For Locals: I urge you attend and hear this brilliant author/editor Discuss The Current Scene!
Skidaway Island Republican Club
PRESIDENTS’ DAY DINNER
Monday, February 16th
Plantation Club -The Landings 6PM
Honored guest speaker: John Podhoretz
American writer, editor of Commentary Magazine, columnist for New York Post, author of several books on politics and former presidential speech writer for Reagan and Bush$125 PP
RSVP Tom Osborn 598-1799
E Mail: TomOsborn@BellSouth.Net
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Actually they are both! (See 1, 1a and 1b below.)
When we decide we are at war and will do what it takes to win then the Muslim scourge will end until it resurfaces and we have to do it again.
The idea of trying to solve the Jihad problem in a PC manner is a self-defeating trap we have imposed on ourselves.
The Viet Nam War taught us losing beats winning and that is a tragedy that haunts us to this day, has come to dictate our policies and has proven to be a disaster.
As for France, they should impose on themselves the same solution they demand of the Israelis: These recent Jihadist attacks underscore the need for France to immediately engage in negotiations with French Muslims that will result in the creation of two states for two peoples, living side by side in peace and security, with Paris as a shared capital.
If France builds housing in the part Muslims want, the West and U.N should start a BDS movement against them and the world should ban the purchase of all French goods and refuse their academics from attending scholarly meetings and the Palestinians should bring France before the ICC. (See 1c below.)
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1) Is the Obama White House Crazy or Cowardly?
Dick:
A massacre occurs at a satirical French publication, Charlie Hebdo. Its sin had been satirizing the Prophet Mohammed.
The shooters yelled, "Allahu Akbar" (Allah is the greatest) and, "We have avenged the Prophet Mohammed."
What could the attack mean?
The White House spokesman Josh Earnest interpretedthis event as a sign the United States has to "be clear about what the tenets of Islam actually are. And we’re going to redouble those efforts in the days and weeks ahead."
So the Obama White House is now a propaganda center for what Earnest described as "peaceful" Islam.
This is either madness or cowardice.
It could be madness because President Obama and his team are so out of touch with reality that they see themselves as the definers of a 1,500-year-old religion.
It could be cowardice because our national elite in both parties (it was true in the Bush State Department as much as the Obama State Department) is afraid to face the reality that millions of people around the world, many of them motivated by religion, hate the West and want sincerely to destroy it.
I first encountered this cowardice in December 2001. Already, only three months after the horrible attacks of 9/11, the gap between reality and the elites was growing.
I was in a briefing at what was then the CIA counter-terrorism center. The group had been tasked with hunting down an estimated 5,000 members and allies of Al Qaeda.
"Wait a second," I asked them. As an historian who had been studying insurgencies for over 50 years I knew the key question was not the current number of activists but the size of the recruiting pool. "How many people are potential recruits?"
"Oh, about 3 to 5 percent of Islam," a CIA analyst responded.
"That would be 39 million to 65 million people," I replied.
Every analyst in the room nodded yes and smiled. That was what they had been trying to tell the Bush White House, they said. No one would listen.
This was the moment in the movie Jaws where the police chief says "We're going to need a bigger boat."
Every element of the bipartisan national establishment rejected this message about the scale of the threat. This self-delusion is what led the Obama administration two years ago to declare that Al Qaeda was "decimated".
But today, after more than 13 years of war, thousands of dead Americans, tens of thousands of wounded Americans, vastly more dead and wounded people in the Middle East, and trillions of dollars, we are losing the war we are afraid to fight.
Callista and I made a documentary in 2010, "America at Risk," to define the scale of the threat and the desperation of our elites to avoid reality. Sadly the film is still accurate.
When, following the Benghazi attack, the Obama Administration apologized for a movie insulting Islam, it encouraged the intolerant and the killers. President Obama and Secretary Clinton were so desperate to appease these haters that they paid for TV commercials in Pakistan apologizing for any offense people might have taken to free speech the U.S. government had nothing to do with.
When the French magazine, Charlie Hebdo, printed cartoons about Islam two years ago, the Obama White House said, "We are aware that a French magazine published cartoons featuring a figure resembling the prophet Muhammad, and obviously we have questions about the judgment of publishing something like this."
President Obama went to the United Nations in 2012 and said, "The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam."
As a Christian who over the course of his career has been lectured routinely by the left about free speech and the obligation for taxpayers to fund anti-Christian art like thePiss Christ, I am deeply offended that an American president feels compelled to defend one religion from insult above all others--particularly one in whose name fanatics are seeking to destroy Western Civilization.
Whether these actions are madness or cowardice, the time has come to stand up to the intellectually dishonest cowering of our elites.
Congress should hold hearings on the scale and nature of the threat radical Islamism poses.
The United States and its allies should drive radical Islamists off the web to impede their ability to recruit and spread their hated over the internet.
Congress should pass a law making it illegal to advocate or recruit for radical Islamism.
Some mosques will have to be monitored and radical Imams who incite violence will have to be deported or jailed.
The era of allowing our enemies to use our freedom and our institutions to destroy us must end. President Lincoln warned, to use a phrase now popular, that the Constitution is not a suicide pact. It is as true today, faced with mortal enemies from abroad, as it was in the Civil War.
If 9/11 wasn't adequate warning, maybe Paris will be.
Call your Congressman and Senators today.
Demand action
Newt
1a) Muslims and the Left's Death by Tolerance
Aside from the three Muslim men who perpetrated the deadliest terror attack in France since 1961, there are some other individuals complicit in the Wednesday massacre. They have names such as Hollande, Merkel, Löfven and Obama. Their connection to the act will largely go unnoticed and unapprehended -- and they likely will never be held to account.
1b) The Problem is Within Islam Itself
1a) Muslims and the Left's Death by Tolerance
Aside from the three Muslim men who perpetrated the deadliest terror attack in France since 1961, there are some other individuals complicit in the Wednesday massacre. They have names such as Hollande, Merkel, Löfven and Obama. Their connection to the act will largely go unnoticed and unapprehended -- and they likely will never be held to account.
In the wake of the brutality at the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, socialist French president Francois Hollande called for tolerance.
I call for intolerance.
The difference between us isn’t that, relatively speaking, I lack the quality. I have a lot of practice exercising tolerance because I have far more to tolerate — not the least of which is the political power and policies of people such as Hollande, Merkel, Löfven and Obama. The real difference is that I actually know what tolerance means.
Tolerance always implies a perceived negative. You wouldn’t have to tolerate a delectable meal or a beautiful car; you relish those things. But you would have to tolerate a stubborn cold, a painful rash or foul weather. So Tolerance Lesson One for Leftists:
If you say you’re tolerant of Muslims, it implies that you consider them a negative.
If you don’t — if instead you like them or just view them neutrally — tolerance doesn’t enter the equation.
Of course, not everything we perceive as negative actually is so. We may dislike broccoli, but tolerate it in order to avoid offending a host or for health reasons. In such cases, when the perceived negative is not objectively negative and there are good reasons to put up with it, tolerance can be a great exercise of virtue.
It also can be virtuous when dealing with an objective negative (ON), such as unjust imprisonment or a terminal illness, that you cannot remedy. Soldiering on nobly in such situations often builds great character and provides inspiration for others.
But what of when at issue is an ON that can be remedied? This brings us to Tolerance Lesson Two for Leftists:
The only virtue in this case lies in wiping the negative out.
Unlike when bearing up nobly in the face intractable ONs, tolerating those that could be eliminated renders one guilty of a failure of omission; it is dereliction of moral duty. An example would be a man who could prevent someone from habitually invading his home and endangering his family, but who fails to do so out of neglect, cowardice or in deference to twisted ideology. (This could, by the way, be viewed as a microcosm of something that perhaps, just maybe, we might want to start having an honest national discussion about.) Another example was when the Spaniards encountered the bloody-altar Aztecs in 16th-century Mexico; they didn’t say “Hey, tearing the hearts out of thousands of innocents while they’re still alive and hanging their body parts in the marketplace isn’t our thing, but we’re good multiculturalists and don’t impose values.” They were intolerant — and, thankfully, an intolerable Hades-born “religion” was vanquished.
Also note that since being neglectful, a coward or a twisted ideologue is an ON itself, it generally doesn’t engender respect. Remember that allowing the continued existence of remediable ONs sometimes amounts to people letting themselves be used as doormats. (People wipe their feet on doormats.) Of course, other times an individual won’t perceive the ON as a negative; noteworthy here is that ingested poison will kill you whether you recognize it as poison or not.
Many interesting lessons on tolerance could be learned from the Muslim world. Note that when pious Muslims perceive something as negative (this isn’t to imply that all their perceptions are accurate), they often stop at nothing to wipe it out. Just consider the tens of thousands of non-Muslims killed and thousands of churches burned by jihadists during the last decade, the enforcement of Sharia law, and the Muslim-conquered parts of European cities euphemistically known as no-go zones.
The leftist response to this Islamic chauvinism is well exemplified by the reaction to the 2014 “Trojan horse scandal,” involving the supplanting of Western curricula by Islamist doctrine in seven London schools. Critiquing one offending institution, British officials noted that pupils didn’t “learn about different faiths and cultures” and, critiquing another — and this is the money line — said that students “understanding of…mutual respect and tolerance…is underdeveloped.” “Ah, yes, these Muslims just need to be tolerant like us,” say the good leftists.
Talk about being dimmer than a 15-watt bulb in a North Korean night.
Since these Muslims view other faiths and cultures as inferior to their own, as negatives, they would have to be tolerant of them — if they didn’t think they could vanquish them. But because they’re making great headway on that front, they have no need to be tolerant. You needn’t tolerate what you can terminate.
And they’re really just taking a leaf out of the left’s book. How tolerant are liberals, really? Remember again, the only test of tolerance is how well you abide things you dislike. And no one is more vicious in destroying perceived negatives than leftists. Just ask the people who’ve lost jobs for defending marriage or criticizing homosexual behavior, such as former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich or ex-Atlanta fire chief Kelvin Cochran. Ask those punished under hate-speech laws or bitten by speech codes on college campuses. Ask the bakers and other Christian businessmen put out of business for refusing to be party to homosexual “weddings.” The reality is that when leftists hate something — and it is all emotion with them — they have no mercy. (Mind you, this is one reason liberals accuse conservatives of being “haters”; it’s projection. Governed by emotion, they only oppose what they despise, so they naturally view opposition as synonymous with hatred.)
So leftists’ calls for tolerance amount to a request that Muslims and others practice what leftists themselves merely preach. But if you consider their working definition of the word — confusing tolerance with affinity or indifference — there is an irony here: these secular fundamentalists have the same message the Islamic fundamentalists do:
Believe what we believe.
Like what we like.
Hate what we hate.
Become one with our collective.
And we can live in peace.
Secular and Islamic fundamentalists have something else in common. Both groups have many perceived negatives that aren’t actually objectively negative, so they try to wipe out the wrong things. Thus do they work together to destroy Christianity and Western civilization. And this is why I named as co-conspirators in the Paris attack Francois Hollande, Angela Merkel, Stefan Löfven and Barack Obama. But this brings me to my last Tolerance Lesson for Leftists, and I direct my words now specifically to leftists: There’s something else pious Muslims perceive as a negative, and it also happens to be something that is an objective negative.
In the editorial offices of a French magazine this week, murderous Muslim butchers put an emphatic and bloody exclamation point on President Barack Obama’s 2012 declaration before the United Nations that, “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”
1c) The Palestinian Endgame
And even before the broken bodies of the dead French cartoonists had been removed from the scene of their slaughter, Muslim apologists of the American political left were taking to cameras and keyboards to make sure the apparent greater crime of political incorrectness was not perpetrated.
CNN pundit Sally Kohn sent out a barrage of PC tweets that repackaged the foolish charge made years ago by fellow left-winger Rosie O’Donnell that, “radical Christianity is just as dangerous as radical Islam.” You can be forgiven if you’re struggling to remember the last time monks with suicide belts stormed a mall food court or a group of knife-wielding nuns beheaded an infidel before mass. Both scenarios elicit laughter because such behavior is totally out of the ordinary for followers of Jesus.
Can you find nutjobs claiming to be Christian who have committed violent acts? Of course. But in every example you cite, you must also admit without exception that the offender didn’t justify his actions by referencing Christian Scripture, was not acting in accordance with the teaching of any mainstream Christian denomination, nor do there exist large groups of Christians dedicated to implementing such a strategy.
Former elected chairman of the Democratic Party Howard Dean appeared on MSNBC actually attempting to say the same about Islam. “I stopped calling these people Muslim terrorists,” he proclaimed -- as though Howard Dean or anyone on the left has ever used that phrase with regularity. “I think ISIS is a cult. Not an Islamic cult. I think it’s a cult,” he stammered.
This is precisely the same nonsense we’ve been hearing from American liberals for years. Simply recall that after the horrific attack at Fort Hood, where Muslim terrorist Nidal Malik Hasan jumped onto a table, shouted “Allahu Akbar” and massacred Americans in cold blood, the Obama administration labeled the event “workplace violence.” Or go online and watch Attorney General Eric Holder refuse to even act like he understands the phrase “radical Islam.” When you do, it should become apparent why events like this continue to happen. We are paralyzed with fear at the thought of honestly acknowledging the problem we face is within Islam itself.
Every time Islamic jihadists strike, our society frantically searches for some reason to explain what provoked them: American foreign policy, the invasion of Iraq, a preacher in Florida who threatened to burn a Quran, the establishment of Israel after World War II, the events at Abu Ghraib, offensive cartoons, and on and on and on.
But lost in this silly sideshow is the truth that Islam has been imitating their warrior prophet and fighting the world since the 7th century.
Yes, thankfully there are a large number of Muslims today who choose to interpret their holy book in a manner that allows them to live at peace with others. But we can’t deny the reality that Islam is the only religion in the world where there is an open discussion within the faith about whether it’s acceptable to saw off journalists’ heads, burn children alive who don’t renounce their faith in Christ, massacre thousands by using jetliners as missiles, or slaughter cartoonists at a satirical magazine. And again, those acts of terror aren’t the product of some modern movement of Islamists who misunderstand and pervert their scriptures. It has been this way since Muhammad was perpetrating the violence himself.
The stark difference between Kohn and O’Donnell’s “radical Christian” violence and Islamic terror is the difference between despicable acts and despicable teachings. There’s a reason that Alexis de Tocqueville wrote over a century ago, “I studied the Quran a great deal. I came away from that study with the conviction that by and large there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad.”
Multiculturalist blather and politically correct garbage prevent us from acknowledging that simple reality. Pretending there is some moral and ethical equivalency between all faiths is cultural suicide. Muhammad proclaimed, “I have been ordered (by Allah) to fight against the people until they testify that none has the right to be worshipped but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.” Three Muslims in France merely followed that example this last week. That’s the real problem we continue to ignore.
Pete Heck is a speaker, author and teacher who hosts a weekly radio broadcast on WIBC. Follow him @peterheck or email peter@peterheck.com.
Undoubtedly the most vexing question in the Israel/Palestine conflict concerns the issue of refugees; that is, the Arab refugees from the 1948 war. Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas has described the right to return as an individual right, one that is beyond his power to waive. On the surface this seems like a principled position, even if one disagrees with it.
Opponents of the Palestinian right of return have argued that it would transform Israel into another Palestinian state if all five to eight million descendants of the refugees of 1948 returned, effectively negating the right of the Jewish people to self-determination. But this argument suggests an immediate objection; certainly a people has a collective right to self-determination, but when that right comes into conflict with basic individual rights it must give way.
The problem with this objection is that for the Palestinians the right of return is a means to an end. Every Palestinian leader, even the most moderate, sees as their goal the restoration of the Arab and Islamic character of historic Palestine, which includes all of present-day Israel. Consider the following statement by Palestinian moderate Omar Barghouti,
“I make a distinction between self-determination for Jewish settlers in Palestine, which I categorically oppose -- never in history was a colonizing community ever allowed self-determination not in South Africa, not in Algeria, not in Ireland, not anywhere. Colonizers are not entitled to self-determination, by any definition of self-determination, but post-colonialism, post-oppression, after justice has happened, then we must envision integrating the former colonizers into a common nation that can determine its future. So they are part of the future determination of the state if they are indigenized.”
Self-determination in this case means a partition along ethnic/religious lines, a partition that would afford both groups the ability to live in a state where they formed the majority. Barghouti rejects any majority Jewish state on principal.
Is Mahmoud Abbas’s position all that different? He has repeatedly refused to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, effectively negating the framework of two states for two peoples. Abbas claims that to do so would undermine the rights of Arab Israelis; Barghouti at least tells us what he really thinks. I leave it to readers’ imagination what indigenization entails.
What does the decidedly un-moderate and wildly popular Hamas see as the future for Jews in a Palestinian state? See for yourself.
Given recent events in France and the penchant of both Palestinians and self-hating Jews to cite the French experience in Algeria as a precedent, I thought it might be useful to review what happened after France left Algeria.
In the early part of the 19th century, France conquered present-day Algeria and set about incorporating it into France. When Algeria gained its independence in the mid-20th century, roughly a million Frenchmen lived there. Virtually all of them fled, along with the indigenous Jewish community. The French Algerians had lived there for more than a hundred years, and the Jewish community dated to the time of the Phoenicians.
During negotiations, the Algerians assured French President Charles De Gaulle that the ethnic French community could stay in Algeria; for some reason things didn’t work out that way. After the French left, between 30,000 and 150,000 Algerian Muslims who sided with France were massacred. Historian Alistair Horne provides a description of what happened to them,
“Hundreds died when put to work clearing the minefields along the Morice Line, or were shot out of hand. Others were tortured atrociously; army veterans were made to dig their own tombs, then swallow their decorations before being killed; they were burned alive, or castrated, or dragged behind trucks, or cut to pieces and their flesh fed to dogs. Many were put to death with their entire families, including young children.”
Nobody should make the mistake of assuming that because Israel is powerful they have nothing to fear from the Palestinians. If it happened to the French, it could happen to the Israelis, and there are a lot of people fantasizing that it will.
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