08.24.10
It never takes long for the real story on these creeps to surface
You just knew it was only a matter of time until this came out.
I think of those America-haters lined along the streets of lower Manhattan Sunday, with their placards about “racist fear.” I think of columnists like Eugene Robinson trying to make 70 percent of America look like a frenzied mob on the fringe. I think about MSM bigwigs like Katie Couric prattling about the danger to “American values.”
Well, so it turns out this Faisal is an America-hating, Hamas-loving, Sharia zealot after all.
I’ve been thinking and writing a lot lately about the concept of disconnect. Wee see disconnect in every aspect, on every level, of American life these days. What makes for the proper attachment of the modifier “chillingly” before the adjective “surreal” in describing it is the fact that so many people with such ostensibly respectable credentials are throwing their disingenuousness – let’s be completely accurate here – their willingness to lie – in our faces. The above-mentioned arbiters of societal mood know damn well and have since this guy showed up on the radar screen that he was a radical Islamist.
And their “W’s State Department sent him on trips, too” meme doesn’t wash, either. As we’ve said many times here at BN, W and his administration were not consistent in their adherence to American principles. That’s why North Korea is still a threat. It’s why the fraud of climate change hasn’t died yet. And, of course, it’s a precipitating factor in the debt and deficit levels staring us in the face.
It’s some small comfort, I suppose, to know that when one’s hunches about some development on the national or world stage grow strong, one can be assured that facts will soon surface to back them up. The downside, though, is that countervailing lies still carry a lot of weight in these very strange times.
08.17.10
It’s our tax dollars, so we’re a bit curious as to what they’re going for
Claudia Rossett wonders, just what is the itinerary on this junket through Muslim nations on which the State Department has sent the Ground Zero mosque imam? Everyone’s discussing him, but he slipped out of the country and no one can provide a list of people with whom he’s meeting, or whaqt he’s doing.
08.11.10
The age of disconnect – today’s edition
68 % of voting Americans oppose the Ground Zero mosque, per a CNN poll.
08.09.10
The war is here
I’d come to the conclusion of my adolescence before I ever gave Islam a cursory thought. I knew it was the religion of Arab cultures, and a few others. I knew its founding prophet was Mohammed and its scripture was the Koran. There were the points in Israel’s history, occurring as the news of the day, such as the 1967 and 1973 wars, and the 1972 Munich massacre, but these were presented in basically ethnocultural terms. It wasn’t until I took a comparitive religion course in college, though, that I gave it any more consideration than that.
I progressed into adulthood (at least physically) with Islam still not showing up much on my radar screen. Then the terror became a staple of world affairs . The Beirut Marine barracks attack, Leon Klinghoffer being wheeled off the side of the cruise ship, plane hijackings. It still looked like something that was a problem elsewhere, though.
Then came the 1993 World Trade Center attack, the African embassy attacks and the USS Cole attack. I hadn’t boned up on the details the way I had other world-stage developments over the years, but I could connect enough dots to see that my sense that they’re coming after us was founded on substance.
Of course, 9/11 sealed the deal, and since jihadist attacks directly on the West have occurred fast and furious since then, one would have to make a point of avoiding information about what is clearly a war to be oblivious to it.
Still, one can maneuver through one’s days as an American and not see first-hand signs of this war. Job preoccupations, or, in this economy, the proccupation with finding a job, home and family dynamics, hobbies, civic involvement, Facebook, pop culture and even mundane factors like the weather can fill one’s cognitive field for all of one’s waking hours.
That’s why a piece like Andy McCarthy’s at NRO this morning on the Ground Zero mosque, the cluelessness of Mayor Bloomberg and the State Department, and the dense web of such Islamist organizations and projects as the North American Islamic Trust, the Islamic Society of North America, the Islamic Association of Palestine, CAIR, the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center, and, central to this matter, the Cordoba Initiative is imperative reading. It’s like enjoying a gorgeous day in central Ohio, with an ominous tornado-spawning storm squall blowing eastward over the Illinois-Indiana border. Information about when it will hit your area is a click away at the Weather Channel website, but you’d have to be motivated to do the clicking.
When Newt Gingrich says, as he does in recent speeches, that we’re in a twilight struggle to resist the imposition of sharia in the United States of America, he’s not being a nerdy alarmist who ought to pull his nose out of obscure tracts and get a life. He’s an observant American who is aghast, and rightly so.
The main reason the Ground Zero mosque should not be built is not that it is an insult, which it certainly is. It must not be built because it would be a forward base for one of our most capable and determined enemies in this current world war.
Just read it
Mark Steyn’s latest column, that is: “The Self-Mutilation of the West.” It’s interesting; as I type this, a TV news program is in the background replaying Eric Holder’s testimony to a Congressional hearing, in which he goes to astounding lengths to avoid acknowledging the veracity of radical Islam.
I was recently derided by a BN commenter as engaging in garden-variety name-calling for pointing out that this regime and its sociocultural infrastructure will not specifiy the nature of the most aggressive among our enemies. It’s time to state that such derision stems from either profound ingnorance or cowardice.
05.05.10
But when it comes to a real threat, we’re supposed to be vague and nebulous to the max
David Harsanyi on the way the current regime has no problem with specifying all kinds of perceived problematic entities – insurance companies, banks, pharmaceutical companies, Israel, – and calling for “frank discussion” of all kinds of hoo-ha, but will not brook the mention of the term “radical Islam” when discussing “man-caused disasters.”
04.07.10
He has no qualms about being a thug at home, but thinks it’s hip to show the world a patty-cake face
01.26.10
Why the world needs examples of righteousness
Because there are far too many cultures where this is the norm.
And I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that they share in common a particular religion.
09.09.09
Beautiful and glorious – today’s edition
TCM is one damaged Freedom-Hater. According to a fresh AP poll 52 percent of us disapprove of his handling of the health care issue. The number is the same for his handling of the economy.
J.R. Dunn at The American Thinker has an in-depth look at this monumental collapse.
Health care week
Of course, tonight the Aquarian Totalitarian throws his Hail-Mary pass for socialist health care on Capitol Hill. I have to be out of town this evening, so I may not get to watch it live.
I remember when the H-Word Creature made a fuss about our nation’s health care system in 1993. At the time, I thought, what an odd domestic issue to make such a focal point out of. I mean, a person decides to either carry or not carry health insurance, based on a number of factors such as one’s general health, one’s income, one’s priorities and one’s plans. You get sick, you go get treated for it, and you pay the deductible, or you pay the whole thing.
Milton Friedman famously asked why companies shouldn’t offer food benefits, since food is even more essential to basic existence than health insurance.
I’m a pretty simple person by nature. I try to keep my worldview and my ideas for public policy as uncomplicated as possible. It seems to me that what’s called for is completely portable insurance, with no weird tax implications for making one insurance choice over another. I ought to be able to buy a policy from Pheonix, Arizona, or Bangkok, Thailand, for that matter, if the price and provisions suit me. It further seems to me that catastrophic insurance with a fairly high deductible is what most people need. Some may also want some incidental insurance of the Aflac variety. Other than that, one ought to lead a healthy lifestyle, not run to the ER for every case of the sniffles, and not sue doctors for things that weren’t their fault. If you get some serious but treatable malady, go see a doctor or a nurse practitioner, get treated and pay for the service out of pocket.
I think the reason Freedom Haters latched on to health care as a key issue is that it’s easy to make it look like something that ought to be a right. Good health has a lot to do with being sure you’re going to keep living, right?
But that’s what makes the whole undertaking so insidious. Nothing is more personal than tending to one’s health. As I’ve said in a previous post, “health care” encompasses so much of life that it’s easy for the state to insert itself into every aspect of our lives once it gains a toehold.
Key things to stay on top of this week: any “compromise” talk or triggers or cooperatives, how abortion is dealt with, how tort reform is dealt with, and, most importantly, whether this notion of health care being some kind of right gets properly quashed.
