Standing Against the Jihad
From Ghost of a Flea, a sentiment I hardily endorse:
If you see a barbarian carrying a badly spelled injunction to kill Jews, smash his sign and smash him in the face. The barbarians have much, much worse in mind for you. Ignore the police, they are collaborating with an occupying power, our own stupidity. Seriously. What is the worst that can happen to you? The enemy are cowards and our justice system is a joke. Any constituency prepared to offer a low grade urban insurgency is rewarded with arts grants, preferential hiring and – the Golden Fleece – tenure. There are no crimes any more, only pathologies. No criminals, only victims of circumstance. Therefore, be not afraid of the law let alone voodoo insults such as “racist”. Sticks and stones, remember, really do break bones and have the corollary effect of concentrating the mind.
The next time someone sets off a bomb aimed at civilians, the act needs to be answered in kind. This is not an injunction (heaven forbid). It is an observation. Elizabeth did not take the Spaniards to court and any press questioning her intellect – let alone her patriotism – would have met a swift and well deserved end. No, she set fire ships among them and did her level best to see none of the enemy found their way home again. And if their Spanish friends and families quailed in fear, so much the better. If our Elizabeth cannot do the same, the Crown is not hers to keep and the sovereign power ceded to either the law of all against all or to that law free men must once again claim for themselves.
Our forefathers did the work for us. Our only task is to remember who and what we are.
What’s the Gaza War All About?
Why did Israel go to war with Hamas? Hmmm? Maybe it had something to do with Hamas indiscriminately launching rockets into Israel and killing Israelis.
Barry Rubin asks: The Gaza War: Is It Really So Hard to Understand?
But why, more than one reporter from highly reputable publications has asked me, is Israel attacking Gaza now? At first, I was astonished. Then I answered: because Hamas canceled the ceasefire and started massive rocket firings at Israel.
No, they responded, as if I had said something rude. Isn’t it the election, or an attempt to stop the tunnels, or this or that reason?
Absolutely not, I say, it’s like Pearl Harbor or September 11. If someone announces they are going to go to war with you and then does it, you retaliate and fight.
But so many of our fellows, including the media, just can’t comprehend what this war is all about.
There are reasons, however, for this response. Large elements in the West find it very hard to “get,” that is to understand, Hamas or the Palestinians in general – or, for that matter, Islamists in general, or Arabs in general, or Muslims in general – albeit with all the many variations and exceptions.
No matter how much diplomatic aid, sympathy, or money the West gives Hamas – and it has saved Hamas and the PLO over and over from their own mistakes – they will not become grateful or pro-Western. Anti-Western and anti-American sentiment is too valuable and too widespread to disappear. The Palestinians – and Iran’s regime, and Syria’s government, and Hezbollah, and other Islamists – need scapegoats. Who else are they going to blame for their problems? Themselves?
If you save the terrorists today, they will commit more terrorism tomorrow. If you let them escape the consequences of their own extremism, you can guarantee they will stay extremist and take a lot of the masses with them.
What is the Gaza war all about? The same thing as the entire war against Islamic terrorism. It’s the West against the barbarians of Islam. Hopefully we will wake up to the fact and finally recognize the threat for what it is.
A threat that must be destroyed.
I don’t want any Muslims in my country. I don’t want any mosque in my community. I don’t want anyone who worships Allah in my country, unless they explicitly renounce violence.
Which, according to the silence of Muslims in this country and others, is not likely.
Life Under the Hamas Rocket Barrage
“Sderot Under Siege” in Commentary Magazine describes daily life in southern Israel as Hamas daily launches dozens of rockets into the residential community. Writer David Keyes describes “this feeling of unremitting and ubiquitous terror is the norm in a community of 20,000 residents.”
I scan the looming gray clouds above for any indication of incoming rockets or mortars. A single fish-shaped white balloon sitting high off in the distance is my sole source of comfort. It is the Israeli army’s preferred method of identifying incoming rockets. It triggers an alarm which gives residents a few seconds to find shelter. I cannot shake the feeling that at any moment a rocket will fall from the sky and strike me directly. I note the location of every bomb shelter along the way in case I must make a mad dash to safety.
Read the whole article here.
Score One for Blago
Senate Majority Leader Harry (Sourpuss) Reid (D-Nev.) is in a snit about Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s appointment of former state attorney general Roland Burris to fill the seat vacated by The Obama.
According to the Christian Science Monitor, the Illinois secretary of state is also having a hissy fit about the news.
Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White declared that he won’t accept any paperwork that Blagojevich files to name a new senator because of “the current cloud of controversy surrounding the governor.” The Illinois legislature has initiated impeachment proceedings against Blagojevich.
And the guy next in line to take over the governor gravy train says his predecessor is not “fit” to lead the great state.
Illinois Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn, who is poised to take over as governor if Blagojevich is impeached, held his own news conference shortly after the governor made his announcement, declaring that “the people of Illinois have come to the conclusion that [Blagojevich] is not fit to be governor, and therefore he is not fit to make any appointment to the United States Senate.”
So far though, Blago, who may indeed be a sleazebag, has not been convicted of anything. And, given that the indictment against him is brought by the same guy that railroaded Scooter Libby (who BTW should get a pardon by President Bush), I don’t blame him for going ahead and exercising the powers of his office.
The 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says:
When vacancies happen in the representation of any State in the Senate, the executive authority of such State shall issue writs of election to fill such vacancies: Provided, That the legislature of any State may empower the executive thereof to make temporary appointments until the people fill the vacancies by election as the legislature may direct.
The real problem is state legislatures giving governors the authority to fill senate vacancies in the first place. There should be some provision for an immediate scheduling of a special election to fill those seats.
Of course the 17th Amendment has caused other problems to the American political process.
Originally Article 1, Section 3 of the Constitution required state legislatures to chose the two senators for each state.
The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, (chosen by the Legislature thereof,) for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote.
Immediately after they shall be assembled in Consequence of the first Election, they shall be divided as equally as may be into three Classes. The Seats of the Senators of the first Class shall be vacated at the Expiration of the second Year, of the second Class at the Expiration of the fourth Year, and of the third Class at the Expiration of the sixth Year, so that one third may be chosen every second Year; (and if Vacancies happen by Resignation, or otherwise, during the Recess of the Legislature of any State, the Executive thereof may make temporary Appointments until the next Meeting of the Legislature, which shall then fill such Vacancies.)
As originally conceived senate elections required a compromise from all of the elected representatives of a state legislature, which meant that citizens from rural areas and small towns had the same voice in the process as those from big urban areas.
The 17th Amendment changed all that by transforming Senate elections into large urban area referendums. To win a seat, a candidate for Senate here in Virginia has to carry Northern Virginia, Richmond and Hampton Roads. The vast majority of the state (geographically) really doesn’t matter.
As a result, issues that matter in rural areas also recieve short shrift. Urban issues have dominated national politics for the past 40 years or so (the amendment itself was added in 1913), which is a big reason liberals dominate the Senate.
Anyway, the Blago affair and the heartburn it’s causing democrats is great fun to watch. When he gets around to appointing a replacement for Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-5th District) much hilarity will no doubt ensue.
Hurray for Blago.
Waging War
Alan Dershowitz writes about Israel, Hamas and moral idocy in the Christian Science Monitor.
Israel has waged a three day war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, seeking to end the terrorist organization’s ability to lob rockets into civilian centers of Israel. Predictably critics of the Israeli attacks condemns them for civilian deaths, when it is Hamas itself that puts military targets in the heart of residential neighborhoods for the propaganda value of dead civilians.
The firing of rockets at civilians from densely populated civilian areas is the newest tactic in the war between terrorists who love death and democracies that love life. The terrorists have learned how to exploit the morality of democracies against those who do not want to kill civilians, even enemy civilians.
This is the dilemma of the civilized West in its war against the barbarians of Islam. They use our moral code against us. At some point though, we need to set aside moral niceties and get on with the business of waging war against an enemy that knows no moral bounds.
Civilians will indeed be killed. A compassionate responses would be to allow civilians to them the area of conflict, those that won’t become combatants. To the extend that the “civilians” of Gaza allow their homes, schools, hospitals and neighborhoods to become staging grounds for Hamas rocket attacks, they should indeed bear the brunt of war, for they have enabled and encouraged Hamas to attack other non-combatants.
Areas dominated by Islamic extremists like Hamas should be completely destroyed. Every terrorists should be hunted down and killed. Every mosque that facilitates Islam’s war should be demolished.
Hopefully Israel has figured this out and won’t stop until the deed is done.
Speaking of Religious Tolerance
Also in the Washington Examiner, looks like the happy folk from the Religion of Peace are on the move in Pakistan.
Taliban militants are beheading and burning their way through Pakistan’s picturesque Swat Valley, and residents say the insurgents now control most of the mountainous region far from the lawless tribal areas where jihadists thrive.
There goes the neighborhood.
In some places, just a handful of insurgents can control a village. They rule by fear: beheading government sympathizers, blowing up bridges and demanding women wear all-encompassing burqas.
They have also set up a parallel administration with courts, taxes, patrols and checkpoints, according to lawmakers and officials. And they are suspected of burning scores of girls’ schools.
Maybe India can launch a few nukes in their direction. A few decades of radioactive waste seems a small price to pay for erasing those animals from the planet.
Michael Newdow Needs a Hobby
Atheist pest Michael Newdow hopes to convince D.C. District Court to ban all references to God from the Jan. 20 inaugural festivities. From the Washington Examiner:
A well-known California atheist says he and 17 others, plus atheist and
humanist organizations, will file suit Tuesday in D.C.’s District Court to
strip all references to God and religion from President-elect Barack Obama’s
January inauguration ceremony.Michael Newdow, of Sacramento, Calif., says he wants to remove the phrase
“so help me God” from the oath of office, plus axe the invocation prayer
from Pastor Rick Warren, already under fire from the left for his opposition
to gay marriage.According to Newdow, any reference to God or religion violates the
Constitution.
Except that, well, umm, it doesn’t.
The whole ban-references-to-the-Christian-God-from-public-life crusade hinges on a brief reference to a “separation of church and state” in a letter from Thomas Jefferson. Upon that tiny molehill, nut jobs like Newdow have built the mountain of no religious expression in public life.
Despite the fact that this nation was self-consciously founded by Christians as a Christian nation, and that our laws (even with about 60 years of lousy court rulings) are based on a biblical view of morality. And yes, all laws impose a moral code, the question is who’s moral code.
Newdow & Co. want to throw out about 500 years of Christian civilization based on their irrational disbelief in God. He really needs to get a hobby, like maybe fighting for zoning regulations baning mosques in U.S. cities, towns, suburbs and rural areas.
Instead he tries to ban the one cultural force that over the past 2000 years has created the civilization which provides the freedom for him and his fellows to launch nutty court challenges and force their minority views on the majority.
Hey Mike, get a life.
A Bulwark Never Failing
A warning over at BigLizards about a possible flare up of war in Bosnia and Herzegovina as radical Muslims launch thuggish behavior against non-Muslims, and in so doing perhaps launch another round of religious wars in Europe.
Although Bosniak (48%) is the plurality ethnic group and Islam (40%) the plurality religion, in fact Serbs and Croats together form a 51.4% majority of Bosnians, while Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Catholicism account for 46% of citizens of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Thus, being outnumbered and not in totalitarian control of the government, the militant Islamic faction of the Bosniaks feels insecure and “under siege.” This of course drives them towards greater militancy and terrorism (but what doesn’t?)
I believe we may be on the brink of a new Bosnian civil war, which might serendipitously test a pet proposition of mine: Passionate Christianity is a greater bulwark against militant Islamism than is enlightened Euro-secularlism, and its rise is indeed the only thing that might possibly defeat the so-called “jihadist” movement.
This falls under the rubric of “you can’t fight something with nothing;” the standard liberal democracic “philosophy” of Europe is as close to nothing as one can find on this globe; while Christianity, strained and anemic as it may be in this post-Enlightenment, post-Renaissance age of science and sanity, is nevertheless a powerful belief system that (we all remember) united the Jews, the Greeks, and the Romans; conquered the Roman Empire; held sway over most of the known world; civilized the Vikings, the Celts, and other nomads of land and sea; and predates Islam by more than six centuries.
Taliban’s War Against Children
A security camera in Afghanistan captured the moments before a suicide bomber ignited a bomb in an SUV. The dirt bag could have waited a few moments to allow the 15 or so children pass, but instead chose to kill them.
The video is at DVIDSHUB.net.
Any wonder why Israel is bombing the crap out of Hamas in Gaza? Whether it’s murdering children and other innocents with suicide bombs, or lobbing rockets across the border into Israeli shopping centers, hospitals and neighborhoods, it’s always the same Islamic pestilence. They must be eliminated.
Let’s hope Israel doesn’t quit until every one of them is dead.
Great Gig In the Sky
Saw this on Ace of Spades HQ.
The Thin-Skinned One
Oh boo hoo, The Obama is having a hard time holding up under the “fish bowl” life of an American president. From the Politico:
HONOLULU – The media glare, the constant security appendage and the sheer production that has become a morning jog or a hankering for an ice cream cone – it’s been closing in on Barack Obama for some time.
Now the president-elect appears increasingly conscious of the confines of his new position, bristling at the routine demands of press coverage and beginning to chafe at boundaries that are only going to get smaller.
Obama even took the unusual step Friday morning of leaving behind the pool of reporters assigned to follow him, taking his daughters to a nearby water park without them. It was a breach of longstanding protocol between presidents (or presidents-elect) and the media, that a gaggle of reporters representing television, print and wire services is with his motorcade at all times.
He was unprepared to be president two years ago. He was unprepared six months ago. And, in a little more than three weeks from now he will still be unprepared to lead this nation.
What a wuss.
Be Not Afraid
NRO has thoughtful article by Joseph Morrison Skelly on Christians resisting tyranny by celebrating the birth of the Savior.
For two millennia, tyrants have suppressed word of the birth of Christ or religious commemorations of it. Herod feared for his throne. In the modern era, dictators have realized that the potential for human freedom inherent in this divine event threatens to undermine their authoritarian rule. Liberty, not servitude, is the logical outcome of a process whereby men and women channel their allegiance not simply to a secular leader but ultimately to a heavenly being, and, at the same time, governments accept the principle that temporal power must take account of a higher moral law.
Most of the article talks about Deitrich Bonhoeffer’s resistance to Nazism, comparing Bonheffer to Christians enduring oppression at the hands of Communist and Muslims. He concludes:
Today, there are Christians who quietly stand up to tyranny. On the morning of December 25, they will acknowledge the day’s significance. In Beijing, a husband will wish his wife “Merry Christmas.” In Havana, a family will exchange gifts. A minister in Riyadh will read the Gospel. A priest in Pyongyang will silently say Mass. These men and women, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, resist without fear. They grasp a fundamental fact about the intersection of freedom and faith, as true for Christians as it is for men and women of all religions. They understand that to be human is to know God; to be human and free is to know God fully.
Read the whole thing here.
A Christmas Message from the Queen of England
RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!!
It’s Snowzilla!!
Of course killjoy city officials and some crappy neighbors are pissed.
Almost makes me wish we had a ton of snow.
The Year Newspapers Died
Two thousand eight may go down in history as the year the newspaper industry died.
For the past 20 years the general leftward tilt of the nation’s big cities dailies has accelerated to a full unabashed radical leftist bias. They have given up any pretense of objectivity, or even balance, in covering politics and national affairs.
In 2008, the Washington Post, New York Times, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe and a host of other lessor papers abandoned all fairness and threw their support fully and even embarrassingly behind The Obama in his run for the presidency.
Not only has bias infected nearly every aspect of newspaper coverage of national affairs, but quality of their coverage has declined to a point where you cannot count on any nationally distributed newspaper to accurately or correctly recount an event or issue. Fact checking is virtually non-existent and outright fabrication is almost common place.
And readers are turning away in droves. Circulation has tanked. Ad revenues, including the ever lucrative classified section, are bottoming out. Large chains like McClatchy and the Tribune Co. are headed for bankruptcy or bankrupt. Wall St. analysts predict that even the venerable New York Times will fold sometime in 2009.
But that doesn’t mean people are no longer interested in the news. As the following report on a Pew Center survey demonstrates, the Internet, web sites, blogs, etc., have eclipsed newsprint as the medium of choice for news delivery.
The Internet has surpassed newspapers as the main source for national and international news for Americans, according to a new survey.
Television, however, remains the preferred medium for Americans, according to the survey by the Washington-based Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.
Seventy percent of the 1,489 people surveyed by Pew said television is their primary source for national and international news.
Forty percent said they get most of their news from the Internet, up from 24 percent in September 2007, and more than the 35 percent who cited newspapers as their main news source.
Only 59 percent of people younger than 30 years old prefer television, Pew said, down from 68 percent in the September 2007 survey.
My parents still rely on television to know what’s going on. My parents, my aunts and uncles and their friends are all their 70s, and like their peers are woefully uninformed about national affairs. But they are also a demographic that for the most part won’t be around in another decade.
Television viewers will continue to get older, and as a group disappear, not to be replaced by younger viewers. Expect the next big wave of media dinosaurs to hit the tar pits to be the nightly news, both the network and cable varieties.
All is not lost for the newspaper industry, however. Some chains, like Community Newspaper Holdings and GateHouse Media, focus on “hyper local” news coverage. And that’s where the future of the newspaper industry lies.
I’ve always that with the widespread availability of national and global news it was completely ridiculous for a small-town daily to carry wire service stories about events halfway around the globe. You can get the story sooner and more complete from a cable news outfit or a national daily. Besides, when you read the local newspaper you’re looking for local news. That’s high school sports scores, county government shenanigans, cops and courts. Why waste space on the various wars in Pakiraniraqistan?
Seems to me there’s a couple opportunities presented by the demise of the NYT and its cousins. There is still an apetite for national or global news, just not as delivered by leftwing biased paper-based news services.
The challenge is to train up a generation of conservative-leaning journalists and getting them started in the Internet-based news business. We should be funding scholarships for Christian young people to learn how to report and write the news and deliver that news over every electronic online delivery vehicle available and on the way.
There may also be an opportunity for a group of investors to start buying small newspapers, and on the “hyper local” model, start chains of conservative leaning publications. From there, we hire young, aggressive journalists with solid Christian worldviews. We turn them lose in the local community and then when they’re ready, promote to the national level.
You want to change the world? You have to change the way people see the world. Journalists are the image makers. They write the first draft of history, a draft that should be written by those who believe in truth with a capital T.
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