offers. In thirty years, if they get their way, the United States will have the religious freedom and women’s rights of Saudi Arabia, the economy of Zimbabwe, the freedom of the press of China, the crime and violence of Mexico, the tolerance for Gay people of Iran, and the freedom of speech of Venezuela. Won’t multiculturalism be beautiful?

I’m tired of being told that Islam is a “Religion of Peace,” when every day I can read dozens of stories of Muslim men killing their sisters, wives and daughters for their family “honor;” of Muslims rioting over some slight offense; of Muslims murdering Christian and Jews because they aren’t “believers;” of Muslims burning schools for girls; of Muslims stoning teenage rape victims to death for “adultery;” of Muslims mutilating the genitals of little girls; all in the name of Allah, because the Qur’an and Shari’a law tells them to.

I believe “a man should be judged by the content of his character, not by the color of his skin.” I’m tired of being told that “race doesn’t matter” in the post-racial world of President Obama, when it’s all that matters in affirmative action jobs, lower college admission and graduation standards for minorities (harming them the most), government contract set-asides, tolerance for the ghetto culture of violence and fatherless children that hurts minorities more than anyone, and in the appointment of US Senators from Illinois. I think it’s very cool that we have a black president and that a black child is doing her homework at the desk where Lincoln wrote the emancipation proclamation. I just wish the black president was Condi Rice, Colon Powell or someone who believes more in freedom and the individual and less in an all-knowing government.

I’m tired of a news media that thinks Bush’s fund raising and inaugural expenses were obscene, but that think Obama’s, at triple the cost, Were wonderful. That thinks Bush exercising daily was a waste of presidential time, but Obama exercising is a great example for the public to control weight and stress, that picked over every line of Bush’s military records, but never demanded that Kerry release his, that slammed Palin with two years as governor for being too inexperienced for VP, but touted Obama with three years as senator as potentially the best president ever.

Wonder why people are dropping their subscriptions or switching to Fox News? Get a clue. I didn’t vote for Bush in 2000, but the media and Kerry drove me to his camp in 2004.

I’m tired of being told that out of “tolerance for other cultures” we must let Saudi Arabia use our oil money to fund mosques and madrassa Islamic schools to preach hate in America, while no American group is allowed to fund a church, synagogue or religious school in Saudi Arabia to teach love and tolerance.

I’m tired of being told I must lower my living standard to fight global warming, which no one is allowed to debate. My wife and I live in a two-bedroom apartment and carpool together five miles to our jobs. We also own a three-bedroom condo where our daughter and granddaughter live. Our carbon footprint is about 5% of Al Gore’s, and if you’re greener than Gore, you’re green enough.

I’m tired of being told that drug addicts have a disease, and I must help support and treat them, and pay for the damage they do. Did a giant germ rush out of a dark alley, grab them, and stuff white powder up their noses while they tried to fight it off? I don’t think Gay people choose to be Gay, but I damn sure think druggies chose to take drugs. And I’m tired of harassment from cool people treating me like a freak when I tell them I never tried marijuana.

I’m tired of illegal aliens being called “undocumented workers,” especially the ones who aren’t working, but are living on welfare or crime. What’s next? Calling drug dealers, “Undocumented Pharmacists”? And, no, I’m not against Hispanics. Most of them are Catholic and it’s been a few hundred years since Catholics wanted to kill me for my religion. I’m willing to fast track for citizenship any Hispanic person who can speak English, doesn’t have a criminal record and who is self-supporting without family on welfare, or who serves honorably for three years in our military. Those are the citizens we need.

I’m tired of latte liberals and journalists, who would never wear the uniform of the Republic themselves, or let their entitlement-handicapped kids near a recruiting station, trashing our military. They and their kids can sit at home, never having to make split-second decisions under life and death circumstances, and bad mouth better people then themselves. Do bad things happen in war? You bet. Do our troops sometimes misbehave? Sure.

Does this compare with the atrocities that were the policy of our enemies for the last fifty years-and still are? Not even close. So here’s the deal.

I’ll let myself be subjected to all the humiliation and abuse that was heaped on terrorists at Abu Ghraib or Gitmo, and the critics can let themselves be subject to captivity by the Muslims who tortured and beheaded Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, or the Muslims who tortured and murdered Marine Lt. Col. William Higgins in Lebanon, or the Muslims who ran the blood-spattered Al Qaeda torture rooms our troops found in Iraq, or the Muslims who cut off the heads of schoolgirls in Indonesia, because the girls were Christian.

Then we’ll compare notes. British and American soldiers are the only troops in history that civilians came to for help and handouts, instead of hiding from in fear.

I’m tired of people telling me that their party has a corner on virtue and the other party has a corner on corruption. Read the papers-bums are bi-partisan. And I’m tired of people telling me we need bi-partisanship. I live in Illinois, where the “Illinois Combine” of Democrats and Republicans has worked together harmoniously to loot the public for years. And I notice that the tax cheats in Obama’s cabinet are bi-partisan as well.

I’m tired of hearing wealthy athletes, entertainers and politicians of both parties talking about innocent mistakes, stupid mistakes or youthful mistakes, when we all know they think their only mistake was getting caught. I’m tired of people with a sense of entitlement, rich or poor.

Speaking of poor, I’m tired of hearing people with air-conditioned homes, color TVs and two cars called poor. The majority of Americans didn’t have that in 1970, but we didn’t know we were “poor.” The poverty pimps have to keep changing the definition of poor to keep the dollars flowing.

I’m real tired of people who don’t take responsibility for their lives and actions. I’m tired of hearing them blame the government, or discrimination, or big-whatever for their problems.

Yes, I’m damn tired. But I’m also glad to be 63.. Because, mostly, I’m not going to get to see the world these people are making.

I’m just sorry for my granddaughter.

21st Century Philosophy

Poli Sci 101 For Obama: Why Democracy Works And Socialism Fails

Why isn’t there a single example of a successful ‘People’s Paradise’? How is it that the best of intentioned revolutionaries was never able to produce a functional society? Why is it that societies that espouse economic equality and predicated on well meaning ideals, either secular or religious, have proved to be abject failures?

Socialists mistakenly believe that a collective ‘unity’ of belief, thought and ideology empower a society. Their strength, they believe, are in the numbers of those who share their ideologies. Socialists 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.

For today’s liberal elites and their Democrat hangers on, 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. Mr Obama indicts America as self absorbed and drunk with materialistic inclinations. President Obama wants Americans to believe that if only they would unite under his banner, all would be well with America and the world.

The Obama message, right out of the socialist playbook, is populist and intoxicating to leftists everywhere. Why? Because the promise of equal opportunity pales in comparison to the promise of the equal distribution of wealth.

The Socialist state takes a dim view of anyone or group that might demand lower taxes, or changes in the state welfare benefits. Just recently, millions of Frenchmen turned out to protest an employers right to fire them from their jobs- even if their job performance was sub par.

The Socialists naturally see themselves as ‘progressive.’ They believe their way of viewing the world is an improvement over the ‘old way’- hard work for greater personal gain, for example (it is interesting to note how ‘progressives’ have aligned themselves with Hollywood- the most narcissistic and self centered group of people on the planet. They are also among the most removed from the real world, believing themselves to be a kind of aristocracy, entitled to material things others would have to pay for. There is much truth to the old saying. ‘You are known by the company you keep.’ The ‘progressives’ have made clear their attachment to the phony aristocracy of Hollywood trumps the relationship they might have with the rest of us, ‘the little people.’

Of course, the ‘progressives’ cannot argue that the greatest philosophers and thinkers were free to think and present their cases. It is they, the progressives, who want to present their own versions of history, religion and ideologies. Disagree with them and the wrath of the State will come down on you.

In reality, the ‘progressives’ are actually regressive. It is because of the single minded, lockstep thinking that we find ourselves in the messes we are in. They believe in the ‘My way or the highway’ kind of thinking. Disagree with them and the world is coming to an end. The vitriol and visceral hatred of the current administration is a good example. No difference of opinion will be tolerated. Disagree and the well oiled machine of personal destruction comes out. The Democrat controlled House and Senate spectacularly shower themselves with selfish pork barrel politics in these tough economic times, caring little for the shame they heap upon the nation in the eyes of the world.

Tens, if not hundreds of millions have died because of ‘My way or the highway’ ideologies. Disagree with the powers that be or want to be, and there are calls of “Death to…”.  Disagree loud enough and you are marked for death. We all got a taste of that as the cartoon riots unfolded. It was ‘My way or the highway’ ideologies unleashed on democratic societies.

‘My way or the highway’ is a nothing more than a regression to a more barbaric time, when disputes, disagreements and different ideas were settled only when blood was spilled. That is a derivative of ‘My way or the highway.’ Mankind evolved and advanced when 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. The Soviets produced engineers by the millions. They built the world’s largest hotel, the Rossiya, in Moscow, meant to be showcase of Soviet superiority. There are walls that are crooked and floors that are uneven. It is true the Russians led early on in the space race. It is also true that many tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, died over the years because money that was spent on the space race was diverted from providing food to Soviet citizens. That malaise infected Communist eastern Europe. Once a net exporter of grain, Poland reached a point where she could barely feed herself. To put that in perspective, at one time, Poland grew more grain than France or Canada.

Western democracies have proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that living in a free and tolerant society creates a culture of progress and the free exchange of idea thoughts and ideas- realities that frighten the dysfunctional leaders of the region. Socialist states are nothing more than a monument to failure. Replacing democracy in favor of a socialist agenda is a deliberate choice to embrace failure. Those who choose that kind of fate are not the empathetic figures they want you to believe they are.

The entire raison d’etre of the left is wrapped up in identity alone. This is anathema to citizens of a real democracy, people who define themselves by their efforts, work and achievement- and the freedom to have independent and differing opinions and views.

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 Left leaning administration and Congress of  today take a dim view of anyone or group who might question the distribution of stimulus money, demand lower taxes or demands for any kind of accountability. Leftists today wants to saddle the citizen with a bigger load and a more intrusive government. Why? Because a lesser burden on the individual and less control of the individual by the state empower the individual. In the Leftist state any kind of individualism and real self expression, empowered or otherwise, represents a threat to the state.

The western Judeo-Christian democracies understand why free democracies succeed over socialist states. We have accepted freedom and democracy as a way of life and as a result our societies prosper and progress and the market place of free thoughts and ideas flourish. Socialists see freedom and democracy for what they are, societies that value independent thinking and creativity. They rightly understand that to be a threat to their power structure and thus insist on uniformity of thought and state approved belief structures.

Mr President, is this what you really want for America?