Islam

Open Thread

Mark Noonan25 Comments

While everything in our history has been disparaged, the fight against Nazism has been, so far, spared by the left. This is now being “corrected”, with the Washington Post noting that while the Allied leaders were anti-Nazi, they weren’t anti-racist. The left will erase every last bit of our history if we give them the chance.

Related: Professor says that whiteness is terrorism.

A radicalized Methodist plotted a terrorist attack in California. Oh wait: scratch that – it was a radicalized Muslim.

On this day in history, Saigon fell to the Communists. Never has any nation betrayed another as badly as we betrayed the Republic of Vietnam.

Interesting article on the Christian origins of Islam. Of course, people who know have always seen Islam as a Christian heresy. Mohammed apparently spent a lot of time in then-Christian Syria and he would have been surrounded there by a Christian society which hotly disputed just about every aspect of Christianity. No surprise that he picked up a version of it which allowed him to place himself at the head of the enterprise – he just had to deny the divinity of Christ and he was off to the races.

Hoaxers falsely accused Peter Buttigieg of sexual assault. Thing is, there was as much evidence against Buttigieg as there was against Kavanaugh. Now, note the difference: Kavanaugh was slandered by the national media in an orgy of hatred, none of which has been retracted or apologized for (indeed, they are giving Kavanaugh’s lying accuser awards), while it took just a few hours for the same national media to debunk the accusations against Buttigieg.

Brazil moves decidedly away from the left. This is a good thing. Brazil (population 208 million, 3.2 million square miles of territory) should be a Great Power nearly on par with the United States. If Brazil really can navigate away from the authortarian leftism which has plauged Latin America for a century, it would be great for Brazil and the world.

This Time, the Jews Aren’t Sticking Around

Mark Noonan32 Comments

Instructed by what happened after 1933 in Germany, modern Jews, it appears, are not waiting around to see what the New New Order will be like:

Some fifty years ago, a mass migration transformed Judaism in France and in other countries of Western Europe. Algeria, a French colony in North Africa, was granted independence in 1962. Over one million French residents — European settlers and natives that had opted for French citizenship and culture — had no choice but to flee across the Mediterranean to the mother country, and ten percent of them were Jewish. Overnight, the Jewish community in Metropolitan France grew from 300,000 to over 400,000 souls…

…Now, a reversal is taking place. Today Jews are migrating out of France, and this is occurring in increasingly larger numbers.

This migration starts within France, as a mere change of locations. In Greater Paris, middle-class Jewish families are deserting neighborhoods that have been engulfed by more recent immigrants from Africa and the Near East. These new immigrant populations have proven prone to violence, and as radical Muslims, many entertain negative views about Jews and Judaism. Harassment, arson, and assault are frequent. There have been several murders. Even the liberal-minded Imam Hassan Chalghoumi of Drancy, who advocates friendly relations with Christians and Jews, was threatened and assaulted.

“I did not leave Morocco for France to be confronted by Morocco again in France,” a Casablanca-born Jewish physician confided to me…

Get out while the getting is good.  As the Muslim population surges in Europe the Muslim radicals grow in number and strength and start making demands – demands which are, for the most part, immediately accepted by the Ruling Class of Europe.  This acceptance is because the Ruling Class of Europe (like the Ruling Class everywhere in the West, including the United States) is cowardly – cowardly because they are not Christian, not Jewish, not anything…just rulers with lots of money and power and a determination to hang on to both as long as they can…and if they can buy a little peace for themselves by grovelling to Islamists, they’ll do it.  The Jews, though, are seeing the writing on the wall and aren’t sticking around until the cattle cars come ’round to pick them up.

As in all forms of descent, momentum takes over – from a mere fearful desire to appease the Islamists comes a desire to be as anti-Semitic as the Islamists.  There are moves afoot in Europe to ban the kosher preparation of food as well as circumcision of children (no, not much effort to ban the Islamic preparation of food).  Its easier, you see?  To stand up for the Rights of Man (which France, once upon a time, claimed loyalty to) takes courage and, in the end, a willingness to kill or die for the cause.  That can disturb the sweet deal you’ve got where the money pours in and you get to attend swank conferences on the taxpayer’s dime.

For the moment, Jews can find refuge – in Israel and the United States.  But even the United States is not absolutely secure, because if the American left does emerge completely triumphant in our current battle, if they are able to marginalize us and thus obtain full power to do as they wish, then it will become uncomfortable for Jews in the United States, as well (which just makes it even more amazing that so many American Jews vote for the people who are already turning on them).  We already see in the more liberal areas of the United States a kowtowing to Islam, which is just how it started in Europe…but kowtowing isn’t enough.  Eventually, such actions lead a person to joining the other side…to become anti-Semitic (some on the left have already made this journey).  And, so, in the end, if I were to advise a foreign Jew where to go, I’d say Israel…and pray the IDF is, indeed, up to the task of taking out Iran’s nuclear weapons program (American Jews, you’re not off the hook – you have to stick around and help us defeat this nonsense).

And, of course, it isn’t just Jews under threat.  In Europe there are also plenty of Christians who no longer feel that Europe is safe for them.  While Europe is ostensibly filled with Christians, my guess is that the number of Europeans who actually live as Christians is in the 10% range (some countries have a higher number – Ireland and Poland, for instance; but even in those places, it is probably just a bare majority…in some places of Europe, especially the power centers, there are hardly any Christians, at all).  I’ve read stories of Europeans emigrating to the United States simply because they feel they can’t raise their children to be Christians in Europe – the whole of society is weighted against them.  A two-track destruction of European civilization is going on – hammering the Christians who built it, welcoming in the Muslims who wish to end it.

Say what you will, but this is a fight to the finish – Western, Christian civilization has been under attack for centuries (I’d date it to the misbegotten – and entirely misnamed, as it’s proponents were amazingly ignorant – so-called Enlightenment of the mid 18th century).  Point blank, we are already living in what amounts to a post-Christian era, but which is still a Christian framework of society (such concepts as individual liberty, the worth of the individual, etc, are Christian concepts alien to all other civilizations on Earth).  Now, it seems, the ignorant and cowardly heirs of the so-called Enlightenment are essentially calling in Islam to finish the job.  It makes more sense than you might think – Enlightenment thinking is very Determinist in view; fatalistic, as it were: and so is Islam.  The modern, Western Determinist figures everything happens because of what has happened before, no human free will.  The Islamist figures everything happened because of God’s will, no human free will.  It is Christians (and Jews) who actually hold that humans have a part to play independent of God’s will…that we can choose our fate.  This conception built our civilization, and the end of our civilization is built around the end of such a concept.

How it will come out remains to be seen – though, as a Christian, I’m absolutely assured that my side wins, in the end.  But this doesn’t mean we have no role to play – that we cannot or must not fight.  The only question is: will we fight?  The Jews are (wisely) starting to flee an increasingly anti-Semitic Europe – but you can only flee so far.  And there is no place for the (at least) 150 million Americans who believe in the Judeo-Christian West to flee to.

UPDATE:  The left goes to ever more extreme lengths to attack Israel – now the fact that IDF soldiers don’t rape Muslim women is “proof” that IDF soldiers don’t think of Muslim women as human beings.  On the flip side, this must mean that the Muslim men who rape Christian women are paying them a compliment those nasty IDF soldiers never could…

Ignoring The Scorpion..At OUR Peril.

Leo Pusateri67 Comments

Forgetting the Parable of the Scorpion…They pander and walk on egg shells, ever so careful not to affect Muslim “sensibilities” (while trampling roughshod over everyone else’s) and then sit back in wide-eyed, befuddled wonderment as Muslims turn on their benefactors.

The answer, of course, is simple. Those who follow the Koran, who choose to live in the 14th century, and who perform mayhem and murder in its name are evil. Treating them as moral equals (as their doctrine moral relativism dictates) doesn’t work, because they are NOT moral equals.

But as long as these liberal loons are in power- as long as they continue to think that these attavistic freaks will all of a sudden sing kumbaya if only we can convey our good intentions, expect to get stung again.

And again.



And again.



Hillary Clinton: How could this happen in a country we helped liberate? | WashingtonExaminer.com
washingtonexaminer.com
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton 


The Crusades, Reconsidered

Mark Noonan44 Comments

From an excerpt of Jonah Goldberg’s new book, Tyranny of Cliches’:

…Until fairly recently, historically speaking, Muslims used to brag about being the winners of the Crusades, not the victims of it. That is if they talked about them at all. “The Crusades could more accurately be described as a limited, belated and, in the last analysis, ineff ectual re­sponse to the jihad—a failed attempt to recover by a Christian holy war what had been lost to a Muslim holy war,” writes Bernard Lewis, the greatest living historian of Islam in the English language (and perhaps any language).  Historian Thomas Madden puts it more directly, “Now put this down in your notebook, because it will be on the test: The cru­sades were in every way a defensive war. They were the West’s belated response to the Muslim conquest of fully two-thirds of the Christian world.”…

You can, of course, bring up some bad things which happened during the Crusades – most notably the massacre of the both the Muslim and Jewish population of Jerusalem when the Christians took the city in 1099 as well as Richard the Lionheart’s massacre of 2,700 Muslims at Acre during the Third Crusade.  Bad things.  Should not have been done.  No decent person in 2012 would ever contemplate doing any such thing.  But, by the standards of 11th and 12th century warfare, not at all remarkable.  And any Muslim who wants to whine about it is directed to what Muslims did when they took Constantinople in 1453…many centuries later, when we were all supposed to be much more civilized.

So, I leave aside such complaints – war is always nasty and the hard men of the 11th and 12th centuries, on both sides, did many a cruel act.  But the main facts cannot be disputed:  the Crusades were a counter-attack.  The Muslim attack upon Christianity began, entirely unprovoked, in 634 when some rapacious Muslim barbarians from the Arabian peninsula launched what was at first no more than a large scale plunder raid in to Christian Syria.  Quickly noticing how weak the Christian forces were (the Christian government of the area – the Byzantine Empire – was greatly weakened by a recently concluded, 20 year long war with Persia), the Muslims just poured in to a military vacuum.  For centuries thereafter, Muslim armies conquered Christian lands, massacred and enslaved Christians, treated Christians like dirt when they didn’t murder or enslave them and generally acted like pirates.  Europe was weak from the 7th to the 10th century as the new, Christian civilization developed upon the debris of the old Greco-Roman civilization…and that build up was hampered by the “barbarian wars” which absorbed the energy of Europe often over a period of centuries.  Because of this, the Christians could do no more than hold on…once Europe recovered a bit, there was a chance to push back…and it wasn’t just a push in to the middle east (though that was by far the more famous part), but also a push against the Muslims in Spain.

The only thing bad about the Crusades was that they ultimately failed – they did not extirpate the Mohammedan heresy.  And it is high time that people started to learn the truth about the Crusades.

Can America Tolerate Sharia?

Mark Noonan17 Comments

Eliyahu Stern in a New York Times Op-Ed argues that Americans have nothing to fear from the importation of Sharia law in to the United States – he likens laws banning Sharia to past attempts at excluding Jews from full civil rights:

…The suggestion that Shariah threatens American security is disturbingly reminiscent of the accusation, in 19th-century Europe, that Jewish religious law was seditious. In 1807, Napoleon convened an assembly of rabbinic authorities to address the question of whether Jewish law prevented Jews from being loyal citizens of the republic. (They said that it did not.)

Fear that Jewish law bred disloyalty was not limited to political elites; leading European philosophers also entertained the idea. Kant argued that the particularistic nature of “Jewish legislation” made Jews “hostile to all other peoples.” And Hegel contended that Jewish dietary rules and other Mosaic laws barred Jews from identifying with their fellow Prussians and called into question their ability to be civil servants…

This argument does strike a chord – not just in someone familiar with the history of anti-Semitic persecution in the Christian West, but even for those – like myself – who are Catholics and know how our ancestors were considered unsuited for American citizenship as we allegedly owed loyalty to a foreign prince, the Pope.  Of course it was always nonsense to hold that Jews and Catholics couldn’t be good citizens of the United States – such views were just a hold-over of Protestant bigotries from centuries prior.   And, of course, once Jews and Catholics became numerous in the United States and demonstrated their loyalty again and again, it became absurd for anyone to hold to those old bigotries.  Is it the same for people of the Muslim faith?  Are we just rushing to judgment before we’ve given Islamic Americans a chance to prove themselves?

Perhaps – but here is the difference:  anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism pre-date the founding of the United States of America.  Indeed, the Puritans who founded Massachusetts and set the stage for the growth of American liberty were, to a man and woman, ferociously opposed to any manifestation of Catholicism.  When those Puritans came from Europe to America, the war between Protestantism and Catholicism was still raging in Europe (when the Puritans landed at Plymouth Rock Europe was in the second year of what would become the Thirty Years War which was just a horrific war made even worse by sectarian animosities being used as a cloak for greed and cruelty).  We, as it were, inherited a bigotry…but Islam never felt such animosity in America until people of the Muslim faith started to massacre Americans for no justifiable reason whatsoever.

Remember that – it is key:  there is not and has not been an iota of justification for Muslims to feel hostility towards the United States.  Indeed, the proper feeling among Muslims should be gratitude…gratitude that American influence was set against the European colonial powers; gratitude that when Muslim States started to steal Western assets via nationalization the United States refused to coerce Islam in to restoring the stolen property; gratitude that the United States has restrained Israel from occupying Cairo and Damascus; gratitude that we pressured Israel to give up the Sinai and the West Bank even though Israel had no cause to do so; gratitude that we have helped to topple tyrants ruling over Muslim States; gratitude that time and time again the United States has rushed aid to Muslim States stricken by disaster.  The hatred felt by Muslims towards the United States is unreasonable…and the murder of Americans by people claiming to act in the name of Islam is a blot upon Muslim honor.  This blot is compounded by the fact that Americans have yet to see a vigorous, Muslim campaign to stamp out the people who murder Americans.

The words “bigotry” and “mistrust” are not synonymous.  We would be nothing more than bigots if we asserted that all Muslims are bad – but if we express mistrust of Muslims, the question must be asked – why?  Because Muslims have unjustifiably attacked Americans.  Because we have many examples of Sharia-advocates using it as a tool for persecution.  Because some of the most fervent advocates for Sharia have connections to the most vile, anti-American groups.  Certainly no American will object to a Muslim going to an Islamic court to clarify matters of faith and morals – no more than any American, of whatever belief, objects to a Catholic getting a ruling on the validity of a marriage.  But there is enough evidence in the actions of some Muslims who advocate for Sharia to convince Americans that Sharia is not compatible with American ideals.

It doesn’t have to remain this way – in fact, in just a few, short years American attitudes can be vastly altered.  All Americans will need to see is action on the part of Muslims to go after those who attack the United States and/or use Sharia as an excuse to brutalize their fellow human beings.  It won’t do the least bit of good for 10,000 people to swear that 99.9% of Muslims would never dream of attacking Americans or using Sharia as a means to oppress…words are meaningless unless matched to action.  It shouldn’t take American special forces and drone attacks to kill radical Islamists – Muslims should be doing it.  The sort of people who carry out terrorist attacks and use Sharia for oppression are not fit for decent company…no rational, well-meaning people would tolerate such in their midst.  But just as long as Islam at least appears to tolerate those sort, so will American mistrust of Islam remain, and likely grow.

You can’t excuse yourself from the act of building civilization by simply accusing others of being bigots.  We, as non-Muslims, have our duties to perform…to be tolerant of differences, to show love towards our fellow men and women, to fight for what is right.  Muslims have these same duties.  And I say to all Muslims who wish to have a world in which mistrust of Islam is a thing of the past – get busy:  you’ve a lot of work to do.  Once you’ve done it, you won’t have to ask for tolerance of Sharia…it will be automatic; in fact, you’ll find Christians and Jews to be willing collaborators in helping Muslim observance of Sharia…provided it is, as some claim, just a matter of adjudicating Muslim religious practices.

The Republic of South Sudan

Mark Noonan7 Comments

From Bloomberg:

The Republic of South Sudan was declared an independent nation today in the capital, Juba, as tens of thousands of people celebrated their freedom after almost 50 years of rebellion against the Muslim north.

The national flag was raised for the first time after the declaration of independence was read by the speaker of the South Sudanese parliament, James Wani Igga. Celebrations started at midnight when church bells rang as a countdown clock flashed “free at last.”…

I don’t think any nation ever started with more against it than South Sudan – generations of war and oppression lead up to this moment, and the nation is probably the poorest in the world.  The article goes on to note that there is a total of 100 miles of paved roads in the country.  On the other hand, it does sit atop rather large oil reserves and now that it is free from the north, the people there will start to see some benefits.

It is to be hoped that the new government will go absolutely free market – using only oil revenues to sustain the government and having no other taxes and minimal regulations on new businesses, South Sudan can swiftly become prosperous.  Literally, just let ‘er rip…if they set up what amounts to an area of completely free trade, money will pour in for investment.  It’ll still take 50 years to rise, but the change will be phenomenal and will start to raise up the people very quickly.

More importantly, to me, is the example this provides – both as to the oppression that Islam deals out to all non-Moslem people and the fact that separation is the only way to resolve that issue.  Following upon South Sudan we also need Assyria (out of Iraq), South Egypt, South Lebanon, a piece of the West Bank for the small Christian community there (a strip of land around Bethlehem would be best) and probably several other Christian enclaves out of other Moslem nations.  It is just a fact that Christians cannot obtain peace and justice in Moslem lands – what the Moslems did in South Sudan was by far the worst, but in all Moslem lands the lives, freedom and property of the Christians are at the mercy of the least Moslem whim.

It is time to face up to the facts – civilized behavior towards “the other” is a long way off in Islam, and until that developes it is best that no non-Moslems be forced to endure Islamic rule.