08.14.10
The Most Equal Comrade endorses it
. . . . the Ground Zero mosque, that is.
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.
07.08.10
While we’re embracing a decline mindset, they’re thinking big
Al-Qaeda, that is. Turns out last year’s plot to bomb NYC subways was part of a bigger plot that included a similar attack in the UK.
07.01.10
We haven’t prevailed yet
Leon Panetta may have good reason to feel that we’ve made significant progress against al-Qaida, but the network still has its high-profile operatives who are in a position to do great harm.
06.18.10
Why we call the current state of affairs in our country the domestic front in World War III
06.04.10
Whatever needs to be done to keep the Rachel Corrie from breaking through the Gaza blockade, Israel must do it
This is what war by propaganda looks like.
06.02.10
When this towering statesman is done with his latest term as Israeli PM, can we make him US president?
Video of Netanyahu’s response to world reaction to the flotilla raid. Plain truth like we only get from a tiny handful of individuals in this insane world: There is nothing to apologize for. The flotilla was a proxy move by Iran to establish a Mediterranean port. There is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Gazans have plenty of food and medicine. The same European voices expressing outrage will be next to get annihilated after Israel. Israel will always defend itself.
05.25.10
One last wistful look at the days when dealing with this cleanly was possible
The first decade of the twenty-first century has been the most tumultuous and hair-raisingly alarming I have wintnessed in my time on earth, which began in the middle of the 1950s. For each and all of the mortal threats to our civilization these past ten years have delivered, there has been an abundance of written examination of warning signs we would have done well to heed.
I think none of these has been more prescient than a 2003 Commentary article by American Enterprise Institute scholar Joshua Muravchik entitled “Facing Up to North Korea.” He takes the reader through the timeline of the Hermit Kingdom’s nuclear ambitions, disregard for the Non-Proliferation Treat, duplicitousness, blackmail and mad brinkmanship starting in the late 1970s. The article came out, mind you, well before the U.S. rounded up North Korea’s neighbors for that ill-advised series of get-togethers known as the Six-Way Talks, at which nothing was accomplished.
As we know, there has been a new round in the cycle of belligerence that began with North Korea’s sinking of the Cheonon in late March. The very latest development in this round is North Korea’s severing of all ties with South Korea, including hosting guest personnel at the Kaesong industrial park. South Korean ships and planes will now have to be more careful than ever not to cross one microinch into North Korean sea lanes or airspace. Even a close brush with borders could be used as an excuse for an accusation for territorial violation. It will now be more difficult than ever to monitor developments in the north.
The last president of the United States (and I choose the word “last” rather than “previous” quite deliberately) caught quite a bit of hell for his Bush Doctrine, which posited that, in our age, the U.S. cannot wait for mortal threats to fully bloom before dealing with them. He was particularly excoriated for acting on that doctrine in the case of the Baathist regime in Iraq.
It’s ironic indeed that that president chose to ignore his own doctrine in the case of a threat that was even more ominous. After all, we didn’t have to rely on patchwork intelligence to determine whether North Korea had nuclear weapons. They told us plainly that they did. Not only that, they tested them twice. Still, Christopher Hill and Condi Rice blathered on about “unhelpful” moves and attitudes and kept convening their silly talks. And here we are, with war a real possibility.
We’ve run out of good cards to play in the Iran situation as well. The deal brokered by Turkey and Brazil have rendered further efforts to impose sanctions meaningless. In fact, Iran has said it will pull out of the arrangement if more sanctions are imposed.
The time to deal with these festering threats in a way that would be sure not to involve mayhem was years ago. Now we have a post-American regime that harbors utopian fantasies as our only bulwark against the two most evil regimes on earth, which are now technologically ready to scorch us should we try to thwart their designs.
Well, I guess God is our very last bulwark, should He deem us worthy of His mercy.
05.22.10
“Loss,” indeed
Mark Steyn on TCM’s shamelfully lame, imprecise and inadequate tribute to Daniel Pearl.
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.
05.12.10
Why we call it a world war – today’s edition
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, speaking in Tokyo where he is visiting, said that the shipment of over 30 tons of arms seized in Thailand last year was headed from North Korea to Hamas and Hizbollah. Says Iran and Syria wee helping to facilitate the transfer.
North Korea. That would be the same country that sank its next door neighbor’s ship last month with a torpedo.
TCM finds this whole scenario boring and bothersome. He wants to focus on fundamentally transforming the United States of America.
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.”
04.21.10
Why we call it a world war – today’s edition
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard’s Qods force has a presence in many areas of the world, providing funds, arms and training to an array of bad guys. One place you can find it is Venezuela, where its involvement is increasing.
04.05.10
No shortage of jihadists – today’s edition
Taliban claims responsibility for today’s US consulate attack in Peshawar, Pakistan.
03.29.10
Jihadists don’t split hairs over differences between infidels
Two major suicide bomb attacks on the Moscow subway. If you haven’t submitted to Allah, it matters not to the jihadists whether you’re a generous Western representative democracy or a wily hegemonic land mass spanning two continents.
03.27.10
The pattern becomes more clear with every move he makes
TCM’s self-satisfaction at having reached a nuclear arms reduction agreement with Russia fits into a recent pattern of foreign-policy moves that further confirms the conclusion that his zeal is for a left-wing vision of utopia, in which all cultures and ideologies have equal merit and that the power of the idea of humankind’s unity can surmount the cumulative lessons of history.
As Jamie Fly at the link above says, TCM is preoccupied with a 1980s-era problem in a 2010 world in which rogue players pose the really pressing threat. A mutual reduction in US and Russian strategic force doesn’t mean squat to the Kim regime, the Iranian mullahs, or any of the world’s myriad jihadist networks eager to get their hands on what an increasing number of states have.
When one considers TCM’s blatant humiliation of Benjamin Netanyahu, leaving Bibi to cool his heels while he went upstairs for dinner with his family (and saying, “If there’s anything new [as in any reconsideration of Jerusalem home-building], let me know”) and the decision to go for less-than-maiximum sanctions against Iran, in the context of his excitement about this new treaty with Russia, it becomes hard to muster any encouragement about a safer and more just world. This is a worldview that got a foothold in our society some fifty years ago, when red-diaper babies sat in coffee houses listening to guitar-strumming folk singers. This is the worldview of those whose highest priority is feeling good about how much they care for “humankind” in the collective, who have no use for the particular, lest some pesky detail of history reveal a glitch in the notion that endless peace is plausible.
TCM finds the whole business of foreign policy boring compared to his grand plan for the regime that will occupy the land mass known for 234 years as the United States of America, but to the extent he deals with it, his moves are of a piece with his domestic thrust. The idea is that egalitarianism will be the order of the day on every scale. On the world stage, the country known until recently as the United States of America will be just another place on the globe where a certain percentage of the world’s comrades happen to reside. Nothing special about it.
And that means that there will be no room for a different vision, one which invites the possibility of free and sovereign individuals, unhampered by the state as they go about the achievement of their own dreams. No one anywhere will have a place to which he or she can go to see if such a vision can work.
No place left to stand, that’s what The Aquarian Totalitarian has in mind for those of us who harbor the audacity of freedom.
03.26.10
I don’t think this is going to unfold well
America’s attention hasn’t been focused on the northeast Asia theater of our current global tinderbox lately, but that will change starting now.
North Korea threatens “unprecedented nuclear strikes” against South Korea and the United States should they try to exploit perceived instability in the North.
One could dismiss this as more of the bluster to which we have become somewhat inured over the past few years, except that it’s occurring at the same time a South Korean naval vessel with 100 personnel on board is sinking off the coast of North Korea, and the only possible cause being mentioned in news reports so far is a torpedo attack.
