Those few of you out there who drop in from time to time to see what's new here on this blog are well aware of my feelings concerning Islam and muslims. I have relatives, some back in Connecticut, who are some of the finest, most compassionate people I know. Unfortunately, being of the Democratic persuasion, they are also subject to all the misconceptions that liberal flesh is heir to, including the mistaken belief that there is a difference between "moderate Islam" and "radical Islam". They have allowed themselves to be blinded to the fact - apparent to anyone who has read the Quran, Hadith, and Sura - that orthodox, true Islam demands a world Caliphate, and the death, submission and/or enslavement of all non-believers. Any muslim who does not accept that and live by it is an apostate, and the Quran demands their death. (photo of mosque in Dearborn, MI)
An Overfilled Heart: Usages And Abusages
We interrupt this sententious, pseudo-scholastic series of overgeneralizations about why rich folk shouldn't marry poor to bring you a rant of the old style, including a few words of explanation about...a word.
The moments when I want to retreat entirely from the world, perhaps, as Garet Garrett did at the last, having reinstalled myself, my library, and my AR-15 in an unoccupied cave (albeit within range of a WiFi hotspot), have been growing more frequent. They correlate with periods of overwhelming dissonance, at which the sense of things has become too elusive even for a Certified Galactic Intellect to discern. For my greatest intellectual need is answers: penetration into the "whys" of a phenomenon. I'm not content simply to admire a rainbow, or a waterfall; I need to know whence they come, and the luminance and the megadyne-centimeters per second available from them. Laugh if you like; others have done so, and I remain as I am.
But just as every cause has more than one effect, every effect has more than one cause. Comprehension is not possible if not all the causes of a particular effect -- at least, all the non-trivial ones, but how does one distinguish them from the others? -- are available for inspection. In matters of politics and political maneuvering, that seems ever more often the case.
We pause here for a few dirty words from an Esteemed Co-Conspirator.
They who go into politics are generally persons of weak conscience. Two centuries of the demotic incentive -- the need to please 50%-plus-one to gain or retain power -- have produced a sub-race of Mankind almost completely free of moral qualms. All that matters to them in any situation that requires a decision is the utterly pragmatic determination of the currently relevant constituency: just who those 50%-plus-one are to be "this time."
Yes, yes, there remain a few exceptions. The most thoroughly burbanked species will occasionally sprout a sport or two. We'll get to them in due course.
In consequence, at this moment we face the following tableau:
- A bevy of reliable reports has Barack Hussein Obama dithering and wringing his hands over whether to authorize the Abbottabad strike that reaped the life of Osama bin Laden, the most notorious terrorist mastermind since Lawrence of Arabia;
- The strike occurs at last, though some doubt remains over whether Obama himself made the go-decision;
- SEAL Team Six achieves a pure success: no friendly casualties except for a helicopter;
- Obama, in his habitual front-running manner, grabs the lion's share of the credit in his announcement of the event;
- Pakistani officialdom is unanimous in condemning the American strike;
- Subsequent official bowing and scraping toward Pakistan and the Islamic world nauseates every American with, in Ann Barnhardt's memorable phrase, "both balls and brains;"
- Obama's "we don't spike the ball" homily puts a Jupiter-size cherry atop the heap of vomitus;
- Yet moderately trustworthy polls suggest that Obama would defeat any of his current Republican challengers in November 2012.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF I, the proprietor and standard-setter of Eternity Road, did immediately thereafter invite Mark Alger, for whose expressive powers my admiration knows no bounds, to grace this normally profanity-free site with one of his most unrestrained rants.
Because sometimes, in some circumstances, even a Certified Galactic Intellect is reduced to screaming "What the fuck is going on here?" (For the sake of brevity, this reaction shall henceforth be referred to as the "WTF macro.")
Of course, personages of greater note than I have recently unleashed a barrage of "f-bombs," though their motivations remain uncertain. Others have deplored the vulgarity, and have proclaimed The Donald to have demonstrated his unsuitability for public office thereby.
I hold no brief for Trump's political ambitions. I, too, consider him unsuited for high office, albeit for other reasons. However, the rhetorical violence he unleashed in Las Vegas strikes me as completely appropriate to the recent conduct of our political elite and the bizarre, almost schizophrenic reactions of our populace. Particularly in the sphere of foreign policy and international relations, the Obama Administration and its enablers have been acting as if, to a man, they're unable to determine America's interests or to express them in a clear and stable fashion.
It seems to take Mark Steyn, or a figure on his plane of penetration and detachment, to capture the full sweep of the contradictions and the irrationality thereof.
The belated dispatch of Osama testifies to what the United States does well — elite warriors, superbly trained, equipped to a level of technological sophistication no other nation can match. Everything else surrounding the event (including White House news management so club-footed one starts to wonder darkly whether its incompetence is somehow intentional) embodies what the United States does badly. Pakistan, our "ally," hides and protects not only Osama but also Mullah Omar and Zawahiri, and does so secure in the knowledge that it will pay no price for its treachery — indeed, confident that its duplicitous military will continue to be funded by U.S. taxpayers....But the strong horse/weak horse routine is a matter of perception as much as anything else. On Sept. 12, 2001, Gen. Musharraf was in a meeting "when my military secretary told me that the U.S. secretary of state, Gen. Colin Powell, was on the phone. I said I would call back later." The milquetoasts of the State Department were in no mood for Musharraf's I'm-washing-my-hair routine, and, when he'd been dragged to the phone, he was informed that the Bush administration would bomb Pakistan "back to the Stone Age" if they didn't get everything they wanted. Musharraf concluded that America meant it....
If it took America a decade to avenge the dead of 9/11, it took Britain 13 years to avenge their defeat in Sudan in 1884. But, after Kitchener slaughtered the jihadists of the day at the Battle of Omdurman in 1897, he made a point of digging up their leader the Mahdi, chopping off his head and keeping it as a souvenir. The Sudanese got the message. The British had nary a peep out of the joint until they gave it independence six decades later — and, indeed, the locals fought for King and (distant imperial) country as brave British troops during World War II. Even more amazingly, generations of English schoolchildren were taught about the Mahdi's skull winding up as Lord Kitchener's novelty paperweight as an inspiring tale of national greatness....
A decade on, our troops are running around Afghanistan "winning hearts and minds" and getting gunned down by the very policemen and soldiers they've spent years training. Back on the home front, every small-town airport has at least a dozen crack TSA operatives sniffing round the panties of grade-schoolers. Meanwhile, at the U.N., at the EU, at the Organization of the Islamic Conference, in the "Facebook revolutions" of "the Arab spring," the Islamization of the world proceeds: Millions of Muslims support bin Laden's goal — the submission of the Western world to Islam — but, unlike him, understand that flying planes into buildings is entirely unnecessary to achieving it.
The above handful of paragraphs alone entitle Steyn to the throne of punditry, the title of Most Perceptive Analyst of Geopolitical Reality currently writing in the English language. Yet this man, whom no less a giant of the intellect than Thomas Sowell called "the gold standard in American commentary," is a Canadian, a subject of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
Yet even Steyn, a genius of opinion-editorial if ever there was one, welshes on the critical point:
Millions of Muslims support bin Laden's goal — the submission of the Western world to Islam...
Wrong, wrong, WRONG! This implies that there are Muslims who don't support bin Laden's goal...but anyone who calls himself a Muslim thereby accepts the two most basic precepts of Islam:
- The Qur'an is the immutable, uneditable, and unquestionable Word of God;
- Muhammad, to whom the revelation of the Qur'an was entrusted, is the Perfect Man, to be emulated in all things as far as possible.
Therefore, all Muslims, without exception, accept as doctrine that it is Allah's dictate, and the duty of all Muslims as far as they can contribute to it, to subjugate the entire world to Islam, by any means necessary including fire and sword. Read Suras 2 through 9 and come to some other conclusion. [Emphasis mine. RT]
Allow me to be maximally, obnoxiously direct about it:
- We are at war with Islam, not with "terrorism," and not by our will but by Islam's explicit decrees.
- The war was declared by Muhammad and the followers thereof, not by us of the West.
- The war has been ongoing since Muhammad's earliest jihads against those of his Arabian neighbors who declined to accept his authority.
- By the explicit dictates of the Qur'an, it is total war: there are no noncombatants, and no prisoners will be taken. The maxim is "convert, be enslaved, or be killed." [Emphasis mine. RT]
- To be a Muslim, therefore, is to be a front-line soldier in the war of Dar al-Islam against Dar al-Harb.
- Therefore, your Muslim neighbors, no matter how superficially peaceable, are your enemies, just as any Nazi was at an earlier time in history. The mosque down the block is an enemy beachhead on American soil. [Emphasis mine. RT]
If you can argue against that on the basis of Islam's core scriptures, feel free to do so. I'd rather be wrong about this...but I'm not.
It has been clear since 732 Anno Domini that the Western world, once better described as Christendom, is at war with Islam. Clear, that is, to anyone with adequate knowledge of the dictates of Islam whose intellect isn't fettered to an irrational desire to appear "tolerant" and "inclusive."
From that follows an ugly conclusion, one that most Americans have struggled to evade:
Denunciations of the assertion that Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim have been widespread. Suffice it to say that we'd rather not believe that 53% of American voters did such a stupid thing. And perhaps, in the sense of having disclaimed the Shahada and accepted Christian baptism, Obama is at least formally not a Muslim. However, his behavior since his inauguration to the presidency speaks otherwise. At the very least, in any clash between Muslim and non-Muslim interests or sensibilities, he prefers to take their side against ours. He's even said so, publicly.
What, then, can one say about Obama's "We don't spike the ball" emissions?
What can one say about his relentless kowtowing to Muslim potentates and Muslim sensibilities?
What can one say about his repeated assertions that Pakistan, one of the most venomously pro-jihad states in the world today, has cooperated with us in the "war on terror?"
What can one say about his Administration's facilitation of immigration from Islamic states?
What can one say about Americans' overall tenor of passivity before all this evidence of quislingry, from him, his henchmen, and his handlers?
Other than to invoke the "WTF macro," that is?
You can't refute the conclusion without refuting the reasoning or falsifying the evidence from which it proceeds. You can close your eyes and stop your ears; that is all.
What do you choose to do?
In light of what's followed, the clarity and resolve exemplified by this passage from the cited Steyn column:
On Sept. 12, 2001, Gen. Musharraf was in a meeting "when my military secretary told me that the U.S. secretary of state, Gen. Colin Powell, was on the phone. I said I would call back later." The milquetoasts of the State Department were in no mood for Musharraf's I'm-washing-my-hair routine, and, when he'd been dragged to the phone, he was informed that the Bush administration would bomb Pakistan "back to the Stone Age" if they didn't get everything they wanted.
...appears to have been a blip, a momentary aberration in our politicians' natural inclination to placate even those peoples who hate us by doctrinal decree, and conciliate even those states that make enmity toward the United States a core tenet of policy. There was another blip, a few years earlier: the Achille Lauro hijacking and the murder of Leon Klinghoffer, during Ronald Reagan's second term as president. What followed then?
Oliver North conceived of an operation to get the terrorists back. Contrary to Egyptian president Mubarak's assurances that the terrorists had already left Egypt, North found out the terrorists were still there. Indeed, working with Israeli intelligence, North determined the precise EgyptAir 737 that would carry the terrorists out of Egypt, even down to the flight number. He wanted to intercept the flight, modeling the operation on the extraordinary World War II interception of Yamamoto, mastermind of Pearl Harbor.President Reagan was briefed on the daring plan – along with copious warnings from timorous State Department officials that the Europeans might have their feelings bruised, America would look like a cowboy, and it would only strengthen the hard-liners in Egypt. Asked if the operation should proceed, Reagan said: "Good God! They've murdered an American here. Let's get on with it."
Adm. Frank Kelso, the officer in charge of America's Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean, ordered his men to carry out the mission. In no time flat, Tomcat fighters had taken off from the U.S. aircraft carrier Saratoga. After refueling in midair and guided by Hawkeyes, the Tomcats caught up with the EgyptAir flight. The fighters stealthily trailed their target for a while in total darkness, their lights off, even in the cockpit. Then the Tomcats swooped in on the EgyptAir flight, surrounded the plane, and forced it to land at a NATO base on Sicily controlled by the United States.
Ronald Reagan wasn't perfect, despite the hagiography. But it takes a low sort of morality to disdain his clarity, and the surge of resolve displayed by President Bush toward Pakistani strongman Pervez Musharraf, in favor of the principle-and-courage-free posturings that have followed.
Ugly language can be abused -- and abusive. However, as I've written before, there are times when nothing else will suffice. If we're not at such a point today, we're awfully damned close to one.
But at the ultimate cusp, the "WTF macro" will not suffice. Present trends in mealy-mouthed, insincere international diplomacy continuing, we'll soon reach a nexus at which the options will be two: to surrender to Islam, root and branch; or to "cowboy the fuckup!" and acknowledge the true dimensions of this war. At that point, no amount of profanity, however employed, will adequately describe the horrors before us. More, the longer we take to get to that nexus, the worse the sequel will be, no matter which course we choose to follow.
Where do you stand, Gentle Reader?
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Sorry, folks. I was completely ignorant about comment rules. Anyone can post, but I'd prefer a name, even if it is made up. Anonymous posts just seem cheap, if you know what I mean. Also, if you want to argue a point, that's fine. Cheap shots and name calling towards me or another person commenting (ad hominem) is rude and will get you banned. Other than that, I'd love to get some comments.