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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; David Solway</title>
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		<title>Fiddling While Washington Burns</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/david-solway/fiddling-while-washington-burns-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=fiddling-while-washington-burns-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 26 Aug 2013 04:12:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Solway]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[country]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fun]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=201893</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[When a culture puts frivolity over survival.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/fiddle.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-201996" alt="fiddle" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/fiddle.jpg" width="280" height="386" /></a><strong>[Illustration by Frontpage&#8217;s cartoonist <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/amir-avni/obama-fiddles-while-america-burns/">Amir Avni</a></strong>].</p>
<p><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">In an August 20, 2013 article for <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/howard-rotberg/fun-and-foolishness-in-a-dangerous-time/"><i>FrontPage Magazine</i></a>, Howard Rotberg deplores the “growing cultural emphasis on fun” which, in the midst of the current crisis brought on by fiscal irresponsibility and by Islam’s war against the West, distracts us from understanding the various forces that threaten our way of life and from “taking up arms in defense of [our] own liberty.”</span></i></p>
<p>Not that the warning hasn’t been sounded before. In his perennially relevant study of an increasingly frivolous intellectual culture, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Amusing-Ourselves-Death-Discourse-Business/dp/014303653X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1377091661&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=amusing+ourselves+to+death"><i>Amusing Ourselves to Death</i></a>, Neil Postman addresses the subject from the standpoint of the electronic media that entertain while detaching viewers from the social, political and economic issues and consequences of “real life.” Fun, so to speak, has become fundamental, superseding both specific and contextual knowledge and leading to what today we call the “low-information voter” or, just as likely, the no-information voter. One recalls Lewis Mumford in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/City-History-Origins-Transformations-Prospects/dp/0156180359/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1377094547&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=lewis+mumford+the+city+in+history"><i>The City in History</i></a>, who referred to a historical episode dating back to the 5<sup>th</sup> century A.D. that has always struck me as an exemplum of a culture in terminal decline. The citizens of Augustine’s city of Hippo, Mumford writes, were too busy attending the games in the local Forum to defend themselves against the Vandals at the walls, whose defense they had left to a contingent of hired mercenaries, with the inevitable result that the city was razed and these distracted citizens put to the sword.</p>
<p>When a culture puts fun over the demands of survival, the writing is on the very wall that is about to be breached. <i>Mutatis mutandis</i>, our condition today is not structurally different from that of our fifth century precursors. “Fun” in all its ramifications—the circus atmosphere enveloping election seasons and the media cosmeticizing of party candidates, the transformation of the electorate into spectators seeking entertainment, the concomitant refusal to pay attention to the pressing issues of the day, the free rein of appetite as a societal “right,” the reluctance or even inability to look beyond the narrow perimeter of immediate caterings, the hypertrophic emphasis on pleasure and gratification at the expense of civic responsibility, the valorizing of and enchantment with violence as a means of escaping boredom, a tendency, as most of us know but are chary of acknowledging, called the “<a href="http://www.newsmax.com/TheWire/wwii-vet-death-race/2013/08/23/id/521952?s=al&amp;promo_code=14A1A-1">thrill kill</a>,” that is fast becoming a <a href="http://clashdaily.com/2013/08/hate-crime-88yr-old-wwii-vet-dead-after-brutal-beating-by-black-teenage-thugs/">signature</a> of the <a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/08/if_gw_bush_had_a_son_hed_look_like_christopher_lane.html">black subculture</a>—has come increasingly to predominate in the sensibility of the age. What goes along with it is a general sense of mental stupefaction that incapacitates and disqualifies the person so afflicted from making informed decisions about matters of social and political import or considering his own long-term interests.</p>
<p>According to the satirical magazine <a href="http://www.theonion.com/articles/study-38-percent-of-people-not-actually-entitled-t,5701/"><i>The Onion</i></a>, 38% of people are not entitled to their own opinion. Tongue solidly lodged in capacious cheek, the magazine reports: “In a surprising refutation of the conventional wisdom on opinion entitlement, a study conducted by the University of Chicago&#8217;s School for Behavioral Science concluded that more than one-third of the U.S. population is neither entitled nor qualified to have opinions.” <i>The Onion</i> may not be that far off the mark; indeed, the percentage is doubtlessly higher. The article continues, citing the renowned ersatz authority Professor Mark Fultz: “While people have long asserted that it takes all kinds, our research shows that American society currently has a drastic oversupply of the kinds who don&#8217;t have any good or worthwhile thoughts whatsoever. We could actually do just fine without them.” Professor Fultz’s conclusions are obviously a tad exaggerated, but knowledgeable experts, like the late Milton Friedman and the late Andrew Breitbart, and probably respected commentators like Mark Steyn and Ann Coulter, would surely agree. Of course, the so-called “intellectual classes” are, for the most part, equally dysfunctional, playing with ideas that have no more bearing on reality than the pursuits of their less privileged counterparts.</p>
<p>But it is not only a question of amusing, tweeting, texting, sexting, video-gaming, i-poding, Biebering, downloading, raving, drugging and golfing ourselves to death. No less damaging are ideological considerations, formulaic convictions, and self-inflating preoccupations with issues that, by any mature standard of value and importance, would be judged as manifestly trivial or, if not wholly inane, indulgently misguided. Many people, for example, particularly among the “elite,” invest their time and energy in taking up the cause of the transgendered or in asserting the social construction of gender, in renaming Muslim vandals as “Asians” or disaffected “youths,” in accusing whites of crimes committed far more often by blacks, in arguing about the status of gay marriage, in misrepresenting Israel as guilty of the very atrocities that define Islamic culture, in trashing neighborhoods in the name of social justice, in legislating the size of soda pop bottles, in prescribing the composition of school lunches, in mandating diversity training programs, and so on—all this while the Middle East is aflame largely due to American policy incompetence, while Russia and China are flexing their muscles in the international arena, while the Muslim Brotherhood is undermining nation after nation and unbridled Muslim immigration is changing the face of Western civilization for the worse, while dedicated enemies like North Korea and Iran are advancing their nuclear ambitions, and while the economy is imploding as we speak. We are like the grade school children for whose benefit the authorities have required bolsters to be placed at the bottom of playground slides to cushion their landing; meanwhile, youngsters in Gaza are learning to fire AK-47s.</p>
<p>Plainly, it is not only the fun culture that distracts and decontextualizes us from matters of national concern, rendering us helpless before our enemies; it is the low-education citizen, the entitlement parasite, and the strident, high-self-esteem ideologue among us who are fiddling while New York, Washington and Detroit burn. And perhaps they must burn if we are ever to come to our senses, to put fun in its proper place as a recreational ingredient of life, to restore the conviction of responsibility for defending a millennial tradition, to cure the pathology of encapsulated indifference, and to expunge the frivolity, appetitive or intellectual, that a comparatively pampered existence has allowed to colonize the Western mind.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Re-Interpreting the Koran</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/david-solway/re-interpreting-the-koran/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=re-interpreting-the-koran</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 01 Aug 2013 04:25:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Solway]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[koran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muslim]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Peace]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terrorism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[theologians]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=198833</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Giving the Religion of Peace its due.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/koran1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-198835" alt="koran1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/koran1-450x321.jpg" width="270" height="193" /></a>As I’ve written on several previous occasions, there exists a sect of reformist Muslims who believe that the Koran has been grievously misread by cavilers and doubters who are convinced that Islam is not a religion of peace, but a violent and imperialistic faith intent on world conquest. The passages in the Koran—and the environing literature as well—that give rise to the animosity of nit-pickers and quibblers, the enlightened Muslims claim, require to be re-interpreted so that their temperate and merciful essence can be made plain to all. Embarking on the process of re-interpretation can be a salutary and liberating task, one that we spurn at the peril of darkest ignorance and counter-productive rancor. Eventually the detractors of Islam may realize that they have failed to grasp the beauty, elegance and rhetoric of conciliation that animate the holy texts and be moved to make amends for their anti-Islamic vitriol and stubborn recidivism.</span></i></p>
<p>To consider only a few salient instances of controversial passages that have been consistently misapprehended.</p>
<p>Koran 2:191, speaking of infidels who do not accept the word of the Prophet, commands us to “kill them wherever you may find them.” Here we must be particularly alert, subtle and astute, for killing the unbelievers does not mean to slay them bodily, but to kill them with kindness, in other words, to shower the candy of life upon them, to reward them with prestigious appointments and lavish emoluments, to bow before them in the streets and welcome them into the homes of the devout, to address them with profound respect, to decorate them with titles and ply them with accolades—until, bedazzled by the nobility and magnanimity of Islam, they are ready to convert.</p>
<p>Similarly, in Koran 2:216, where we read that “fighting is prescribed”  for the faithful, we are to understand that the battle is enjoined to vanquish the evil impulse in Muslim and non-Muslim alike, until universal harmony and jubilation dominate the world. This is the true meaning and purpose of the Caliphate.</p>
<p>When Allah warns in Koran 3:56, with regard to those who reject the faith, “I will punish them with terrible agony,” the supreme Lord does not propose insupportable physical torment but, rather, the moral suffering that comes from the recognition of apostasy or denial, which can only strengthen the fibre of a mortified conscience.</p>
<p>Koran 5:33 informs us that “The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His messenger and strive to make mischief in the land is only this, that they should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off on opposite sides or they should be imprisoned; this shall be as a disgrace for them in this world, and in the hereafter they shall have a grievous chastisement.” Admittedly, this is hard verse to fathom; however, as is often the Prophet’s wont, he is not targeting body parts but engaging in graphic allegory to impress upon both believers and unbelievers the self-torture they will feel, smitten by their higher selves, should they curse the Almighty.</p>
<p>In the same way, Koran 8:12, which reads: “I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them,” is not meant to be taken literally. The true meaning is: browbeat them tactfully and lightly slap their wrists if they persist in their folly and continue to rebuff your acts of philanthropic munificence. This is the Islamic version of tough love.</p>
<p>Koran 18:65-81 is often taken to condone honor killing, since what appears to be the senseless murder of a young man is only meant to spare his parents the trauma of his imminent misdeeds and to prepare the way for a successor.  Of course, one knows that killing is frowned upon in Muslim culture, and this apparent killing of the young man is nothing but the symbolic correlate of expunging his “disobedience” and mischief-making and replacing his wayward sensibility with contrition and the promise of rehabilitation.</p>
<p>Koran 47:35 adjures: “Be not weary and faint-hearted, crying for peace, when you should have the upper hand, for Allah is with you.”  The “upper hand” (Arabic: <i>shakir</i>) refers not to arrogant predominance or to the hand the strikes downward from the crown to the jaw, cleaving the skull in two, but to the hand that is raised heavenward in prayer. Nor should the Muslim “cry for peace,” that is, for relaxation or diversion or couch-potatohood, but should be above all triviality in his desire to know the peace of exaltation. Genuine peace can only be found in the bosom of God</p>
<p>The same procedure leading to the extraction of authentic purport applies, for example, to the Hadith (sayings and acts ascribed to Mohammed). For example:</p>
<p>When, in <i>Bukhari</i> 11:626, Mohammed discloses that &#8220;I decided to order a man to lead the prayer and then take a flame to burn all those who had not left their houses for the prayer, burning them alive inside their homes,” he does not envision the burning of the flesh but the inward fire of self-contempt that slackers and tergiversators will eventually experience. The pain of remorse can indeed be searing.</p>
<p>In <i>Bukhari</i> 52:177, we read that “the Hour [of Resurrection] will not be established until you fight with the Jews.” This admonition obviously has nothing to do with anti-Semitism; the idea is to engage in playful sparring and amiable argumentation with Jews in order to reveal the high spirits, good humor and self-deprecating modesty of Islam, thus impressing the initially skeptical Jews with the genial nature and friendly feelings inherent in the faith.</p>
<p>Analogously, when we find in <i>Ibn Ishaq/Hisham</i> 9:90 the divine behest that “A prophet must slaughter before collecting captives,” neither the term “slaughter” nor “captives” connotes anything malevolent or untoward. “Slaughter” refers to animal sacrifice in homage to the deity; “captives” alludes not to slavery, an abomination which critics of Islam unfairly accuse it of practicing even to this day, but to the human heart binding itself in the golden chains of celestial beatitude.</p>
<p>Thus, when Mohammed, in <i>Tabari</i> 9:69, is reported as saying that “Killing unbelievers is a small matter to us,” we come to understand that this is among the most pacific of passages in the Hadith. By “unbelievers,” Mohammed is once again drawing attention to animal sacrifice on the altar of devotion, for animals do not believe or worship. And by “a small matter,” Mohammed, a master ironist, is merely being facetious. The “small matter” is clearly of gravest importance, the carrying out of certain ritual decrees regarding the treatment of animals, which today justify the custom of <i>halal</i> cuisine.</p>
<p>Again, those who are strangers to nuance will misconstrue a text like <i>Muslim</i> 19: 4294, in which we are told that “When the Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) appointed anyone as leader of an army or detachment he would especially exhort him [to] make a holy war.” A reset is needed if we are to grasp the Prophet’s tenor, for by prosecuting holy war, we are to understand righteous preaching for the benefit of the human soul. No one is to get hurt for Islam is the religion of peace, amity and concord.</p>
<p>I have isolated merely a sparse handful of the myriad comparable passages and tropes that proliferate throughout the Islamic canon. The same habit of re-interpretation—which is actually proper interpretation—of the scriptures is the <i>sine qua non</i> for reading and understanding the traditional texts of Islam. Indeed, every venomous, inflammatory or disturbingly ambiguous passage in the entire range of Islamic writings, counsels, messages and prescriptions, when placed in the appropriate light, can be seen to denote the opposite. We are all <i>dhimmis</i>, second class beings, compared to the Creator. We must all pay the <i>jizzya</i>, or tribute tax, of genuine worship to the Lord of the Universe. We discover our freedom in “perfect slavery” (a term popularized by the <a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/03/bostom_interview_what_went_wrong_with_bernard_lewis.html">medieval Islamic scholars</a> al-Qushayri and Ibn Arabi) to the dictates of an enlightened conscience and ethical behavior. Life is a blessing and a miracle, which the <i>Sharia</i>, by ordering our activities down to the minutest details, confirms and extols—<i>Sharia</i> may look like totalitarian compulsion but it is really perfect love. “Submission” is the triumphal assertion of the sanctified will, that is, submission to our best selves, aka our Islamic selves. Beheading (“smiting of the neck”) is only a metaphor for changing one’s mind about first and last things. And so on.</p>
<p>It is only the literalists, the barbarians, the uneducated, and the unevolved among Muslims who will act in defiance of their sacred texts, even if they happen to constitute a majority. They are patently unable to process what any sensitive and informed person among the <i>ummah</i>—or for that matter, among Jews, Christians and secular Westerners—recognizes immediately: the Koran and its outriders are not what they appear to be to primitive, malicious and uninstructed minds. What seems opaque or problematic becomes instantly transparent to an agile and sympathetic intelligence. For there is no violence or niggardliness in Islam, only light, majesty and infinite tolerance for suffering mankind. This is the charm of the initially paradoxical passage in Koran 5:54: “O believers, take not Jews and Christians as friends; they are friends of each other. Those of you who make them his friends is one of them. God does not guide an unjust people.” By which Mohammed means that one should embrace the foreigner not simply as a friend but as a more-than-friend, a brother, a soul mate, in short, as one cherishes one’s own spirit. Otherwise, one will be in dire want of divine guidance.</p>
<p>We owe a debt of gratitude to the school of Muslim thinkers, editors and redactors without whom we would remain trapped in a tangle of misconceptions respecting the religion of peace.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Opening Wide the Gates of Vienna</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/david-solway/opening-wide-the-gates-of-vienna/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=opening-wide-the-gates-of-vienna</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 25 Jul 2013 04:15:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Solway]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[1683]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gates of vienna]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[koran]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=197874</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What could not be achieved in 1683 is now coming to pass.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/BurqaSharia.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-197914" alt="BurqaSharia" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/BurqaSharia-293x350.jpg" width="293" height="350" /></a>The debate over the nature of Islam continues to fester not only between liberals and conservatives, left and right, but among conservatives as well. It is one of those issues that remain divisively controversial, even among those who share a common or similar political orientation. There is no ultimate consensus on the horizon and there will probably not be a decisive verdict until civil disruption and social mayhem can no longer be ignored or dissembled—what we might designate, taking a page from Janet Napolitano, as “Muslim-caused disasters.” But for the time being, the discussion seems clearly to favor those who maintain that Islam is a “religion of peace” that has been “hijacked” by the extremists within its ranks, a conclusion promoted by politicians seeking votes, professional multiculturalists, brain-dead Hollywood celebrities and producers, and a vast and corrupt media conglomerate that lost its bearings back in the diversity-crazed Sixties when minority hiring and a concomitant “fractious ethnic politics”, as William McGowan put it in a 1993 article for <a href="http://www.city-journal.org/article01.php?aid=1473"><i>City Journal</i></a>, became the rules of the game.</p>
<p>Sometimes the pro-Islam argument is rendered a little more intricate to introduce distinctions that lend a scholarly patina to the dispute. Clare Lopez, Senior Fellow at the Center for Security Policy, writes of a member of the anti-Muslim Brotherhood community who nevertheless regards “Islamist ideology as a mere ‘Sharia Hypothesis’…that has no demonstrable connection to classical Islam” (personal communication). For this conflicted individual, as for so many of his likeminded counterparts, Islamic doctrine does not form the basis for Islamic terrorism. Frequently we are told that Islam does not constitute a solid bloc of theological conviction and practice but is many different things, a protean religion subject to myriad interpretations. The split between Shia and Sunni would seem to reinforce this notion, except for the lamentable fact that both wings of the faith are united in their desire to restore the Caliphate and to subdue the West to its hegemony.</p>
<p>Often a historical thesis is added to the mix, that is, Islam enjoyed its benign and enlightened periods over the long course of time and flourished as an emancipatory culture in Abbasid Baghdad, Umayyad Cordoba, and during portions of the reign of the Ottoman Empire. Unfortunately for this pleasant perspective, major historians of Islam like Ignaz Goldhizer, Robert Irwin, Serge Trifkovic, Ibn Warraq, Bat Ye’or and Andrew Bostom, among a constellation of others, have scuttled this urban myth so thoroughly in their painstakingly researched volumes—revealing the lapses and misconceptions that vitiate much of the work of such experts as Bernard Lewis and Malise Ruthven—that there is no longer any excuse for continuing to believe in Islam as a civilizing force.</p>
<p>At the outset, it should be obvious that one cannot begin to understand Islam, or at least come to some reasonable approximation of what Islam entails, unless one has read the Koran. Most of those interlocutors with whom I have discussed the question of Islam—Western liberals and conservatives, who twist themselves into knots to avert the accusation of “Islamophobia”—simply have not done so. They have read desultory commentaries by various ostensible pundits or perused newspaper editorials or watched the TV News, that is, they glean their information chiefly from tainted sources. Some have actually read books <i>about</i> Islam, usually presenting laundered versions of the faith, but when I ask them what they make of the pivotal ayah in Koran 2:193, for example, they are at a complete loss. Islam is a religion of imperial conquest, and the Prophet’s marching order is clear and inescapable: “Fight against them until there is no more <i>fitnah</i> (temptation, tumult, disbelief) and Allah’s religion reigns supreme.” There is no way to interpret this passage as anything other than a divinely inspired summons to perpetual war leading to the establishment of a universal Caliphate—a command devoutly adhered to by the so-called “extremists.”</p>
<p>Reading the Koran is only a start. Those who wish to enter the intellectual fray equipped with a modicum of credibility should also gain some familiarity with the ancillary literature, both canonical and exegetical. Reformist Muslims will already possess the requisite erudition, but unfortunately the tendency they evince is to cherry-pick mainly those earlier, generally superseded passages in the Koran that impart a rosy hue to their argumentation, or they set about assiduously re-interpreting and contextualizing whatever tropes and injunctions are manifestly indigestible, as I contended in a recent <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/david-solway/the-question-of-islamic-reform/">article</a> for this site. Their efforts are understandable since they cannot surrender the faith that cradles their needs and susceptibilities, despite its dogmatic and ingrained resistance to beneficial change. Thus they must find ways to accommodate what they know to what they want.</p>
<p>But there are other facts apart from the scriptural that need to be considered. Those who defend or support Islam against the claim that it is an inherently violent, aggressive and sanguinary faith disregard or are ignorant of the concept of a frequency of distribution of extreme events. As Paul Austin Murphy points out in an <a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/07/can_the_british_conservative_party_be_critical_of_islam.html">article</a> for <i>American Thinker</i>, as if in confirmation of Samuel Huntington’s statement that the borders of Islam are bloody, Islam is the key ingredient in the civil wars and sporadic conflicts raging in the Philippines, Thailand, Nigeria, Kenya, Chechnya, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Kashmir, India, Indonesia, the Sudan, Lebanon (and Syria, of course), Ethiopia, Chad—to name only some of the trouble spots.</p>
<p>Islam has also breached the West, sectors of major cities having become Sharia enclaves and no-go zones, and civil violence, rapes, “grooming,” murders, riots, and the takeover of municipal residential zones proceeding on a daily basis. <a href="http://www.meforum.org/2646/worldwide-trends-in-honor-killings">91% of honor killings</a> worldwide are committed by Muslims. The argument that Muslims represent only a minority of the immigrant population in the West, and the radicals among them merely a tiny fraction of that sliver, does not stand up to examination. Muslims are the fastest growing demographic in many host nations and constitute a statistically significant proportion of the population in countries like France, Germany, Belgium and the United Kingdom, where they exercise power and influence through voting patterns, subtle behind-the-scenes pressure, infiltration of various governing bodies and physical menace.</p>
<p>It is precisely here that Raymond Ibrahim’s principle of the “<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/islams-rule-of-numbers-and-the-london-beheading/">rule of numbers</a>” comes into play. In his own words, it is a “rule that expresses itself with remarkable consistency: The more Muslims grow in numbers, the more Islamic phenomena intrinsic to the Muslim world—in this case, brazen violence against ‘infidels’—appear.” As the Muslim immigrant population reaches critical mass, violence increases exponentially, in ratios meticulously tracked by Ibrahim. Relatively peaceful when the numbers are small, the Islamic cohort becomes incrementally and progressively belligerent as the numbers rise. “The question is,” he concludes, “how long will leftist media and politicians refuse to face reality, including by propagating the <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/an-analysis-of-al-qaidas-worldview/">false “grievance” claim</a>, which, once Muslims reach enough numbers—as is projected for Europe—will be discarded for the full-blown jihad?”</p>
<p>The incendiary developments on the Italian island of Lampedusa, a way station for Tunisian, Libyan and Moroccan refugees, is, in the <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/enza-ferreri/an-island-in-revolt-a-window-into-europes-future/">words</a> of journalist Enza Ferreri, “a window into Europe’s future.” In 2011, she writes, “according to a report of the <a href="http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/RegularSession/Session23/A-HRC-23-46-Add3_en.pdf">United Nation’s Human Rights Council</a>, “[a]pproximately 60,000 irregular migrants arrived [in Italy] as part of the 2011 influx from North Africa,” primarily from Tunisia and Libya. Around <a href="http://afrocosmopolitan.com/italy-60000-immigrants-received-in-2011">50,000 of these came to Lampedusa</a>.” During the flux of arrivals and departures, she continues, when these illegals would be settled elsewhere in Italy and in Europe, “there were many times when the <a href="http://www.enzaferreri.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/lampedusa-italy-part-i-what-happened-in.html">number of newcomers was higher than that of the locals</a>. On those occasions, when natives were outnumbered, there were tales of local women having to be accompanied everywhere to protect them from immigrants’ unwanted attention, sacked shops, apartment doors forced open, people returning home to find Tunisians sitting at the dining table eating and, after the intruders’ departure, some householders even discovering faeces inside saucepans.”</p>
<p>Many of these aliens, Ferreri writes in <a href="http://gatesofvienna.net/2013/07/why-lampedusa/"><i>The Gates of Vienna</i></a>, “are not refugees [but] economic migrants in search of…welfare benefits in Europe.” They constitute an invasion that has destroyed the island’s economy and devastated its social structure. The harbors are blocked with transit boats so that local fishermen often find themselves deprived of access to their livelihood. The reception center was burned to the ground by a mob of disgruntled illegals. Residents keep their children indoors and barricade themselves in their houses during the night. No matter. The pope on his July 8, 2013 <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/08/pope-globalisation-of-indifference-lampedusa">visit</a> to Lampedusa mourned “the globalization of indifference” to the plight of Third World migrants, <a href="http://www.positanonews.it/articoli/98398/prima_uscita_dal_vaticano_per_papa_francesco_che_visitera_lampedusa_la_frontiera_dei_disperati.html">describing</a> the island as “the frontier of the desperate.” Blind to the irony of his portrayal, the Holy Father got the frontier right, the desperate wrong. EU asylum regulations privileging “refugees” over natives have turned the island into a simmering volcano. The Lampedusan experience is Europe’s sinister destiny, as the island microcosm projects on a vaster scale to the continental mainland. One recalls Oriana Fallaci’s horror in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Rage-Pride-Oriana-Fallaci/dp/0847825043/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1374409390&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=oriana+fallaci+books"><i>The Rage and the Pride</i></a> at the spectacle of public squares in Florence, having become Muslim encampments, reeking of urine and ordure.</p>
<p>This is indeed the Europe of the future, and, in many different regions and cities, it is also the Europe of the present. Jean Raspail’s prophetic vision in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Camp-Saints-Jean-Raspail/dp/1881780074/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1374408993&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=the+camp+of+the+saints+by+jean+raspail"><i>The Camp of the Saints</i></a> of a collapsing Europe swamped by millions of Muslim boat people, havoc in the streets, churches mutating into mosques—a novel much reviled when it was first published in 1973—is gradually and perhaps irreversibly coming to pass. Those of us who believe that America and the remnant Commonwealth are exempt will be in for a nasty surprise. And it matters little which political stripe or kit of ideological sympathies characterize the enablers of Islam. For the facts are in. The gates of Vienna have been opened wide. What Islam could not accomplish in 1683 by military assault, it is now in the process of achieving via immigration, accompanied by spasmodic bouts of terror and with the eager complicity of Western intellectuals, submissive politicians, befuddled clergy and a debauched media apparatus.</p>
<p><i>Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin.</i> The writing is on the wall.</p>
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		<title>The Question of Islamic Reform</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/david-solway/the-question-of-islamic-reform/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-question-of-islamic-reform</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 12 Jul 2013 04:07:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Solway]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muslim]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[reform]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Does the "Religion of Peace" have within it the capacity to be brought into modernity? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/islam_prayer.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-196614" alt="islam_prayer" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/islam_prayer.jpg" width="291" height="320" /></a><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/islam_prayer.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-196614" alt="islam_prayer" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/islam_prayer.jpg" width="291" height="320" /></a>Perhaps the major theological problem confronting the revisionist Muslim community today—i.e., those whom we call “moderates”  or “secular-oriented intellectuals”—is the canonical scriptures which define their faith and without which Islam would cease to exist. The dilemma for these “enlightened Muslims” is the Koran itself, with its ubiquitous summons to warfare, conquest, enslavement and social and economic persecution of vanquished peoples, which is why they are preoccupied, to the brink of obsession, with the twin concepts of re-interpretation and contextualization.</p>
<p>These meliorists are convinced that Islam is diametrically opposed to something called “Islamism,” that Islam is <i>essentially</i> a “religion of peace” rather than a bellicose imperial movement and that its founding texts therefore invite reinterpretation. This belief can be readily demolished by anyone with a cursory acquaintance with the Islamic literature and a modicum of common sense. For once the incendiary and violent passages are expurgated from the Koran and the Hadith, and the philosophical and political curriculum appropriately bowdlerized, there is far too little left over on which to base a credible and authoritative, world-historical faith. Indeed, as I have <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/david-solway/can-muslim-activism-be-done-right/">argued before</a>, the result would resemble a version of Baha’i’ and could no longer legitimately be called Islam. Re-interpretation is effectively a dead end, a theological placebo swallowed by the naïve or the willfully ignorant who find the strong medicine of reality unpalatable or even abhorrent.</p>
<p>The notion of contextualization fares no better. Here the thesis is that one must adopt a historical or dialectical perspective on the progressive evolution of belief systems. The repugnant portions of the scriptures are understood to apply only to the times in which they were conceived and written. Of course, there is some truth to this contention. The Bible also contains offensive passages which have been despumated with the passing of time. But the difference between the Bible and the Koran is categorical. The former is largely narrative and parabolic in structure and the parts we would regard as objectionable are comparatively few. The Koran, on the contrary—especially the longer, Medinan section—is almost unrelentingly belligerent and exhortative, commanding the believer to slay, conquer, oppress and impose draconian taxes on those who have been subjugated.</p>
<p>To <a href="http://www.blogwrath.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/islam-vs-islamism-2.jpg">say</a>, as did reformer Salim Mansur, an apostle of contextualization, that Jesus should not be held responsible for the actions of his followers and therefore, by implication, neither should Mohammed is to miss the point entirely. Jesus commanded the faithful to turn the other cheek, not to “slay the unbelievers wherever you find them” (Koran 9:5). Jesus is in no need of contextualization. Judaism differs inasmuch as the messiah has not yet arrived and the fundamental commandments are both few and benign. In Christianity, as we have noted, Jesus is a harbinger of peace and love, and his exegetes, like Saint Paul, are fallible human beings whose utterances are seen to be open to debate. In Islam, however, the word of the Prophet, transmitted by Allah via the angel Gabriel, is set in theological stone; it cannot be reinterpreted or contextualized, only abrogated by Mohammed himself. Its directives are neither locally nor temporally specific. They are meant to be understood as having general and timeless application, constituting the default position of Islamic belief. Efforts to neuter such clearly unmistakable and bloody imperatives, which ramify throughout the Koran—as, for example, in the <a href="http://www.muslimaccess.com/articles/jihad/kill_the_infidels.asp">Muslim Access website</a> which strenuously labors to sanitize the intractable—are embarrassingly disingenuous.</p>
<p>The abiding, if not insoluble, problem with the seductive hypothesis of contextualization is a kind of prolepsis, an anticipation of change before it happens—which in this case would then render the original event tolerable. Are we to assume, in other words, that the beheading of 600-900 Jewish males of the <a href="http://www.hirhome.com/islam/art.htm"><i>Banu Qurayza</i></a> and the enslavement of their women and children at the Battle of the Trench is perfectly understandable because it occurred in 627? That the <a href="http://islammonitor.org/index.php?option=com_content&amp;id=3312:islams-indian-slave-trade-part-i-in-islams-genocidal-slavery-">annihilation</a> of 60-80 million Hindus during the conquest of India is historically unexceptionable because it occurred between the 11<sup>th</sup> and 16<sup>th</sup> centuries? Need we merely contextualize such atrocities—without apology—in order not to be unduly disturbed by them? Were Islamic warriors more primitive in the unenlightened past but are now well on the way toward civilized behavior and international standards of just conduct?</p>
<p>In that case, how are we to process the myriad commands and injunctions to kill, brutalize and devastate that remain “on the books,” are reckoned as mandatory, and are regarded as perennially valid by the majority of the world’s practicing Muslims. How are these rules and ukases to be contextualized in the present, let alone re-interpreted? How does one reinterpret and contextualize the manifold orders to slaughter, mutilate, enslave and exploit the infidel that are rife throughout what is considered a holy and <i>eternal</i> text coeval with the Creator? To agree that such recalibration is possible without expunging the Islamic faith from the ledger of the world’s major religions or turning it into something unrecognizable is a delusion that flies in the face of reality.</p>
<p>A corollary argument we often come across is that Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, only needs time in which to reform itself. I have contended that Islam cannot be reformed and yet perdure as Islam. But even were renovation possible, the issue is that, in a nuclear age in which terrorist organizations diligently seek the acquisition of WMDs and will, most likely, eventually get them, we no longer have the time to wait upon an Islamic “higher criticism” to disarm an aggressively militant faith—which is also a political ideology. Ayaan Hirsi Ali <a href="http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2013/06/ayaan-hirsi-ali-on-2-state-delusion-reaching-a-2-state-solution-is-to-betray-god-the-koran-the-hadit.html">believes</a> that Islam will undergo a positive transformation, a necessary “cultural change,” in another hundred years or so. Were this even remotely possible, the predicament would persist: we do not have another hundred years in which to exercise our patience. I doubt if we even have a decade before a widespread conflagration is ignited and casualties reach astronomic proportions, a consequence that follows in the wake of Islamic virulence.</p>
<p>Roger Kimball, <a href="http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2013/07/07/world-order-and-islamism/?singlepage=true">parsing</a> Charles Hill’s new book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Trial-Thousand-Years-Institution-Publication/dp/0817913246/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1373244370&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=charles+hill+a+thousand+years"><i>Trial of a Thousand Years: World Oder and Islamism</i></a>, suggests that “there are millions upon millions of Muslims outside the Mideast who have made their peace with modernity.” But such a metamorphosis strictly implies that these moderates are not really Muslims any longer, and certainly not Muslims in good standing. They are <i>nominal</i> Muslims, dissembling members of the faith, Stanislavsky Muslims engaged in a species of method acting, imagining themselves to be what they are not, for Islam as such is not amenable to assimilation into the Western, post-Westphalian world order. Re-interpretation is predicated on deliberate negligence just as contextualization is a sop to the intellectual conscience, and both are instances of theological fraud and the desire to retain a venerable designation or a cultural <a href="http://www.powercube.net/other-forms-of-power/bourdieu-and-habitus/"><i>habitus</i></a> (French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s term) to which they are neither logically nor honestly entitled.</p>
<p>“Islam’s borders are bloody and so are its innards,” wrote Samuel Huntington in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Clash-Civilizations-Remaking-World-Order/dp/1451628978/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1373314823&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=the+clash+of+civilizations+and+the+remaking+of+world+order+samuel+p.+huntington"><i>The Clash of Civilizations</i></a>, and events appear to have proven him right. But it is even worse than that. The blood has spilled copiously from the borders of Islam across the borders of the West and into the very nexus of our private and public lives. If Islam were reformable, I would be in the vanguard of those encouraging the anti-jihadist activists and the sparse handful of moderates who have attempted to establish a new synthesis. But it is not reformable. It cannot be re-interpreted, contextualized and transformed while still remaining the religion of Allah and his Prophet.</p>
<p>We need to know and name what we are dealing with and devise an appropriate strategy to contest and defeat a determined adversary if we intend to ensure our survival. It is as simple—and uncompromising—as that. Otherwise we will sink into the Spenglerian abyss as merely one more civilization that has grown weary of conflict and the requisites of perpetuation, and has wished itself, as Spengler wrote in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Decline-West-Abridged-Oswald-Spengler/dp/1400097002/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1373395066&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=oswald+spengler+decline+of+the+west">The Decline of the West</a>, into the featureless dark.</p>
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		<title>Living in a Backwards World</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/david-solway/living-in-a-backwards-world-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=living-in-a-backwards-world-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 02 Jul 2013 04:07:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Solway]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Karsenty]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Why all indicators point to cultural collapse.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/sharia-controlled-zone.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-195080" alt="sharia-controlled-zone" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/sharia-controlled-zone.jpg" width="266" height="137" /></a><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">A new meme or figure of speech has begun to circulate among conservative writers and thinkers with increasing frequency and appositeness—namely, that we are living in a world turned upside down, to cite the title of a major <a href="http://www.amazon.com/World-Turned-Upside-Down-Global/dp/1594035741/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1372516746&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=the+world+turned+upside+down+melanie+phillips">book</a> by Melanie Philips, itself derived from Christopher Hill’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/World-Turned-Upside-Down-Revolution/dp/0140137327/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1372516402&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=the+world+turned+upside+down+radical+ideas+during+the+english+revolution">study</a> of revolutionary 17<sup>th</sup> century in England. (The term “world” is used by these writers to refer primarily to the Western sociopolitical domain or provinces thereof.) Almost everywhere we look we see this trope corroborated by extensive empirical testimony, of which I will flag only a few significant instances.</span></b></p>
<p>It is a world, as we have just seen, in which respectable and knowledgeable anti-jihadist freedom fighters Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller are forbidden entry to the U.K. as disturbers of public order and social peace while avowed terrorists are welcomed into the country and allowed to live handsomely on the public dole. It is in this same benighted nation that anti-Sharia activists Tommy Robinson and Kevin Carroll of the English Defence League are arrested for entering a Sharia-controlled zone in Tower Hamlets, a borough of London, on their way to Woolwich to honor Drummer Lee Rigby, slaughtered by Islamic terrorists. As <a href="http://gatesofvienna.net/2013/06/tommy-robinson-arrested-for-entering-a-shariah-controlled-zone/">reported</a> on <i>The Gates of Vienna</i> website, “the Metropolitan police have now taken on the responsibility of enforcing the borders of these shariah-controlled zones, applying the rules laid down by the Islamic inhabitants.”</p>
<p>It is a world in which courageous media analyst Philippe Karsenty, who has <a href="http://vimeo.com/17226900">shown</a> beyond doubt that the infamous al-Dura event implicating Israel is an out-and-out hoax perpetrated by France 2 TV, finds himself convicted by the French courts for defamation—the Dreyfus affair <i>redux</i>. The Court of Cassation’s decision to remand the case to the Court of Appeals, which had originally acquitted Karsenty and then overturned its prior verdict, is not only “outrageous,” as Karsenty justifiably claimed, but legally problematic. As the JTA news source <a href="http://www.jta.org/2013/06/26/news-opinion/israel-middle-east/karsenty-convicted-fined-for-defamation-in-al-dura-case">reported</a>, “In returning the case to the appeals court, the high court said the appeals court had overstepped its bounds in ordering France 2 to send it the rushes of the report.” In other words, from the perspective of the High Court, soliciting evidence is impermissible. Shades of Canada’s Human Rights Tribunals and <a href="http://scc.lexum.org/decisia-scc-csc/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/12876/index.do">Supreme Court decision</a>, which regard truth as unacceptable in their proceedings if it offends a member of a designated minority group. The same travesty exists in many European nations.</p>
<p>It is a world in which the adherents of catastrophic global warming deliberately ignore the massively accumulating evidence to the contrary and politicians are inaugurating policies, based on a fraudulent and corrupted science, that promise to destroy their economies.</p>
<p>It is a world in which powerful Democratic politicians in the U.S. oppose Voter ID laws on the grounds that such legislation would discriminate against black minorities. The facts that (1) I.D. is required for almost every other form of access to official institutions irrespective of caste or color, and that (2) the absence of such laws results directly in voter fraud and the skewing of electoral results, almost always in the Democrats’ favor, are conveniently forgotten or intentionally suppressed.</p>
<p>It is a world in which Iran <a href="http://www.thetrumpet.com/article/10624.19.0.0/world/military/iran-chairs-the-un-conference-on-disarmament">chairs</a> the UN Conference on Disarmament and Syria was recently a <a href="http://blog.unwatch.org/index.php/2013/04/10/u-s-condemns-syrian-membership-on-u-n-human-rights-committee-as-it-meets-in-paris/">member</a> of the United Nations Human Rights Committee.</p>
<p>It is a world that has fallen in love with a manifestly false Palestinian narrative to which it unthinkingly subscribes and that adamantly refuses to consult the historical muniments that are readily available to any interested mind—in other words, a <a href="http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/euhemerism">Euhemeristic</a> world that interprets “myths as traditional accounts of historical persons and events” (Merriam-Webster).</p>
<p>It is a world that insists on portraying Islam as a “religion of peace” when a prodigious number of its expressions in the theological canon, in the jurisprudential literature, and in actual and undeniable events on the domestic and international stages indisputably indicate the complete reverse. In this world, minority cultures and especially the Islamic community are, in effect, given precedence over the heritage cultures. Here the West could learn from Vladimir Putin who, in an <a href="http://www.israpundit.com/archives/55942">address</a> to the Duma on February 4, 2013, stated in part: “In Russia live Russians. Any minority, from anywhere, if it wants to live in Russia…should respect the Russian laws. If they prefer Sharia Law, then we advise them to go to those places where that’s the state law…we will not grant them special privileges, or try to change our laws to fit their desires, no matter how loud they yell ‘discrimination’. We better learn from the suicides of America, England, Holland and France, if we are to survive as a nation.”</p>
<p>Experiencing terrorist atrocities on our own soil; remarking how Islamic-inspired anti-blasphemy laws are gradually encroaching upon the bedrock principle of free speech; noting the rising incidence of Jew-baiting and antisemitic propaganda among Islamic groups and organizations; and witnessing the epidemic of Muslim rapes of non-Muslim girls and women in Australia, Britain and Scandinavia (to name only the most prominent examples), we know—or should know—that Putin is absolutely right. The ignominy is only compounded by the shameful response of our media and government apparatchiks who dismiss, cover over or explain away these abominations as the fault of an uncaring society that treats its immigrants badly.</p>
<p>Such instances of sheer malfeasance and, not to put too fine a word upon it, utter stupidity can be multiplied at will, leading many conservative writers to re-interpret George Orwell’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/1984-60th-Anniversary-Plume-George-Orwell/dp/0452262933/ref=sr_1_1_title_0_main?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1372529392&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=1984+by+george+orwell"><i>1984</i></a>, Aldous Huxley’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Brave-World-P-S-Aldous-Huxley/dp/0061767646/ref=sr_1_1_title_0_main?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1372529194&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=brave+new+world+by+aldous+huxley"><i>Brave New World</i></a>, Arthur Koestler’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Darkness-at-Noon-Arthur-Koestler/dp/1416540261/ref=sr_1_1_title_0_main?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1372529259&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=darkness+at+noon+by+arthur+koestler"><i>Darkness at Noon</i></a> and Jean Raspail’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Camp-Saints-Jean-Raspail/dp/1881780074/ref=sr_1_1_title_0_main?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1372529333&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=the+camp+of+the+saints"><i>The Camp of the Saints</i></a> not as mere dystopian novels prone to exaggeration but as prophetically accurate visions of the future—a future which has become the present. I would add to this apocalyptic library Samuel Butler’s 1872 novel <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Erewhon-Samuel-Butler/dp/1461053323/ref=sr_1_1_title_0_main?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1372529481&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=erewhon+by+samuel+butler"><i>Erewhon</i></a>, describing a world in which everything is done backwards and inefficiently. (“Erewhon” is “Nowhere” spelled approximately backwards.)</p>
<p>In Erewhon, for example, there are no machines (cf. our mounting legislation against successful industries in favor of unworkable “renewable resources”); coinage is trimmed (cf. our sinking currencies); offenders against the law are coddled as ill (cf. our pampering of lawbreakers as suffering victims of social indifference or oppression); the ill are regarded as felons (cf. the innocent are often criminalized); and so on <i>ad nauseam</i>. We live in a backwards world in which the decent are regarded as indecent, defenders of western institutions are considered as terrorists, correct naming is derogated and often prosecuted as slander and “hate speech,” violence is justified if committed by our enemies, unseasonable cold weather is interpreted as an infallible sign of global warming—the beat goes on.</p>
<p>It should be clear by this time that we have lost our bearings and have sacrificed both our sense of reality and our survival as a genuinely liberal culture on the altar of unreflected sentiment, a reluctance to deal with or even recognize unequivocal evidence, and a wholly mistaken conception of our fundamental interests. We have, for the most part, colluded in an agreement that upside down is right-side up, backwards is forwards, and madness is sanity, as if we had been stricken by the ideological version of the Black Plague. It is a world gone perhaps irreversibly mad, for certain forms of madness may be untreatable—in which case we are truly lost. Of course, the world has never been in its right mind, but we can say that the comparatively more enlightened sectors in the West have at least perambulated canzicrans, sideways like a crab.</p>
<p>Today, sideways would be a blessing, for we are moving inexorably backwards—toward the infancy of the mind, toward the re-medievalization of power relations, toward cultural dissolution, toward a renewed primitivism issuing in civilizational suicide, in short, toward our contemporary Erewhon, our “Nowhere,” which is also an anagram for: “Now here.”</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>C’mon Man!</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/david-solway/cmon-man/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=cmon-man</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 27 Jun 2013 04:16:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Solway]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Benghazi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[IRS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muslim]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=194520</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Applying the iconic mainstay of sports lexicon to the world of Barack Obama.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Obamaj.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-194523" alt="Obamaj" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Obamaj-450x350.png" width="315" height="245" /></a>ESPN’s Monday Night Football pre-game show is watched chiefly for its “C’mon man!” segment. The phrase, which derives from common speech and was big in the Sixties, has now become iconic, a mainstay of the sports lexicon, and may be cogently applied to the political world as well. Implying as it does an attitude of stunned disbelief or eyebrow-raising amazement at any statement or event so palpably absurd as to beggar credibility, it fits the political domain like a catcher’s mitt burying a perfect strike. It is especially apt when brought to bear on the utterances of Barack Obama. As for example, to cite at random:</p>
<blockquote><p><i>“Hope and change”</i>—C’mon man!</p>
<p><i>“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for”</i>—C’mon man!</p>
<p><i>“This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and the planet began to heal”</i>—C’mon man!</p>
<p><i>“The state of our union is strong”</i>—C’mon man!</p>
<p><i>“I don’t know what the term is in Austrian”</i>—C’mon man!</p>
<p><i>“Navy corpse-man”</i>—C’mon man!</p>
<p><i>“Our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes, and I see many of them in the audience here today”</i>—C’mon man!</p>
<p><i>“I’ve now been in 57 states—I think one left to go”</i>—C’mon man!</p>
<p>Re. questions about his birth certificate: “<i>We&#8217;re not going to be able to solve our problems if we get distracted by sideshows and carnival barkers”</i>—C’mon man!</p>
<p><i>“We’re the country that built the Intercontinental Railroad”</i>—C’mon man!</p>
<p><i>“I</i><i>slam has a proud tradition of tolerance”</i>—C’mon man!</p>
<p><i>“We see it in the history of Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition”</i>—C’mon man!</p>
<p>“<i>The first nation to recognize my country was Morocco”</i>—C’mon man!</p>
<p><i>“Ramadan is a reminder that Islam has always been part of America and that Muslims have made extraordinary contributions to our country”</i>—C’mon man!</p>
<p>Re. Fast &amp; Furious: <i>“I heard it on the news about this story”</i>—C’mon man!</p>
<p>Re. the IRS scandal: <i>“I first learned about it from the same news reports that I think most people learned about this”</i>—C’mon man!</p>
<p><i>“The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam”</i>—C’mon man!</p>
<p><i>The Falkland Islands (aka Las Malvinas) are “the Maldives”</i>—C’mon man!</p>
<p>Re. the Benghazi betrayal: “<i>There’s no there there”</i>—C’mon man!</p></blockquote>
<p>The list of such stupefying, ludicrous, deceptive and/or misguided statements can be indefinitely extended, betokening a president who makes Chris Berman seem like a soft-spoken, erudite and limpid thinker and a master of lapidary rhetoric. Indeed, the bordereau of gaffes delivered by Obama over the course of his meteoric career has spawned a considerable number of Internet sites whose sole purpose is to track the gibberish of probably the most arrogant, mendacious and ignorant president ever to disgrace the Oval Office. Anyone who actually believes, or believes in, this president, whether a single mother living in the barrio or a sophisticated intellectual prancing in the halls of academia or pontificating in the media, is in serious need of rehab and ideological detoxification. For such people are impervious to reality and prefer living in a fantasy to confronting undeniable, real-world evidence. The unstanchable torrent of nonsense that surges from the vast reservoir of presidential malapropisms is indicative of both Obama’s self-regarding ineptitude and his supporters’ unflinching gullibility.</p>
<p>The segue to such a derisory concatenation of presidential remarks practically announces itself:</p>
<blockquote><p><i>This is the huckster the American electorate put in the White House?</i>—C’mon man!</p>
<p><i>This is the student of Frank Marshall Davis and Saul Alinsky the American people trusted to secure their economic interests?</i>—C’mon man!</p>
<p><i>This is the ostensible benefactor who will hand out free phones, pay off mortgages, stimulate industry, green the environment and repair the medical system?</i>—C’mon man!</p>
<p><i>This is the magus who will solve the world’s problems?</i>—C’mon man!</p>
<p><i>This is the budding climatologist who thinks global warming, which does not exist, is a top priority?</i>—C’mon man!</p>
<p><i>This is the narcissist whose problematic antecedents, disreputable cronies, broken promises, embarrassing bloopers and authoritarian methods of governance the liberal press has protected and cossetted?</i>—C’mon man!</p></blockquote>
<p>The two conjoined words, “President” and “Obama,” are connotatively among the great oxymorons of the current age. In conclusion, another phrase which has entered the idiom would seem particularly appropriate with regard to Barack Obama:</p>
<p>He should be voted off the island.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Can Muslim Activism Be Done Right?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/david-solway/can-muslim-activism-be-done-right/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=can-muslim-activism-be-done-right</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 25 Jun 2013 04:30:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Solway]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[moderates]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Progressive Muslims Institute Canada]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[reform]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=194185</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Or can it be done at all?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/kr.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-194222" alt="kr" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/kr-450x337.jpg" width="315" height="236" /></a><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">In an interesting and presumably comforting article recently posted on this site, titled <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/volpe/muslim-activism-done-right/">Muslim Activism Done Right</a>, Michael Volpe draws our attention to a new Canadian advocacy group, Progressive Muslims Institute Canada (PMIC). Anti-extremist, amenable to secular values and politically communal, PMIC seeks to counter the theological summons to jihad and the spirit of antisemitic hatred embraced by its majoritarian co-religionists, and to establish friendly working relations with the Jewish community. Volpe understands this new project as a welcoming sign and harbinger of the future, suggesting the hope for a gradual reconciliation between heretofore antagonistic groups and the restoration of both sanity and the desire for social peace within the Muslim collective.</span></i></p>
<p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/Progressive-Muslims-Institute-Canada/532732110118067?ref=stream">According to</a> the Director General of the PMIC, Tahir Gora, the Institute “strongly denounces all forms of extremism and terrorism in the name of Islam” and promotes “gender equality…liberal, progressive and secular values among Muslims, and believes in a clear separation between religion and state.” Jewish organizations like the <a href="http://www.cija.ca/community-partners/ramadan/">The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs</a> (CIJA), whose concern with interfaith outreach trumps Jewish security, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B'nai_B'rith">B’nai B’rith</a> have enthusiastically applauded such <a href="http://islamicnetsuites.wordpress.com/">initiatives</a>. And of course, developments like PMIC are a far sight better than jihadist savagery and orthodox adherence to the basic Islamic texts.</p>
<p>But there is a real problem here that Volpe’s article refuses to acknowledge. What these “moderates” or enlightened Muslims are proposing, however laudable, has little to do with mainstream Islam, whose fundamental scriptures cannot be rewritten on pain of apostasy and execution. Any scrupulous reading of the Koran and the attendant canonical and jurisprudential literature should make it amply clear that injunctions to slaughter, conquest, oppression and domination are inscribed in the faith. No attempt at what is euphemistically called “re-interpretation” or “contextualizing” can be expected to gain even modest traction in the larger Muslim world.</p>
<p>Efforts like those advanced by PMIC are doomed to fail. They cling precariously to a comparatively few benign tropes in the earlier, Meccan portion of the Koran, which are in any case subject to the principle of abrogation (<a href="http://everythingislam.wordpress.com/2011/06/27/the-doctrine-of-an-nasikh-wa%E2%80%99l-mansukh-abrogation-in-the-quran-and-the-idea-of-a-hijacked-religion-part-2-muhammad-sameel-%E2%80%98abd-al-haqq-definitions-of-abrogation-an-nasikh/">Nasikh/Mansukh</a>) and replacement by the later, more ruthless and bloodthirsty passages in the Medinian Koran. The “activists” are incubating an entirely new religion, an ostensible form of Islam that is no longer Islam but something closer to, perhaps, the inoffensiveness of Bahá’i, which is vaguely related to Shi’a Islam but essentially independent of it and condemned by both Sunni and Shi’a as <i>haraam</i> (sinful, unclean, forbidden).</p>
<p>Scrub the propulsion toward imperial ferocity from the bedrock tenets of Islam, separate mosque from state, eliminate the doctrine of violent jihad and advocate for gender equality, and what you come up with is a fantasy exercise, that is, an Islam divorced from its historical and present reality. It would comprise a body of doctrine completely alien to the rules, beliefs, usages and commands associated with the legacy of Mohammed. Contrary to the pious and uninformed sentiments of the liberal intelligentsia, Islam is not a religion of peace. As Charlie Daniels writing for <i>CSN News</i> <a href="http://asks/">asks</a>, “What kind of religion and what kind of god advocates the wholesale slaughter of ordinary citizens, what kind of clergy send young men to a gruesome death promising them a place in some male-dominated sensuous paradise where they will while away the eons in the arms of multiple virgins?” A few small activist groups stippling the vast Islamic landscape will not do much in the way of terraforming a world.</p>
<p>The fact is, unfortunately, that Islam cannot be reformed if it is to remain Islam. The apostles of secular values, interfaith communion, and reconciliation with the infidel are, as Muslims, in denial of the proscriptions and prescriptions of the faith they continue to profess. Their approach, <a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3771/violence-islamic-texts">writes</a> Mark Durie at <i>The Gatestone Institute</i>, “must at the very least honestly acknowledge Islam&#8217;s traditions of commentary on the Koran, and explain how a large number of violent texts might be viewed in a more liberating light.” But as Durie goes on to show in meticulous and irrefutable detail, explicit calls for violence as the religious obligation of every believer simply cannot be explained away. Context is no “silver bullet against violent texts.”</p>
<p>When PMIC’s honorary director, Arshad Mahmood, <a href="http://www.jewishtribune.ca/news/2013/06/11/i-am-sorry-that-i-did-not-stand-up">apologized</a> to his fellow Canadians, lamenting “I am sorry that although I retain the title of Islam the radicals and the terrorists and the pseudo-intellectuals kept encroaching on my religion until they took complete possession,” he has utterly missed the point. The radicals have not taken possession of Mahmood’s religion, <i>they are faithfully practicing it</i> and enacting its precepts, edicts and solemn duties, as spelled out in sura after sura and verse after verse of the Koran and in the plethora of ancillary texts. If our neo-Muslim evangelists were to be candid as well as unsparingly lucid, they would realize that they are venturing into <i>terra incognita</i>, attempting a reform for which there exists not a single viable historical precedent. If they truly desire peace and moderation, they would have no choice but to apostasize or to acknowledge that they are engaged in a species of reformation whose effect, were it successful, would yield a largely unrecognizable theological amalgam—or, as we’ve noted, a neoteric branch of Bahá’i.</p>
<p>Their efforts are not derisory, if only in that they might theoretically eventuate in a somewhat greater degree of local harmony and a reduced threat level on the home front. But such noble intentions will have little impact on the structure, axioms and psychological ambience of the global religion, and would likely be ephemeral on the domestic scene. The tendency among our media elites, boilerplate intellectuals, political officials and “activist” Muslims to edulcorate Islam as a religion that has been hijacked by disreputables and “extremists” is founded on one, several or all of five factors: ignorance, fear, venality, wishful thinking, or endemic softmindedness. There is no other set of explanations that would account for so monumental an error in judgment and so craven a genuflection before so muscular a supremacist ideology.</p>
<p>And certainly, the official Jewish organizations that have been smitten with the activist bearers of renovating aspirations will learn once again that they have been enchanted by futile and grandiose delusions. Indeed, “<a href="http://islamicnetsuites.wordpress.com/">regularly interface</a>[ing]” with such naïve and self-contradictory assemblies, they have embarked on a fool’s errand and will one day suffer both renewed violence and the bitter regret of history’s chosen dupes and victims.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>The Greatest Scandal of Them All</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/david-solway/the-greatest-scandal-of-them-all/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-greatest-scandal-of-them-all</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 11 Jun 2013 04:20:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Solway]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[China]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[North Korea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[scandals]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terror]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[White House]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Unearthing the biggest disaster plaguing the Obama Administration. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/dc_edited-1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-192758" alt="dc_edited-1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/dc_edited-1.jpg" width="280" height="178" /></a><em>An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.</em></p>
<p>&#8211; attributed to Marcus Tullius Cicero.</p>
<p>We have been reading of late of the blizzard of scandals that has buffeted the Obama administration. Every week or so a major storm wracks the political climate in the U.S., so much so that it is hard not to grow somewhat blasé. Whether it’s the odium of the Benghazi betrayal and ensuing cover-up; or the IRS training its sights on conservative and pro-Israeli organizations; or the DOJ seizing the phone records of News sources; or the Attorney General caught lying (or conveniently forgetting) about a <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/29/us-usa-justice-holder-idUSBRE94S12I20130529">subpoena</a> against a FOX News reporter; or NSA snooping on Verizon customers under a court order granted in April, as if replicating thriller novelist Brad Thor’s grisly tale about internal espionage, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Black-List-Thriller-Brad-Thor/dp/1439192987/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1370612574&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=brad+thor+black+list"><i>Black List</i></a>; or a follow-up spy program code-named PRISM, expanding an operation begun under George W. Bush that was relatively measured, judicially redrawn and discontinued in 2007, but now, in the <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/spy-games-double-standards/">words</a> of Matthew Vadum; “a warrantless surveillance program on steroids”—the time comes when we expect nothing less of a meretricious administration.</p>
<p>The scandals go back years: the Affordable Health Care Act passed in the middle of the night and encrypted in thousands of pages that nobody seems to have read; a multi-billion dollar stimulus project that didn’t stimulate anything; the defrauding of Chrysler’s secured creditors in favor of the UAW when the auto company went <a href="http://notes-ultima.blogspot.ca/2009/06/uawobama-scandal.html">bankrupt</a>; the Fast and Furious gun-running plan yet to be clarified by the Attorney General; the loans and grants to crony Green entrepreneurs who regularly <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obama-inc-sells-gm-stock-for-10-billion-loss/">fail</a> to meet their goals and end up in default; the numbing disgrace of a <a href="http://www.gloria-center.org/2013/06/the-u-s-governments-disastrous-muslim-outreach-efforts-and-the-impact-on-u-s-middle-east-policy-blind-to-terror1/">Muslim outreach scheme</a> that has seen known terrorists and dubious Islamic groups and individuals welcomed at the White House and operating to influence policy at the highest levels of government. The net result is always the same: a modest degree of public indignation followed by business as usual. Sarah Palin is on the money when she <a href="http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/sarah-palin-america-screwed/2013/06/06/id/508498?s=al&amp;promo_code=13BF8-1">laments</a> that “Obama supporters…naively and blindly (despite failure after failure and scandal after scandal) continue to give him the benefit of the doubt.” After all, this may be a scandal-prone administration, there have been others, let’s move on.</p>
<p>In an article for the <i>Wall Street Journal</i> titled “<a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324412604578519482313147400.html">The Decline of the Obama Presidency</a>,” Fred Barnes argues that Obama’s second term is coming undone not because of scandals but because of inept decisions made during his first term—his sclerotic partisanship, his alienating of potential allies, his broken promises. For Barnes, the scandals themselves are not the major factor in “the Obama breakdown,” though they “have worsened his plight and made recovery next to impossible.” Even <i>The New York Times</i> <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/06/06/new-york-times-editorial-board-says-administration-has-lost-all-credibility/">editorializes</a> that the Obama administration has “lost all credibility.”</p>
<p>In a most important way, however, we have tended to miss the point. We do not have the leisure of indifference or jaded boredom. Concerned citizens have no choice but to grapple, in the succinct <a href="http://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2013/06/07/traveling-with-drudge-americas-indispensable-man/2/">depiction</a> of <i>PJ Media</i>’s Roger Simon, with “the absolute Orwellian madness that is the Obama administration.” The issue is not simply that the U.S. government under the suzerainty of Barack Obama is beset by a concatenation of scandals or has proved itself incompetent. Indeed, <i>pace</i> Barnes, poor decision making may be considered scandalous as well. But the real scandal <i>is Barack Obama himself</i>, a man demonstrably unfit to be president of the United States, who makes the hapless Jimmy Carter and the sleazy Bill Clinton look like choir boys. The scandal is that America is being led by a man about whom we know all too little, who has placed his salient records under seal (including his original birth certificate)—a man who, as Bill Schanefelt <a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/06/president_photoshop.html">writes</a> in in an article titled “President Photoshop” in <i>American Thinker</i>, has “left surprisingly few documented footprints in the sands of time”; who is assiduously liquidating the economy; who is gutting the military while rendering it a politically correct monstrosity; whose foreign policy lies in shambles as he cozies up to dictators and theocrats or sits on the sidelines twiddling his thumbs; and who gives every indication of having managed to evade the responsibilities not only of his position but of genuine adulthood.</p>
<p>One might be forgiven for thinking of him as a paragon of cluelessness, except for the fact that, like a spoiled child, he is determined to get his way and has mastered the art of persuasion all along the spectrum from the temper tantrum to surreptitious appeal to feigned innocence—whatever works. The prophecy of Isaiah has come to pass: “As for my people, children are their oppressors&#8230;”(3:12). The child in this case is certainly precocious, shows himself adroit at manipulating both his peers and his elders, and has been educated by a battery of mentors whose outlook on the world is indisputably malign—<a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/06/redistributing_wealth_stealing_under_the_guise_of_law.html">theft</a> masking as “social justice” and “redistribution,” antisemitism, unchecked spending, ends justifying means, the evils of free speech, deception as virtue, self-indulgence rather than duty and obligation. The president has been well schooled in the arts of his masters. No one can deny that Obama is clever, but it is a cleverness in the service of moribund and irresponsible policies. This <i>is</i> Barack Obama, a curious amalgam of petty vindictiveness and ingratiating charm, freighted with a leftwing agenda that has faltered everywhere save in his own sectarian mind. Manifestly, he is not presidential material, not by any stretch of the most enamored imagination, as the country will belatedly learn to its own prohibitive cost.</p>
<p>America has put a disaster in the White House. “America, as my generation knew it,” writes Richard McKenzie Neal in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/America-hanging-Richard-McKenzie-Neal/dp/1477229353/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1370705454&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=richard+mckenzie+neal+america...hanging+by+a+thread"><i>America…Hanging By A Thread</i></a>, “is but an abstract distortion of a time when our country was sustained by the substance of its people. Today’s general population seems to live in a vacuum of ignorance and complacency.” In effect, Obama is a reflection of Rousseau’s “<a href="http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/228686/general-will">general will</a>,” the very image and compendium of a lax, frivolous, puerile and intellectually suborned public that has voted into office its own synoptic representation. But Obama has taken the political game a giant step further, enfeebling the republican structure of a once-great nation and governing in a manner that will eventually impoverish, peonize and endanger the same electorate that gave him their trust and adoration and placed the reins of power in his hands. They are the victims-in-waiting of what Michael Savage has aptly called <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Trickle-Up-Poverty-Stopping-Security/dp/B008W2ZESG/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1370714986&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=michael+savage+trickle+up+poverty"><i>Trickle Up Poverty</i></a>.</p>
<p>For under Obama’s leadership, the nation is in full retreat on every front, both domestic and foreign. Domestically, the debt and the deficit are rising exponentially; real unemployment remains staggeringly high and remunerative jobs are drying up, except for the burgeoning public sector and government sinecures; fiat money continues to be printed; a proliferating tangle of business regulations is garroting the economy; entitlement spending is creating an underclass of dependents and parasites that weakens the fiber of the nation; confiscatory taxes are shrinking the Middle Class; environmentalism-gone-mad is sapping productivity; and FBI training manuals are being scrubbed of references to the Islamic source of local terrorism and thus increasing the likelihood of jihadist atrocities on American soil.</p>
<p>The international theater is equally menacing. Obama likes to boast that al-Qaeda is on the run. This is true in a way, for al-Qaeda is indeed running—straight toward us. North Korea is exporting its nuclear technology to America’s enemies while America dithers. China is militarizing and expanding its influence in the Pacific. Russia is flexing its geopolitical muscles. Turkey is aiming for a neo-Ottoman Caliphate. The Palestinians are bloodsuckers on American largesse, offering nothing in return but self-righteous intransigence, a false historical narrative and systemic Jew-hatred. Egypt, Libya and Syria are imploding—the first two thanks to American meddling and the last—well, we recall that Hillary Clinton lauded Assad as a “reformer.” Iraq and Afghanistan are going rogue. Terror-sponsoring Iran is on the verge of nuclear capability and has made no secret of its enmity toward the U.S. Meanwhile Obama does nothing but take vacations, preen on television, switch to <a href="http://pjmedia.com/zombie/2013/06/07/obama-in-palo-alto-fundraising-with-the-rich-radicals/">campaign mode</a>, target his local adversaries, appoint fools, political dandiprats and ideological doppelgängers to positions of power, and blab about “red lines” to no effect but his own embarrassment. “When the blast of war is in our ears,” exhorts Shakespeare’s Henry V, “then imitate the action of the tiger/Stiffen the sinews…/then lend the eye a terrible aspect.” Obama has imitated the action of the sheep, relaxed the sinews, and gazed benignly upon our enemies.</p>
<p>Apart from pursuing a narrow and rigid social(ist) agenda, Obama is in way beyond his depth, especially in the field of foreign relations. Arguably, this may be his intention, to render the United States unrecognizable to itself and ultimately to turn it into an international laughing stock, a waning power no longer to be taken seriously. Given his “disdain for his country,” writes David Horowitz in the explosive pamphlet <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/david-horowitz/how-obama-betrayed-america/"><i>How Obama Betrayed America</i></a>, Obama “has set in motion policies meant to make America far from indispensable—a diminished nation that ‘leads from behind’.” But Obama’s glaring mismanagement of America’s interests may also indicate, perhaps no less plausibly, a feckless and myopic understanding of <i>realpolitik</i> and a complete inability to play with the big boys. His political immaturity coupled with his natural cynicism is equaled only by his bloated self-regard, and America’s adversaries have taken definitive advantage of the debilitating flaws of his temperament.</p>
<p>There should be no doubt about this in any rational mind. The various scandals plaguing the current administration are distractions. Poor decision making is a common trait—Eisenhower’s <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3656288/What-we-failed-to-learn-from-Suez.html">self-admitted mishandling</a> of the Suez Crisis, Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs, Carter’s support of the Iranian Shia revolution, and so on. What we are observing now is different by an order of magnitude, a kind of logarithmic spike on the scandal scale. There is a catastrophe afflicting the U.S. and it is summed up and embodied in the person of Barack Obama—his election to the Oval Office, the policies he has subsequently enacted, the vectors of his character on daily display, the progressively devastating consequences of his tenure. “Let us make no mistake about this,” as the president is fond of saying. The greatest scandal of them all is the present occupant of the White House.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>The Immoderate Moderation of the “Moderates”</title>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 03 Jun 2013 04:17:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Solway]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[christianity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[moderate muslims]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=191878</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[When silence speaks volumes.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Ramadan.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-191881" alt="Ramadan" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Ramadan.jpg" width="350" height="319" /></a>In an <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/david-solway/reflections-on-my-ex-muslim-friends/">article</a> I posted on <i>FrontPage Magazine</i>, in which I was at pains to suggest that from the standpoint of the ongoing war of Islam against the West—anyone who doubts this has not been paying attention—the distinction between Islam and Islamism is <i>functionally</i> moot, if not chimerical. I was by no means implying that “moderate Muslims” are in conscious league with their jihadist co-religionists. Rather, my argument was that “moderate Muslims” are essential to maintaining the vigor and power of a faith that is inherently militant and expansionist, and provide the medium their jihadist counterparts are able to exploit to their advantage. In other words, the contextual environment of “moderate Muslims” furnishes precisely the ambient culture in which those we call “extremists” can operate effectively, taking shelter therein when necessary and relying on the very existence of the unreformed, and possibly unreformable, faith they claim to represent.</p>
<p>The argument I am pressing is, obviously, prone to objections, many fanciful or irrelevant. Some of my critics will persist in their belief that Islamism is a perversion of Islam and that the core texts upon which the faith is predicated are subject to reinterpretation. But it is frivolous to dismiss the innumerable calls and injunctions to violence against the infidel enunciated in a holy book. The Koran is not regarded as a contingent and descriptive text, whose wider implications are basically ethical; it is eternal and unchangeable, hortatory and unforgiving, entailing a series of commands to wage endless battle in order to establish worldwide domination, a global Caliphate. To this species of critic, I would say that persistence in a demonstrable error or sheer doctrinal ignorance do not qualify as a valid objection.</p>
<p>More persuasive, at least initially, is the kind of historical and comparative insight proposed by one of the commenters to my original article, who uses the moniker “Visitor.” The two prior Abrahamic faiths, he points out, Judaism and Christianity, evolved over the centuries to become the less sectarian and more embracing communions we see today; surely in the course of time the same can be predicted of Islam, which will eventually detach itself from its early medieval gradients and adjust to the modern world. This is a strong argument on its face, but it neglects several crucial factors.</p>
<p>First, the Koran is categorically unlike the two Testaments in that it is not primarily a narrative and preceptual account aiming toward a condition of redemptive inclusivity. Despite the presence of Canaanites and Romans, the Testaments are not war manuals or piratical logbooks and neither are their talismanic figures desert raiders. Moses gave us the Ten Commandments and Jesus brought the Word of mercy. True, the Commandments have been regularly violated and mercy may be a <i>rara avis</i> among ordinary communicants of Judaism and Christianity, but this does not change the fact that such prescriptions are scriptural ordinances and are meant to be obeyed.</p>
<p>The Koran, on the contrary, features nothing like the Decalogue and treats the concept of mercy as extraneous or foreign to its over-arching message—a few milder passages here and there, mainly in the earlier Meccan portion of the text, only serve to accentuate the pervasive bellicosity of that message. Indeed, the Koran posits a hard and fast distinction between votary and infidel, between us and them, a theological chasm articulated in the form of a legal principle by the 8<sup>th</sup> century Hanafi school of jurisprudence as the great divide between Dar al-Islam, or the House of Islam, and Dar al-Harb, or the House of War. As Kipling wrote in <a href="http://www.bartleby.com/246/1129.html"><i>The Ballad of East and West</i></a>, “never the twain shall meet”—never, that is, until one is crushed by the other, or until they “stand at God’s great Judgment Seat.”</p>
<p>Secondly, time is short and Islam is long. In an age of advanced weaponry, typified by proliferating chemical, biological and nuclear stockpiles, not to mention more conventional arms that can be massively destructive, we simply do not have the political leisure to wait another century or two for Islam to undergo a reformation and shed its imperial theology, to regard Mosque and State as two separate realms, and ultimately to demilitarize itself. Time is running out. Islam cannot be appeased, it must be contained.</p>
<p>Thirdly, to cite yet another argument put forward by “Visitor”:</p>
<blockquote><p>“The Islamic fascists say that the West is at war with the Muslim religion and that therefore the world&#8217;s 1.5 billion Muslims should make war on the West. And you play right into their hands by saying our enemy is not Islamic fundamentalist terror gangs but rather the entire religion and everyone who believes in it. I don&#8217;t think that is a very intelligent strategy.”</p></blockquote>
<p>That is, those who indicate the danger represented by Islam are practicing a reverse “Islamism,” treating the faith as a monolithic bloc in the same undifferentiated way that Islam ostensibly treats the entire Western world.</p>
<p>This argument is both foolish and asymmetrical. Some Western nations may be engaging various terrorist groups and regimes on diverse fronts, but the West as a whole is not on a war footing and has done everything in its power and even beyond its means to accommodate itself to Islam—witness its magnanimous immigration and welfare policies, its protective hate speech legislation, its refusal to investigate the terror-spawning mosques, its <a href="http://www.islamist-watch.org/blog/2013/05/iw-news-brief-fort-hood-fiasco-uk-jihad-denial">procedural accommodation</a> of Muslims in the courtroom, its extra-legal arrest of those who are publicly critical of Islam, and so on. But Islam is another kettle of piranhas; its foundational texts enshrine the doctrine of conquest and subjugation of non-Muslim peoples. Islam at its core is incompatible with Western liberal democracy and is indeed in a state of perpetual war with it.</p>
<p>It should be mentioned that a companion argument often pursued by observers like “Visitor”—I have been on the receiving end of it innumerable times—is that vigorous and unsparing criticism of Islam will only drive moderates into the arms of the jihadists. This is like saying that criticism of bullies will only create more bullies. What we have seen is something very different, namely, that the coddling of moderates has not made them an iota more visible or vociferous in protesting the excesses of their religious congeners. Their silence is deafening and effectively dissident. In a video titled <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/message-to-moderate-muslims/">Message to ‘Moderate’ Muslims</a>, tele-journalist Pat Condell points out that “If they were really that moderate, they would face up to what their religion teaches, and disown it.” Anything less, he continues, than a clear, public rejection of the doctrine of jihad and a willingness to report on the subversive declamations and activities of their imams renders them complicit.</p>
<p>The existence of “moderates,” many of whom may not be devout Muslims and wish only to go about their lives in peace, does not alter the reality that they constitute a silent majority that has not risen up in protest against armed jihad—there is something distinctly immoderate about their vaunted moderation. Nor does their existence hide the fact that the central thrust of Islam, as the Muslim Brotherhood’s oft-quoted <a href="http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.ca/2012/04/sabotaging-our-miserable-house.html">manifesto</a> asserts, is to destroy Western civilization and sabotage its “miserable house.” The war will go on until the West is defeated and accepts the hegemony of the Caliphate. To remark, as “Visitor” does, that we “play right into their hands by saying that the enemy is…the entire religion” is abject nonsense and a rather dense and certainly defeatist strategy.</p>
<p>Understanding the nature of Islam is the first step toward ensuring our survival. The West, as Pope Benedict XVI contended in his famous <a href="http://www.zenit.org/en/articles/papal-address-at-university-of-regensburg">Regensburg Address</a>, is suffering a progressive “de-Hellenization,” losing its reason and ability to analyze the world. Perhaps more to the point, the West has been beheaded, having surrendered its intelligence to the Islamic political and theological cleaver.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Reflections on My Muslim Ex-Friends</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/david-solway/reflections-on-my-ex-muslim-friends/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=reflections-on-my-ex-muslim-friends</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 29 May 2013 04:20:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Solway]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ex-friends]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[irshad manji]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[moderates]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[When the personal is unforgivably political.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/ex_edited-2.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-191217" alt="ex_edited-2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/ex_edited-2-350x350.jpg" width="350" height="350" /></a>Some of my best friends are Muslims. Or rather, some of my best friends were Muslims—not that they are no longer Muslims but that they are no longer my friends.</p>
<p>The problem I had over years of friendship had to do with certain personal attributes which I value highly, namely, consistency and the ability to recognize facts. My friends were good men who believed in Western democratic values, in selective immigration policies based on the possession of needed skills that would contribute to both society and the economy, in the necessity for Muslim (and all) immigrants to assimilate into the heritage culture, and in customary methods of education and a traditional curriculum; they rejected the utter folly of multiculturalism as it is practiced in Canada. At the same time they were staunch adherents of Islam as they understood it and swore by the distinction between Islam and Islamism, between genuine Muslims and radical Islamists, a distinction characterized, they claimed, by an unbridgeable divide.</p>
<p>I enjoyed a positive and warm relation with two of these men in particular. Both are published authors. Both are much in the limelight, reviewed and interviewed in many different places, for defending the liberal society they find superior to any other. And both are under a fatwa issued by their less tolerant brethren. And yet one of these valiant combatants considers Mohammed to be the perfect man whom Muslims should strive to emulate, is not well versed in the complex history of the Middle East, and entertains a corrosive skepticism about Israel. The other, while regarding his jihadist co-religionists as barbarians, yet argues that the atrocities associated with the development and diffusion of Islam should be historically contextualized, that the doctrinal heart of Islam is untarnished by events, and that the faith has not been properly interpreted by those who, he feels, wantonly abuse it. He believes that Islam blossomed under Mohammed as a spiritual quest, ignoring completely the historical fact that the Prophet was also a conquering warlord who engaged in raids for booty and committed bloody and indiscriminate acts of slaughter.</p>
<p>My two ex-friends reminded me of Irshad Manji who, in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Trouble-Islam-Today-Muslims/dp/B002KE47MG/ref=sr_1_sc_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1369587744&amp;sr=1-1-spell&amp;keywords=isrshad+manji"><i>The Trouble with Islam Today</i></a>, anatomizes everything that is wrong with her religion but makes a passionate case for its reform, including the revival of the faculty of <i>ijtihad</i> (independent thinking and counsel). It is hard to take her argument seriously. After 1400 years of nearly unchecked imperial conquest, with a holy book brimming with commandments to kill, mutilate, tax and enslave those it denominates as “infidels,” with hardline clerics in control of dogma today, and with terrorist regimes intent on bringing the West to its knees, can one credibly argue that Islam is even remotely susceptible to wide-scale, peaceful renovation? Moreover, reform would entail the gutting of myriad canonical texts, including the Koran, the Hadith and the five schools of Sunni and Shia jurisprudence, leaving nothing but a rump scriptural archive. Plainly, under the aegis of “reform,” Islam would cease to exist.</p>
<p>My own trouble with Islam, and the reason for calling it quits with my former friends, involved precisely what I understand as the immutable or essentialist nature of Islam. This nature prevails despite the historical nuances, the times when the faith was less oppressive than at other times (e.g., the Abbasid dynasty of early ninth century Baghdad), and the existence of comparatively enlightened movements like the eighth-and-ninth century Mu’tazalites, who fought for the primacy of reason, man’s free will, and the moral responsibility of the individual. The Mu’tazalites, be it noted, were decisively crushed in the tenth century by the fundamentalist Ash’arite sect, after which, as the latter’s leading theologian <a href="al-Ghazali">al-Ghazali</a> wrote in his perennially influential <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Incoherence-Philosophers-Brigham-Young-University/dp/0842524665/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1369590904&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=al-ghazali+the+incoherence+of+the+philosophers"><i>The Incoherence of the Philosophers</i></a>, “the gate of ijtihad is closed.” And it has been closed ever since. Additionally, we should keep in mind that although the Mu’tazalites believed that the Koran was a divinely created text, contingent upon the circumstances of its revelation, and not, as the Ash’arites claimed, co-existent with Allah and therefore fixed eternally, it nevertheless could not be transformed into something it was not.</p>
<p>My Muslim friends struck me as contemporary if somewhat more theologically and philosophically flexible Mu’tazalites, advocating for the rule of reason and the supremacy of democratic institutions and culture over their tribal competitors, and yet unable or unwilling to see that the faith they professed was constitutionally inimical to the liberal ethos they championed—and indeed in a state of perpetual conflict with it. There have existed, admittedly, occasional historical interregna, like Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s Turkey, but these were, and are proving to be, labile and relatively short-lived. The Ash’arite complexion of the faith remains inherent and effectively permanent, irrespective of its historical fluctuations. As was <a href="remarked">remarked</a> by a blogger who attended a <a href="http://tundratabloids.com/2013/05/the-audience-and-daniel-pipes-the-people-are-just-not-buying-the-islamism-thing.html">recent lecture</a> featuring meliorist Daniel Pipes at a synagogue in Toronto, “no amount of verbal equilibristic could change the fact that Islam was established as a political ideology with expansionist goals and remains the same even today.” The distinction between Islam and Islamism is basically a sop to the Western conscience and a conceptual means that allows us to evade hard truths and to avoid painful action. It is the product of fear and laziness, with a large admixture of electoral and fiscal self-interest.</p>
<p>This is where the bastard notion of “moderate Islam” comes into the equation. Obviously, there are millions upon millions of peaceable and reasonable Muslims who are loyal and productive citizens of the Western nations to which they have given their allegiance. No sane person would contend otherwise. But such, regrettably, is not the issue we are discussing. The sticking point is that “moderate Islam” provides the ecological or <a href="https://riverrestoration.wikispaces.com/Hyporheic+zones">hyporheic</a> zone essential to the flourishing of Islamic jihad and the viability of Sharia law. Without that vast circumambient population of “moderates,” many of whom may even be nonobservant, the “radicals” would have nowhere to breed, to thrive and to justify the assertion of their will. There is no Islam without a substantial body of believers, however nominal—the moderates—and there is no “Islamism” without a host on which it can parasitize. In reality, host and parasite become one. In an<a href="http://pjmedia.com/blog/islam-islamism-and-moderation/?singlepage=true"> article</a> I wrote three years back for <i>PJ Media</i>, I quoted Leslie S. Lebl of the American Center for Democracy, who <a href="http://www.city-journal.org/2010/bc0129ll.html">argued</a> that the basic problem is “an ideology fundamental to ‘traditional’ or ‘moderate’ Islam as much as to its ‘radical variant.’” Lebl was clearly on target. “Moderation,” I continued, parsing his message, “is also a perfect cover for immoderation as well as its fecund seedbed and its sustaining medium…what we call ‘moderate Islam’ is the water in which the sharks swim and seek their prey.”</p>
<p>Furthermore, what is meant by “moderate” may well provide less comfort than one would hope. <a href="According%20to">According to</a> Reuters, AP, the <i>New York Times</i> and <i>The Economist</i>, former Iranian president and mass murderer Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani is both a moderate and a reformer. Hillary Clinton <a href="http://cnsnews.com/news/article/syrian-president-assad-regarded-reformer-clinton-says">extolled</a> Syrian president and mass murderer Bashir Assad as a “reformer.” The labels do not inspire confidence. We like to think of the <a href="http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Ummah">ummah</a> as comprising chiefly “moderate” individuals and families who disagree with suicide bombings and beheadings and whatever else may lurk in the terror armamentarium, and yet they may harbor views we would be hard put to categorize as “moderate.” A recent <a href="http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/05/08/pew-report-on-muslim-world-paints-a-distressing-picture/">Pew survey</a> of global Muslim attitudes yielded worrisome results, with distinct majorities in many Islamic countries favoring the imposition of Sharia law and other illiberal tenets associated with the practice of the faith.</p>
<p>And the West is not exempt from Sharia creep and stealth jihad. Many analysts have commented on the large proportion of Muslim immigrants in Britain, the U.S., Australia, Canada, and Europe in general who, in the words of Australian economist and Director of the Institute for Private Enterprise (IPE) Des Moore, are “either sympathetic to violent action by extremists or prepared to play a role in it” (email correspondence). They may not qualify as a majority but they are inching upwards. True, American Muslims appear less given to supporting the extremists among them. Yet there are various enclaves, like Dearborn, Michigan, where Islamic law and sentiment are strongly entrenched, and according to a <a href="http://www.meforum.org/2931/american-mosques">scholarly survey</a> conducted by David Yerushalmi and Mordechai Kedar for <i>The Middle East Quarterly</i>, approximately 80% of American mosques feature texts advocating diverse forms of violence “in the pursuit of a Shari&#8217;a-based political order or advocat[ing] violent jihad as a duty that should be of paramount importance to a Muslim.”</p>
<p>Of course, the Press and Western political leaders are mired in a deep state of denial. There exist, as mentioned above, clearly ideological reasons for being so, as well as issues involving electoral politics and, in many cases, financial incentives. In the wake of the grisly beheading of a British soldier on a London street, which Islamic cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed <a href="http://zionica.com/2013/05/27/nothing-in-islam-that-justifies-the-murder-of-lee-rigby-surely-you-jest-prime-minister-david-cameron/">called</a> “a courageous and heroic act,” Prime Minister David Cameron ignominiously <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/murder-of-soldier-in-woolwich-was-a-betrayal-of-islam-says-cameron-as-he-insists-britain-will-stand-resolute-against-terror-8629067.html">referred</a> to the act as “a betrayal of Islam.” Blame must not be attributed where it is due. Similarly, Muslim rioters are routinely <a href="described">described</a> as “youths,” “Asians,” or “the unemployed.” Thus our fellow travelers do everything in their power to launder Islamic savagery and barbaric practices as a violation and corruption of core Islamic principles, conceiving of Islam as, at root, irenic and moderate.</p>
<p>But moderate Islam is by no means the panacea that, for example, Daniel Pipes <a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/12847/islam-vs-islamism">considers</a> it to be in his avowal that “radical Islam is the problem and moderate Islam is the solution.” Would it were so. Unfortunately, Islam is Islam. Second-generation “moderates” often manifest as lone wolf terrorists or as members of various jihadist organizations to wreak terrible harm—we have seen this happen again and again. But no less disquieting, moderates are the unwitting confederates of the extremists. They may abhor violence and lobby for democratic values and usages, for which they should be praised, yet their liberal orientation does not change the stubborn fact that their existence is logically and materially necessary if those we call “Islamists” are to prosper in advancing their anti-West agenda.</p>
<p>How to resolve this dilemma is perhaps the major question of our time, but I suspect it will abide with us indefinitely. One cannot expect more than a billion Muslims to take a page out of the probably mythical book of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulan_(Khazar)">Khazars</a> and convert <i>en masse</i>. Neither is it feasible nor advisable nor morally acceptable to apply force or repressive legislation, even were it theoretically possible. That Muslim armies did precisely this among their subject peoples is no paradigm for the modern West. The truth is that Islam is here to stay and the specter of conflict and misunderstanding will not magically disappear. It is inevitable. Ultimately, the question must be left to the individual, not the collective. Discussion and debate may sometimes work, but the decisive factor will always be personal experience. Such has been the case with brave apostates like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wafa Sultan, Walid Shoebat, Bosch Fawstin, Ibn Warraq and Nonie Darwish, who should be respected and admired and welcomed among us. They are consistent and are capable of recognizing facts.</p>
<p>And because others are not, I have broken with my Muslim friends.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Stephen Hawking&#8217;s Moral Black Hole</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/david-solway/stephen-hawkings-moral-black-hole/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=stephen-hawkings-moral-black-hole</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 20 May 2013 04:20:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Solway]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[boycott]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Stephen Hawking]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[The laws of the famed physicist's warped universe and their devious implications for Israel and Iran. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Stephen-Hawking.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-189942" alt="Stephen-Hawking" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Stephen-Hawking-450x270.jpg" width="315" height="189" /></a>There has been considerable fallout of late regarding world-renowned cosmologist Stephen Hawking’s refusal to attend Israel’s <a href="http://2013.presidentconf.org.il/en/">Fifth Presidential Conference</a> this coming June, on the grounds of Israeli malfeasance toward the Palestinians. Whatever one’s view of the Jewish state, there should be little doubt that the physicist’s decision to boycott the event is both intellectually indefensible and morally suspect, and raises the question of how mental agility and moral folly can co-exist in the same person.</p>
<p>As several commentators have indicated, his position is intellectually indefensible since Hawking evinces no knowledge of the history of the Middle East, ludicrously <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Diplomacy-and-Politics/Stephen-Hawking-reaffirms-support-of-Israel-boycott-312505">compares Israel</a> to apartheid South Africa, and seems wholly unaware of the <a href="provably%20fraudulent%20nature">provably fraudulent nature</a> of the Palestinian narrative. <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=46">Palestinian revisionism</a> has falsified the historical record in practically every conceivable respect. The data are readily accessible and no genuine scholar or thinking person can deny them and still retain a modicum of integrity. At the same time, his attitude is morally suspect owing to the fact that Hawking, who suffers from motor neuron disease, would have been rendered mute without the advances and advantages of Israeli medical breakthroughs. Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, director of <i>Shurat HaDin</i>–Israel Law Center, <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Diplomacy-and-Politics/Stephen-Hawking-reaffirms-support-of-Israel-boycott-312505">called</a> Hawking’s boycott hypocritical. “His whole computer-based communication system runs on a chip designed by Israel’s Intel team. I suggest that if he truly wants to pull out of Israel, he should also pull out his Intel Core i7 from his tablet.”</p>
<p>In a stinging <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/ari-lieberman/stephen-hawking-boycotts-israel/">article</a> for <i>FrontPage Magazine</i>, Ari Lieberman points to the sharp distinction between the benefits and gifts that Israel has lavished upon mankind in science, technology and medicine and the deficits and depravities that are the legacy of the Arab world: barbarism, cultural regression, ignorance, religiously sanctioned violence and terroristic savagery. It is a distinction, we should have thought, that a world-class scientist like Hawking—who, incidentally, has visited Iran without uttering a single criticism of that rogue state—should be equipped to make but is clearly unable to do. One recalls his most celebrated theory, namely, that black holes <a href="http://library.thinkquest.org/10148/long13.shtml">leak radiation</a>, but he cannot, it appears, register the lies, obsessions and hatreds that routinely leak from the black hole of the Islamic world—perhaps “gush” would be the more accurate word. (Of course, we need to make an adjustment here in the interest of precision: what are emitted from the Islamic world are not photons but, say, crepusculars, not particles of light, as in the original theory, but particles of darkness.)</p>
<p>Hawking, then, can countenance the retrograde policies, Jew-hatred and terror-sponsorship of Iran, a country to which he has granted legitimacy with his approving visit. But when it comes to the democratic nation whose medical and technological discoveries have given him a new lease on life, he engages in facile and politically correct posturing. “One cannot really argue with a mathematical theorem,” Hawking asserts, but one can surely argue with a political assumption—and Hawking’s is defective at best and invidious at worst.</p>
<p>Hawking’s profound failings as a social and political thinker are a subset of a much larger syndrome—the naivety or ineptitude of the acknowledged genius when he (or she) proceeds to pontificate on matters beyond his specialized field and insists on addressing the affairs of the world in general. It appears to be an occupational hazard that plagues a substantial number of such cynosures. This is not quite the same thing as the infirmity that afflicts the “expert,” insofar as an “expert” can be frequently relied upon to botch, mishandle, degrade or obfuscate the very area in which his “expertise” presumably applies. The maladroit “genius,” on the contrary, is one who is lambently at home in his domain, though not outside of it.</p>
<p>In a second <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/ari-lieberman/the-making-of-an-immoral-decision/">article</a> for <i>Frontpage</i>, Lieberman touches on the notion of the idiot savant, who “typically lack[s] normal social communication skills but possesses an abnormally high skill in such isolated disciplines as mathematics or art,” a personality that is “very easily manipulated.” Lieberman dismisses the idea in Hawking’s case, but I would not be so hasty. I tend to regard Hawking as, let us say, a <i>useful idiot savant</i>, for by his determination to boycott the Israeli symposium, he has not only stigmatized Israel but has reinforced the convictions and sentiments of antisemites and anti-Zionists (often one and the same thing) around the world and across the disciplines. In any event, the category of specialized and selectively brilliant incompetents remains intact and boasts a prestigious membership. To mention just a few as illustration:</p>
<p>Bobby Fischer, arguably the greatest chess player who ever lived, was consumed by absurd conspiracy theories and irrational hatreds.  Einstein was a political naïf; if he could have had his way, Israel would never have been born (and Hawking wouldn’t have profited from the microprocessors that permit him to communicate). Richard Dawkins, a renowned biologist, has little understanding of the moral universe. It all comes down for him to the power of the genes and the absence of the Lord, a thesis that empties the human world of moral choice and freedom of the will while dictating <i>ex cathedra</i> to the mystery of the Creation. It is inappropriate for a scientist to assert that God does not exist since that statement can be neither proved nor falsified. It is equally an act of pure hubris.</p>
<p>Martin Heidegger, considered by many the greatest philosopher of the 20<sup>th</sup> century, was an unrepentant Nazi. Bertrand Russell urged Britain to surrender to the same regime that Heidegger supported; in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Flight-Truth-Reign-Deceit-Information/dp/0394576438/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1368640257&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=The+Flight+from+Truth%3A+The+Reign+of+Deceit+in+the+Age+of+Information">The Flight from Truth: The Reign of Deceit in the Age of Information</a>, Jean-François Revel cites a 1937 speech in which Russell declared that “Britain should disarm, and if Hitler marched his troops into this country when we were undefended, they should be welcomed like tourists and greeted in a friendly way.” In his essay <a href="http://www.online-literature.com/orwell/898/"><i>Reflections on Ghandi</i></a>, George Orwell records the Mahatma’s answer to the Jewish predicament in the 1940s: “Ghandi’s<strong> </strong>view was that the German Jews ought to commit collective suicide, which ‘would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler&#8217;s violence’&#8230; When, in 1942, he urged non-violent resistance against a Japanese invasion, he was ready to admit that it might cost several million deaths.” Ghandi was a leader of the Indian National Congress and a promoter of independence from British rule, in other words, a domestic politician, but had no compunction in advising the Jews trapped in the European slaughterhouse.</p>
<p>Similarly, many Nobel Laureates have dismal and even reprehensible track records. One thinks of the ferocious antisemitism of José Saramago and the petulant and sophomoric anti-Americanism of Harold Pinter. Mikis Theodorakis, though not a Laureate but a candidate for the 2000 Nobel, may be a musical genius but he is also a gutter antisemite. Economist Paul Krugman, who is much in the news, may know his Keynes but he certainly does not know how the real world works, arguing for increased government debt and the immateriality of deficits because “we owe what we have borrowed to ourselves.” But as it happens, we also owe it to China, and owing to ourselves makes little sense in an interconnected world without which we could not be our economic selves. This lionized resolver of our fiscal ills will not rest until the nation goes bankrupt, or in <a href="the%20words">the words</a> of William Anderson, a member of the Austrian School of Economics, “his central message is this: internal bond finance of government trumps scarcity.” Scarcity is a fact of the real world that impinges on the life of real people, not a conceptual fancy that exists inside a theoretical construct. Former U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu would win a prize for world-class buffoonery if one were instituted. Chu, who was awarded a Nobel for his work in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_cooling">laser cooling</a>, is a great fan of glucose and termite guts to reduce the world’s dependence on oil, and has recommended painting roofs and roads white to reflect sunlight and save money on air conditioning. Nonetheless, he was also a chief promoter of the Solyndra fiasco, costing the American taxpayer over half a billion dollars. The list could be extended indefinitely.</p>
<p>“Great men” may be great in their professional endeavors but, all too often, when they range outside the borders of their specialties they manifest either as downright silly or positively dangerous. These are very smart people, but they are hawking dubious wares. High intelligence counts for little in the sociocultural realm when it is confined to the narrow if intricate space of a singular curriculum or specialization, when it is not leavened by common sense and moral clarity, or when it considers itself, by virtue of its disciplinary eminence, as authoritative in pronouncing on complex and recalcitrant questions outside its particular field of study. As for Hawking, a representative figure of this strange breed mantled in adulation, he may be a great scientist and a suffering human being, but he is also, like many of his congeners, an ignoramus and a moral imbecile. Why should we be surprised?</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Conversions to Islam</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/david-solway/conversions-to-islam/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=conversions-to-islam</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 08 May 2013 04:53:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Solway]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[capitulation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[conversions]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[At an alarming rate, Westerners strip themselves of their identity and past.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/tamerlan.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-188564" alt="tamerlan" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/tamerlan.jpg" width="282" height="187" /></a>An alarming feature of our current sociocultural world is the striking frequency of conversions to Islam across the entire gamut of Western private and public life: <a href="prisoners">prisoners</a> converting to the religion of peace in record numbers; <a href="http://standpointmag.co.uk/features-may-10-why-do-western-women-convert-julie-bindel-islam-female-conversion">women</a> who crave the emotional comfort and feeling of security that donning the hijab or the niqab purportedly confers; disaffected youth who find purpose and meaning in attending the mosque, often becoming radicalized in the process; African-Americans reacting against Christianity as the white man’s religion and who “<a href="http://www.answering-islam.org/ReachOut/emergence.html">associate conversion</a> to Islam with recovering their ethnic heritage”; political figures who, whether secretly or publicly, swear by the Koran, the most conspicuous recent example being the bizarre spectacle of <a href="http://www.carbonated.tv/news/from-an-islamophobe-to-a-muslim-arnoud-van-doorn-ex-leading-member-in-farright-dutch-politician-geert-wilders-party-accepts-islam">Arnoud Van Doorn</a>, one of the Dutch producers of the uncompromising anti-Islam film <i>Fitna</i> and a former leading member of Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party, <a href="http://www.carbonated.tv/news/from-an-islamophobe-to-a-muslim-arnoud-van-doorn-ex-leading-member-in-farright-dutch-politician-geert-wilders-party-accepts-islam">happily and gratefully</a> converting to Islam. Even a <a href="http://www.mediaite.com/online/gitmo-prison-guard-converts-from-atheism-to-islam-after-seeing-detainees-wake-each-day-and-smile/">Gitmo prison guard</a> proved unable to resist the seduction of Islam. To read only a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_converts_to_Islam">partial list</a> of notable converts to Islam is chastening.</p>
<p>Such conversions reveal a craving for the collectivist embrace of an explanatory and consoling paradigm, and are a symptom of cultural irresponsibility. Some of these, it is true, remain more or less innocuous, but others lead to the espousal of sanctified violence. Michael Ledeen points out in an interesting <a href="http://pjmedia.com/michaelledeen/2013/05/01/homegrown-terrorist-myth/">article</a> debunking the myth of the “homegrown terrorist” that such people, “motivated by strong ideological or religious beliefs,” have come to identify with foreign doctrines and ideologies that are “anything but homegrown.” The indoctrination they undergo may be learned online, though “more often than not [it] takes place at the feet of foreign teachers and trainers.” They are not to be understood as homegrown terrorists since they have “turned to non-American visions and visionaries.” Reiterating his rejection of the “homegrown” label, Ledeen calls them “converts” who “have taken leave of us to join our enemies.” Of course, the terminology we use may also be a question of semantics. <a href="http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Giuliani-US-Grown-Terrorists-Boston/2013/05/05/id/502825?s=al&amp;promo_code=13607-1">Rudi Giuliani</a> has no qualms about using the term “homegrown,” but he means the same thing as Ledeen. He goes wrong, however, in claiming that a significant number of terrorist attacks come from a &#8220;distorted Islamic extremist ideology.&#8221; Such attacks are enjoined in the Koran and validated in the Hadith and derive not from some rarefied or ultraist version of the faith but from Islam proper. There is nothing “distorted” (to echo Giuliani) or deviant about them.</p>
<p>“Imagine,” <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bosch-fawstin/calling-islam-islam/">writes</a> former Muslim Bosch Fawstin, “if…we used terms such as ‘Radical Nazism’…and ‘Militant Communism.’ The implication would be that there are good versions of those ideologies, which would then lead some to seek out ‘moderate’ Nazis. Those who use terms other than ‘Islam’ create the impression that it’s some variant of Islam that’s behind the enemy that we’re facing.” He continues by stressing the undeniable fact that Islam “is a political religion; the idea of a separation of Mosque and State is unheard of in the Muslim world. Islam has a doctrine of warfare, Jihad, which is fought in order to establish Islamic (‘Sharia’) Law, which is, by nature, totalitarian. Sharia Law calls for, among other things: the dehumanization of women; the flogging/stoning/killing of adulterers; and the killing of homosexuals, apostates and critics of Islam. All of this is part of <i>orthodox</i> Islam, not some ‘extremist’ form of it.” Many, if not most, converts appear serenely unaware of the central tenets and imperatives of their adopted faith, and never seem to ask themselves the obvious question: was Mohammed, with his program of military conquest and his many sanguinary injunctions, a “moderate Muslim” or an Islamist?</p>
<p>What we are dealing with is a local subset of V.S. Naipaul’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Belief-Islamic-Excursions-Converted/dp/0375706488/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1367603669&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=v.s.+naipaul+beyond+belief"><i>Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples</i></a>. Naipaul treats of the tragic effects of Arab imperialistic conquest of four Asian nations, Iran, Malaysia, Pakistan and Indonesia. He writes: “The cruelty of Islamic fundamentalism is that it allows only one people—the Arabs, the original people of the Prophet—a past, and sacred places.” Converted peoples “have to strip themselves of their past…It is the most uncompromising kind of imperialism.” Naipaul’s stories about his travels and the people he met are often heartrending and testify to the confusion and dislocation he sees in their lives and the desertification of mind and spirit that Islam has visited on these countries—the most “retrograde force” in the world, as Winston Churchill described Islam in <a href="The%20River%20War"><i>The River War</i></a>.</p>
<p>Naipaul is speaking chiefly of massive, forced conversions, but the same is true, <i>mutatis mutandis</i>, of the inroads that the religion of peace has carved into the West where voluntary conversions seem to have attained <a href="http://www.newsnet14.com/?p=78870">near-epidemic proportions</a>. Islamic supremacy operates through various complementary means: fear triggered by outright violence and the threat of violence; infiltration of administrations at the municipal, regional and national levels; the suborning of a debauched and obeisant media apparatus; the abject scrivenings of a submissive intellectual class; the pervasive compliance of the entertainment industry; and the corruption of the academy with the willing assistance of university syndics, professors and student unions—a perfect illustration of the Gramscian long march through the institutions. The evidence is pouring in from everywhere, dutifully ignored by those who have a stake in the multicultural fiction. Bruce Bawer, our point man in Norway, has abundantly <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/norwegians-outsiders-in-their-own-country/">chronicled</a> the ongoing Islamic conquest of the country that proceeds with the willing complicity of media, academic and political elites. “One way to avoid warfare,” he quips, “is to surrender,” and tells of a representative youngster, a terrified native Norwegian schoolboy menaced by Muslim gangs, who “alone knows five people who have converted.” Multiply by a correlative census coefficient and the picture darkens considerably.</p>
<p>When all these factors are assembled, abetted by the growing phenomenon of conversion, Islam is virtually assured of subverting vast segments of Western social, cultural and political life. Indeed, as if to rub salt into the wound, Islamic speakers are increasingly hosted in our auditoriums, public venues and places of worship while those who oppose the surrender of our rights and liberties to an alien and hostile creed are vigorously repudiated.</p>
<p>To take only the most recent instances of such blatant ignominy, in the immediate wake of the horrific Boston Marathon bombing and the <a href="terrorist%20plot">terrorist plot</a> to blow up a VIA rail passenger train over Niagara Falls, the anti-semitic director of the <a href="http://igcs.binghamton.edu/">Institute of Global Cultural Studies</a> at SUNY-Binghamton, Ali Mazrui, is to be <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/blog/2013/05/anti-semite-ali-mazrui-honored-by-alwaleed-bin">honored</a> at Georgetown University, and Leila Shahid, a convicted terrorist, airline hijacker and spokesperson for the Palestinian mafia, has been invited to speak by satellite link at the University of British Columbia. At the same time, Pamela Geller’s speech at a Toronto synagogue has been <a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/05/free_speech_under_fire_in_canada.html">cancelled</a>, owing to <a href="police%20pressure">police pressure</a> and a flexible rabbi who caved before it, determined, no doubt, to retain his police chaplaincy. Geller is thus deprived of the opportunity to tell the truth about sharia, jihad, honor killing, female genital mutilation, blasphemy laws and all the other gifts showered upon us by Islamic advocacy. But Ali Mazrui and Leila Shahid will be offered the occasion and the forum to fire up sympathy for and make a few more enthusiastic converts to the religion of peace.</p>
<p>The longer we insist on ignoring the dromedary in the room, the sooner the acropolis of the West will be invested and despoiled. The drift toward political and cultural capitulation signaled by such callow genuflections as we have noted here is one of the most important issues of our time. The specter of conversion in particular is the sign and stamp of a successful imperial campaign. Once it acquires the force and sweep of a movement, it is too late for a biopsy. The disease has entered its final stages. It is, perhaps, only a matter of one more generation before the curtain comes down—two if we are lucky. To adapt T.S. Eliot’s famous aphorism, this is how a culture dies, not with a bang but a simper.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>“Allah Made Me Do It”</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/david-solway/allah-made-me-do-it/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=allah-made-me-do-it</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 24 Apr 2013 04:10:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Solway]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[allah]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Court]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[criminal defence]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=186811</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A new accepted criminal defense. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Islam.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-186814" alt="Islam" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Islam.jpg" width="280" height="188" /></a>Writing in <i>Islamist Watch</i> for April 17, 2013, David Rusin draws our attention to a <a href="recent%20case">recent case</a> in an Australian court which would beggar belief if we had not grown inured to such outrages through repetition and cultural submission. As Rusin writes, “Esmatullah Sharifi, an Afghan refugee who came to Australia in 2001 and launched a career as a sexual predator, has been <a href="http://www.islamist-watch.org/12804/sex-attacker-wins-right-to-appeal-over-cultural">granted leave to appeal</a> his sentence for raping an intoxicated young woman in 2008. Robert Redlich, an appellate judge, explained that the sentencing judge had focused primarily on ‘the protection of the community’ and improperly ‘rejected any suggestion [Sharifi] didn&#8217;t have a clear concept of consent in sexual relations’ due to cultural differences.” Rusin suggests that a double standard is in effect, “whereby a Muslim upbringing can excuse horrible behavior that would never be tolerated from non-Muslims.”</p>
<p>There have been a growing number of cases throughout the West, in which Muslim felons, charged with various crimes that would normally entail vigorous sentencing, have seen their cases dismissed or subject to appeal on the grounds of differing cultural norms, customs and assumptions. While convictions can sometimes be made to stick, even then the authorities are prone to react with reluctance and only after charges cannot be reasonably deferred. As Soeren Kern <a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3068/muslim-child-rape-gangs-britain">reports</a> at <i>The Gatestone Institute</i>, in a case involving a gang of Muslim “groomers” in Manchester, the Crown Prosecution Service was provided with DNA evidence of rape but “twice decided not to prosecute” while government lawyers also refused to proceed.</p>
<p>Even a brief internet search will yield innumerable such episodes. The distinction seems to apply only to Islamic offenders; immigrants from non-Islamic countries can generally expect the full weight of the law to be levied against them. But Muslim cases are far more often regarded as special cases and Muslim perps granted unique prerogatives in the eyes of the law.</p>
<p>Thus a Muslim who attacks an American citizen for insulting the Prophet has the assault case <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/penn-judge-muslims-allowed-attack-people-insulting-mohammad-210000330.html">thrown out of court</a> by a sympathetic judge. The judge, Mark Martin, claimed that the accused, a certain Talaag Elbayoni, was justified and even obligated by his religion to respond to perceived provocation with violence. Apparently, in the opinion of this Pennsylvania judge, Sharia law trumps the First Amendment. Similarly, a Muslim who rapes a 13-year-old girl receives a suspended sentence because, in the <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/muslim-who-raped-13-year-old-uk-girl-spared-jail-because-he-didnt-know-it-was-wrong/"><i>words</i></a> of the presiding judge, “it is quite clear from the reports that you are very naive and immature when it comes to sexual matters.” Indeed, Muslim rape of young girls has become a veritable epidemic in <a href="Scandinavia">Scandinavia</a>, the <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-bawer/the-truth-about-gang-rape-in-the-u-k/">U.K</a>. and elsewhere, and Muslim assaults of one sort or another—workplace harassment, physical beatings, intimidation, unpatriotic and even treasonable acts and utterances—are legion. Yet in far too many of these instances our judicial system may be plausibly described as double-jointed, two-tiered, and appallingly lenient—in a word, <i>Islamophiliac</i>.</p>
<p>Such conduct on the part of our judiciary leads to an inevitable question and a logical conundrum, namely, where does it end? If rape, physical assault, and other crimes are dismissed as instances of different cultural values that need to be acknowledged and that generate privileges and exemptions pertaining to no other group or cohort, why stop there? Islam requires its adherents to behave in certain specific ways, the Koran and the ancillary literature prescribe right and permissible forms of conduct and proscribe others, the religion excuses and vindicates particular acts that many of us find intolerable and reprehensible. Nevertheless, the paradigms and ideals inherent in the faith are considered by an increasing number of judges and lawmakers to be sacrosanct.</p>
<p>If that is the case, why should an Islamic terrorist be held to account by Western jurisprudence for flying a plane into a skyscraper or detonating bombs among a civilian population? Does not the Koran, in innumerable pssages, enjoin the believer to <a href="http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/quran/023-violence.htm">slay the infidel</a>? (See, for example, suras 2:191, 193; 8:39; 9:5; 9:29; 9:73; 47:4; 66:9; etc. etc.) Is not violence and slaughter an intrinsic part of a canonical imperative when it comes to Islam and its holy scriptures? Unlike in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, the commands to maim and kill in the Koran are truly extraordinary. The major passages dealing with violence in the two Testaments are chiefly narrative and descriptive, whereas in the Koran they are largely hortatory and prescriptive. The disparity is critical. “Islam,” <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/nonie-darwish/the-nice-muslim-family-next-door/">writes</a> former Muslim Nonie Darwish, “is the only religion that requires its followers to kill those who do not believe in Allah.”</p>
<p>The question remains. If a man is acting according to his faith, that is, his Muslim faith—raping women and assaulting passersby and demonstrators—for which he is frequently reprieved by the courts for reasons of cultural and religious practice and doctrine, why should he be punished for wreaking havoc among unbelievers and skeptics and targeting those by whom he feels offended or whom he has been taught to regard as fair game? After all, he is not individually responsible for his ostensible depravity or malfeasance; educated under different auspices, he is innocent of malice aforethought. He is the product of a society, religion or civilization which we must perforce respect within the multicultural context we have embraced.</p>
<p>Where, in short, does one draw the line between the perpetrating of a presumably “minor” offense—raping, beating, burning cars—and the infliction of a major cataclysm—blowing people up—<i>if the exonerating factor is cultural usage or religious dogma, or both?</i> What principle is in place that would allow us to escape the aneurysm of cognitive dissonance and evade the charge of palpable hypocrisy? For if “principle” is interpreted as the embodiment and expression of a policy of consistent extenuation, then there is no moral or legitimate principle at work whatsoever. Principle has been waived in the interests of expediency and collusion. With respect to Islam, such is the scandal of Western jurisprudence, which tends to act as the domestic arm of Western diplomacy, foreign adventurism and political appeasement of a clever and remorseless adversary.</p>
<p>If God is dead, said Dostoevsky’s <a href="Ivan%20Karamazov">Ivan Karamazov</a>, all is permitted. Whether or not one agrees with this dictum, there can be no doubt that when pride in one’s civilization and gratitude to the precursors who built and defended it weaken and erode, the spirit of the culture is broken and all is permitted to the enemy who would destroy us. He can violate the common law and receive only a mild reprimand or be acquitted wholesale. He can preach subversion and jihad in the mosque and be allowed to pass under the radar. He can kill the innocent in their thousands and be defended by a decadent but influential elite as a holy warrior extracting justice from a colonial oppressor. He is the beneficiary of a selectively applied multicultural ethos that allows him, quite literally, to get away with murder.</p>
<p>Such is the cultural pathology that heralds the decline and fall of a civilization. Given our indifference, our passion for conciliation, our frivolous disregard of both reality and conscience, and the attendant corruption of our judiciary, the Muslim <a href="http://www.islamreview.org/korankafir/chapter14.html"><i>ghazzua</i></a> on our way of life seems likely to succeed.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>The End of the Republic?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/david-solway/the-end-of-the-republic/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-end-of-the-republic</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 18 Mar 2013 04:25:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Solway]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=181699</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The demolition of the U.S. continues.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/david-solway/the-end-of-the-republic/ob5/" rel="attachment wp-att-181701"><img class=" wp-image-181701 alignleft" title="ob5" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/ob5.jpg" alt="" width="280" height="173" /></a>As I write, I am looking out the window at the gradual but remorseless deconstruction of one of the oldest structures in the Canadian capital of Ottawa, the heritage-designated Ogilvy Building. Built in 1907, it had stood empty for the last 20 years and left to deteriorate, until it was recently condemned. According to the <a href="Ottawa%20Citizen"><em>Ottawa Citizen</em></a> for December 17, 2012, this well-staffed and popular emporium “was the place to shop for ‘quality’ goods of every description…founded on the motto ‘Good Merchandise, At a Fair Price, With Service.” With its buff-colored brick facade, large wood-framed windows, high ceilings, ornamental metal cornices and panels decorated with the ‘tree-of-life’ motif, it was an imposing municipal landmark. It now resembles an architectural carcass, its top two floors reduced to a heap of rubble, the medallions and wall plaques scraped away, the sculpted pillars lopped like amputated limbs, the decorative linear meanders chiselled off, and the remaining bricks sandblasted to a lackluster grey. An army of industrious laborers wielding jackhammers and scurrying about in tractors are chipping and hacking away at the once-solid grandeur of what, for a time, seemed indestructible.</p>
<p>“Another emblem there,” <a href="http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/coole-park-and-ballylee-1931/">said</a> poet William Butler Yeats, mourning the passing of a rich and storied world, “in memory glorified.” But now, “all is changed.” And so it is with the Shining City on the Hill, thanks to a president whose actions belie what appears to be an underlying purpose, namely, the erosion of the structures that sustain the greatest republican enterprise in history.</p>
<p>I have been suspicious of Obama from the very beginning of his meteoric national career. I could not understand how a man with so obscure a dossier, very few salient records disclosed to the public; with little or no executive or working experience; and affiliated with a host of decidedly shady characters—communist poet and activist Frank Marshall Davis, former PLO spokesman Rashid Khalidi, unrepentant former terrorist Bill Ayers, America-and-Jew bashing Jeremiah Wright, corrupt financier Tony Rezko, racist leader of the Nation of Islam Louis Farrakhan, to name only a few—could captivate the media, bask in the glow of an adoring public, receive the Democratic nomination, and then be elected to the presidency of the United States.</p>
<p>My suspicion of the man’s <em>bona fides</em> deepened even more after the Honduras affair in July 2009, in which Obama (and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton) sided with leftwing strongman Manuel Zelaya, implicated in a conspiracy to overturn the civil Constitution of the country, and against the democratic legislature that had deposed him. The historically invalid and politically tendentious Cairo speech, the evident shilling for the Palestinians and their flagrantly concocted narrative of ancestral title, the clear animus against Israel and the outrageous treatment meted out to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu only confirmed my misgivings concerning the president’s political agenda.</p>
<p>That an American president should cozy up to the Venezuelan leftist dictator and bow from the waist to the Saudi monarch was beyond my comprehension. (And more recently, his hearting of Turkish autocrat and neo-Ottoman jihadist Recep Tayyip Erdogan as his personal “<a href="friend%20and%20colleague">friend and colleague</a>” is only a further indication of Obama’s troubling and discreditable policies.) That he should see to the massive increase of the American debt within only a few years and apply himself, in the <a href="http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/how-to-weaken-an-economy/">words</a> of Victor Davis Hanson, to “tun[ing] a properly moribund economy,”—i.e., “ensuring 50 million on food stamps, putting over 80,000 a month on Social Security disability insurance, and extending unemployment insurance to tens of millions”—was another sign that something was profoundly amiss. His bruited release of criminal illegals from American prisons defies common sense, as does his refusal to patrol and seal the incendiary border with Mexico. And that he should eagerly adopt the lifestyle of a Hollywood playboy and the jet-setting 1%, in defiance of his own proletarian rhetoric, while the country was foundering economically and absorbing one setback after another in the international theater, should have earned him the distrust of every sentient American citizen. Another stain on this dismal record of political degeneracy is his abandonment of the American ambassador and his entourage in Libya, leading to the death of four Americans.</p>
<p>It doesn’t stop there. The Democratic Party’s concerted attacks on the Second Amendment are surely disquieting. Moreover, new reports circulating about some of the Obama administration’s latest maneuvers, must, if they are true, be squarely confronted and made sense of. At the same time that ordinary Americans may be deprived of their guns, or forced to scale back on legitimate ownership of certain models and magazine capacities, the Department of Homeland Security has <a href="http://lastresistance.com/125/dhs-orders-200-million-more-bullets/">ordered</a> millions of weapons and over a billion rounds of hollow-point bullets (banned internationally), as well as riot gear and other military equipment. The NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) has followed suit, putting in an <a href="http://godfatherpolitics.com/6604/noaa-buying-hollow-point-ammo-for-weather-service/">order</a> for 46,000 rounds of .40-caliber hollow-point bullets. Why, we may wonder, is a weather service being armed to the teeth? Are U.S. citizens now at risk from their own government? After all, the National Defense Authorization Act provides for indefinite detention without warrant or probable cause. The bill does not apply exclusively to terrorists or terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay; even after a change of wording to allay fears of extra-judicial proceedings, the military may still retain the power to arrest and hold Americans without the writ of habeas corpus or, at any rate, without the obligation to take the judicial process further. As Senator Rand Paul <a href="http://rt.com/usa/obama-ndaa-detention-president-288/">objected</a>, “Saying that new language somehow ensures the right to habeas corpus—the right to be presented before a judge—is both questionable and not enough. Citizens must not only be formally charged but also receive jury trials and the other protections our Constitution guarantees. Habeas corpus is simply the beginning of due process. It is by no means the whole.”</p>
<p>Some patriots are profoundly apprehensive over these developments, fearing something like a “hostile takeover” of civil society by a growing state apparatus. But surely, it can’t happen here, though it has happened in many other places. Did not the Fathers write a Constitution to prevent exactly that, especially when one considers <a href="http://constitution.org/mil/ustx_law.htm">Article 1, Section 8</a> that allows for an armed citizen militia? America must be exempt from such a nightmare scenario, which can only be the product of fevered imaginations and conspiracy nuts. Or is it? This is a president who has presided over an imploding economy, a ballooning deficit, a deteriorating international situation, an <a href="http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2013/03/14/ig-report-confirms-pj-media-obama-dojs-leftist-election-lawyer-hiring-blitz/">out-of-control Department of Justice</a>, a diminished military, political and racial divisions that are tearing the nation apart, the specter of restrictions on freedom of expression, the appointment of indisputable incompetents and highly dubious characters to sensitive positions of authority (read: Kew, Hagel, Brennan and Kerry, who are only the most recent), and a <em>de facto</em> alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood whose self-admitted project is the destruction of the United States and whose installment in power in Egypt, as Barry Rubin definitively <a href="http://pjmedia.com/barryrubin/2013/03/14/the-secret-document-that-set-obamas-middle-east-policy/">shows</a>, “was a conscious and deliberate strategy of the Obama administration, developed <em>before</em> the ‘Arab Spring’ began.” Indeed, this is a president who traffics in <a href="blatant%20lies">blatant lies</a>, cover-ups and misdirections at the cost of American interests and consequently merits being suspected of nefarious designs.</p>
<p>I am not suggesting that anything so cataclysmic as a state-sponsored <em>putsch</em> is about to take place. I am only remarking on a series of curious and provocative news items and speculating on their concatenation. But if we were inclined to conduct a thought experiment assuming the possibility of such an event, the main obstacle to its success would seem to be the state of Texas, with its long, unlocked coastline, its oil industry, its early history of “lone star” sovereignty, and the (presumably) fiercely independent nature of its people. Could this be the reason that the Democrats are <a href="http://www.alternet.org/election-2012/paint-it-blue-democrats-launch-plan-take-back-texas">launching</a> what has been called “a full-scale offensive…with the aim of turning a GOP stronghold into a battleground state,” targeting the growing Hispanic community—a demographic shift favorable to the Democrats, investing in grassroots organizations, and infiltrating the school system via a <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2013/02/21/ten-shocking-things-a-huge-texas-curriculum-conglomerate-has-foisted-on-public-school-students/">progressivist indoctrination scheme</a> known as <a href="http://www.voicesempower.com/stopcscope-the-progressive-indoctrination-in-texas-schools/">CSCOPE</a> and the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES), supported by Bill Ayers and President Obama? (CSCOPE describes the Boston Tea Party as a “terrorist attack,” praises the morally compromised UN Secretary Ban Ki-moon as an eco-warrior, extols Islam while denigrating Christianity, exonerates the Black Panthers’ strategy of violence to achieve “equal rights,” and so on.) Take Texas and you’ve got America. In this hypothetical scenario, the whole of Texas is the contemporary Alamo and the president of the United States is the incarnation of General Santa Anna.</p>
<p>As with the historic building just across the street, so the great republican edifice just across the border is being dismantled, as the <em>Citizen</em> puts it, “brick-by-brick, panel-by-panel, window-by-window.” I say this to my American readers: One way or another, your trophy president is going to bring down your country. All the evidence points to the likelihood that he is not only an enemy of the United States of America, but its most formidable enemy in the world today. As I <a href="http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=35718">wrote</a> in 2009, “I do not fear Abbas, Zelaya, Putin, Chavez or the rest of that disreputable bunch. I am alarmed when I consider Ahmadinejad and Khamenei. But I am scared to death of Obama.” You should be too.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Israel Apartheid Week: A Tale of Two Brothers</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/david-solway/israel-apartheid-week-a-tale-of-two-brothers/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=israel-apartheid-week-a-tale-of-two-brothers</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/david-solway/israel-apartheid-week-a-tale-of-two-brothers/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 01 Mar 2013 04:25:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Solway]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[arab world]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel Apartheid Week]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[university of toronto]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=179518</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Whether passive or aggressive, anti-Israel slander amounts to the same thing.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/david-solway/israel-apartheid-week-a-tale-of-two-brothers/iaw-3/" rel="attachment wp-att-179562"><img class="size-full wp-image-179562 alignleft" title="iaw" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/iaw.jpg" alt="" width="311" height="187" /></a>Driving past the University of Toronto recently, I noticed a lone protestor on the perimeter of the campus carrying a sign objecting to Israel Apartheid Week. I was reminded that the University of Toronto was the first academic institution to host and promote the scandal of this event. Beginning in 2004 under the interim presidency of Frank Iacobucci, who does not seem to have realized the ignominy he had countenanced, the contagion spread to many other academic cesspools across Canada, the U.S. and Europe. The University of Toronto, however, is the revered patriarch of the movement. Iacobucci was succeeded in November 2005 by the current president, David Naylor, under whose administration this academic canard has persisted into the present moment—the festival of anti-Semitic hatred and anti-Zionist calumny will unfurl the Palestinian flag and welcome a contingent of bigoted speakers on March 4.</p>
<p>When questioned by the <em>Friends of the </em><a title="Simon Wiesenthal Center" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Wiesenthal_Center"><em>Simon Wiesenthal Center</em></a><em> for </em><a title="Holocaust" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust"><em>Holocaust</em></a><em> Studies</em> about his university’s compliance with so evidently corrupt and defamatory a spectacle, Naylor <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_Apartheid_Week">declared</a> that “We do, in fact, recognize that the term Israeli Apartheid is upsetting to many people, [but] we also recognize that, in every society, universities have a unique role to provide a safe venue for highly charged discourse.” Naylor’s recognition that the term is “upsetting” is entirely frivolous, unbefitting a university president. <em>The fact is that the term is totally false</em>—a given that appears to have escaped Naylor’s attention rather conveniently, thus sparing him the moral duty to confront so spurious a conviction. Further, universities are not always—or even primarily—known for furnishing such “safe venues,” especially when the speakers are unpopular conservative figures.</p>
<p>A few typical episodes will suffice to corroborate the point. A <a href="http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=46&amp;x_review=9">riot</a> incited by pro-Palestinian activists erupted when Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was invited to speak at Concordia University in Montreal, causing extensive damage and injury and forcing cancelation of the event. Jewish students at York University in Toronto required police protection when <a href="http://www.mererhetoric.com/2009/02/12/muslim-mob-attacks-jewish-center-at-toronto-university-police-respond-by-shutting-down-the-center/">threatened</a> by a swarm of Muslim students. Ann Coulter’s talk at the University of Ottawa was <a href="http://www.torontosun.com/news/canada/2010/03/23/13336316.html">shut down</a> by a horde of howling students and a craven administration. Author Warren Farrell’s <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iARHCxAMAO0">address</a> on behalf of a men’s rights organization, the Canadian Association for Equality (CAFE), held at Naylor’s own university, proceeded amidst obscene verbal abuse and palpable menace while police stood idly around. Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren, was <a href="http://www.volokh.com/2010/02/12/free-speech-on-campus-michael-oren-at-uc-irvine/">disrupted</a> and shouted down by unruly Muslim and left-wing students at the University of California at Irvine. David Horowitz, founder of the Freedom Center, is <a href="http://www.amazon.com/forum/politics?_encoding=UTF8&amp;cdForum=Fx1S3QSZRUL93V8&amp;cdThread=TxNPUNV5VB4WOM">accompanied by a bodyguard</a> when he lectures at American universities.  The beat—and the beating—goes on.</p>
<p>The disingenuousness of Naylor’s claim regarding “every society” is revealed if we glance at the Arab world, where no “safe venue” is remotely in evidence. Consider inviting a politically controversial or Jewish speaker to Al-Azhar University in Cairo, or Umm Al-Qura University in Mecca, or the Islamic University of Lebanon where the Academy’s  “unique role to provide a safe venue for highly charged discourse” is about as viable as, well, a Canadian or American university president showing a sliver of moral courage or cerebral acuity.</p>
<p>One does not like to cast disparaging phrases and sentiments around indiscriminately, but I cannot refrain from viewing David Naylor (no differently from his likeminded peers, as it should go without saying) as a disgrace to his calling. Nor can I help speculating that the refusal to intervene, or what amounts to the <em>de facto</em> advocacy we remark in the U of T president, runs in the family. His brother, R.T. Naylor, a professor at McGill University in Montreal, is the former director of the piquantly named American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and the author of many tendentious books on political and economic subjects. The Naylors’ partiality to Islamic causes may be fractionally explained by a Middle Eastern genealogy, as M.J. Stone implies in a favorable <a href="http://vnnforum.com/showthread.php?t=48350">review</a> of the Montreal Naylor’s work in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Linder">pro-Nazi</a> <em>Vanguard News Network Forum</em>, in which he does not fail to mention the Naylor “family roots in Lebanon.”</p>
<p>R. T. Naylor intrigues me not least because we shared a publisher for a time, McGill-Queen’s University Press, for which I no longer write. Naylor, I must confess, is one of the most turgid and clottingly indigestible writers I have ever suffered reading, but one book in particular merits investigating for the kind of anti-American, anti-Israeli, pro-Muslim bafflegab littering the Left/Islamic scene today, an illustration of what David Horowitz has aptly called “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Unholy-Alliance-Radical-Islam-American/dp/0895260263/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1361990809&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=unholy+alliance+-+david+horowitz">the unholy alliance</a>” busy at its insidious work. I refer to Naylor’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Satanic-Purses-Money-Misinformation-Terror/dp/0773534547/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1361990581&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=satanic+purses"><em>Satanic Purses</em></a>, a screed filled with reams of presumably hard economic data arguing that the war on terror is largely deceptive and feeds off a hoodwinked public in order to advance various entrenched interests. The atrocious titular pun on Salman Rushdie’s major novel, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Satanic-Verses-Novel-Salman-Rushdie/dp/0812976711/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1361990874&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=the+satanic+verses+salman+rushdie"><em>The Satanic Verses</em></a>, is enough to extradite the author’s intellectual repute. Not only does the title betoken an adolescent attempt to seem clever and with-it, but ironically also recalls the fatwa on Rushdie issuing from the very Islamic world that Naylor extols and justifies.</p>
<p>Once inured to the battery of putative “information,” it requires only a few pages for the reader to recognize that the writing is vitiated by a sophomoric snideness, operating in the vein of pseudo-mockery and alluding tongue-in-cheek, to take just a couple of examples, to the presumed “regime of brooding Islamic fanatics” in Sudan or the “gang of misanthropic miscreants” in Taliban Afghanistan. These groups are meant to be understood as the inventions of unscrupulous neoconservative agents like George W. Bush and his Republican backers or of the “machinations of the pro-Israel lobby.” It is the latter, we are given to understand, who comprise the brooding fanatics and misanthropic miscreants.</p>
<p>But when Naylor goes on to define al-Qaeda as “largely a law-enforcement fable akin to the Mafia myth,” we know we are witnessing a slick polemical shell game, for the Mafia is no myth and its global reach has been amply documented. For Naylor, the United States is the real Evil Empire, Israel and its American-Jewish supporters are the devil’s deputies, Hamas is a world-class charity, the Oslo Accords were sabotaged by the Israelis, radical Islam is basically innocent and is only reacting to “Western meddling in the Islamic world,” jihad does not mean Holy War (shades of John Brennan), the American government seeks “to demonize Muslims worldwide,” (utter nonsense under Obama, but also under Bush), the international banking infrastructure is “a global espionage apparatus,” and so on <em>ad vomitatum</em>.</p>
<p>When, in an interview with <a href="Counterpunch">Counterpunch</a>, Naylor speaks of Jewish fundamentalist “charities” sponsoring terrorist groups and of Christian fundamentalist proselytizing which “may well provoke further acts of terrorism,” asserts that Israel is engaged in a “policy of mass murder,” torture and theft, and contends that the main resource of Middle Eastern countries “is not oil [but] their émigré population, well-educated and for the most part anxious to go home,” there can be little doubt that we are observing a polemical farce of histrionic proportions, turning reality upside-down, accusing a straw man of the crimes and transgressions committed by one’s own fraternal constituency, and whitewashing a frankly violent, parasitic and Caliphate-aspiring Islamic world.</p>
<p>As Stone put it in the above-cited puff job, “A culmination of thirty years’ work as a historian, criminologist and expert in international political economy, Naylor described<em> Satanic Purses</em> as counterpoint to post 9/11 propaganda. ‘It brings together my expertise in finance, politics, and both Middle Eastern and North American history as it relates to the deeply embedded prejudices against Muslims and Arabs that have existed in the West since the time of the crusades.’” Shades of the increasingly discredited Edward Said. Naylor then goes to bat for Hamas and Hezbollah, describing both terrorist organizations, according to Stone, as “having important social and humanitarian mandates” and being compelled to react “to Israeli atrocities.”</p>
<p>Candidly speaking, it isn’t far from one Naylor’s approval of Hamas and Hezbollah and condemnation of (fictive) Israeli iniquities to another Naylor’s seemingly serene acquiescence in eight years’ worth, now, of Israel Apartheid Week hate fests on the campus he oversees. There is nothing unique about the brothers’ species of advocacy, whether passive like the Toronto Naylor’s or aggressive like the Montreal Naylor’s. Together they offer a paradigm for the migration and sedimenting of radical ideas, via a composite passive-aggressive mentality indicated by a sibling dynamic of permission and attack. There is a symbiotic relation in play here, as one approach lends institutional respectability to the hypothetical scholarship of the other—and vice versa.</p>
<p>The brothers are therefore influential in different but kindred fashions, one through the latent concession of misconstrued authority and the other through the manifest thrust of false argumentation. Moreover, it clearly signals how academic elitism and ostensible intellectual sophistication have succeeded in skewing the genuine terms of debate and have reconditioned violent aggressors as plaintive belligerents. There is not much to choose between wrong thinking and abject pusillanimity.</p>
<p>The placard borne by the lone protestor on the University of Toronto campus read: <strong><span style="text-decoration: line-through;">Israeli</span> Jihad Apartheid Week. No balls to flog</strong>. The second statement may be a trifle bizarre and ambiguous, but it is more easily understandable than the pliant and accommodationist positions adopted by the representative Naylors.</p>
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		<title>Saving the Neighborhood</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/david-solway/saving-the-neighborhood/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=saving-the-neighborhood</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/david-solway/saving-the-neighborhood/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 15 Feb 2013 04:25:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Solway]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[enclave]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mosque]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[neighborhood]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[no go zone]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sharia law]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=177759</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the expansion of Islamic no-go zones must be stopped. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/david-solway/saving-the-neighborhood/shariahzone3-2/" rel="attachment wp-att-177760"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-177760" title="shariahzone3" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/shariahzone3.png" alt="" width="276" height="219" /></a>Recently, British lawyer and “mosque-buster” Gavin Boby visited Canada to deliver a series of lectures on the problem of Muslim infiltration and occupation of municipal neighborhoods. The strategy of <em>de facto</em> Muslim annexation of city districts has worked brilliantly on the European continent and in England, a harbinger of what may well be in store for cities and towns in Canada and the U.S.—see for example <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2012/09/26/Islamic-Leaders-in-Dearborn-Mich-Plan-Rally-In-Support-Of-Laws-Against-Islamophobia">Dearborn</a>, Michigan and now <a href="http://www.icmtn.org/">Murfreesboro</a>, Tennessee, where the Koran and the Sunnah form <em>the basis of religious education</em> being offered at the new mosque there. The process generally begins, Boby says, with the construction of a mosque or community center, followed by the gradual transformation of the area into an Islamic enclave in which the original inhabitants find themselves increasingly harassed and intimidated, unable to live their everyday lives and, in many cases, ultimately forced to leave their homes.</p>
<p>In London (and other English cities), these districts will often morph into no-go zones, mini Islamic republics governed by Sharia law, where even the police enter only at their peril. The <a href="http://pjmedia.com/blog/muslim-patrols-sharia-enforcers-hit-britains-streets/">streets are patrolled</a> by gangs of vigilantes, burning posters they find offensive, threatening passers-by for being inappropriately dressed, attacking gay men, and abusing, raping and “grooming” young non-Muslim girls. On the mainland the problem is far worse, with entire self-ghettoized neighborhoods, like the quasi-<em>arrondissements</em> ringing Paris, that resemble military garrisons and that frequently erupt into frenzies of uncontrolled violence.</p>
<p>Boby’s message is simple and straightforward. As a lawyer who works in the field of zoning by-laws, he believes neighborhoods have the right to maintain existing zoning legislation and to resist city-council changes to the law which would facilitate the building of mosques. Boby does not believe in banning all mosques wholesale, but in looking at proposals to build mosques on a case by case basis. There are just too many violent, Sharia-ruled, Muslim palatinates spreading throughout Europe, from Malmo to Paris and Marseilles to Amsterdam to Luton and Manchester and so on and on.</p>
<p>The mosques in these areas serve as jihadi conscription stations and schools of radical education. Moreover the vast majority of these mosques go up not in the tonier neighborhoods but generally in less affluent districts where residents have little legal and financial clout. In far too many cases, as we’ve noted, these neighborhoods are effectively ruined, with private driveways blocked by worshipers’ cars, dog walkers molested, infrastructure sabotaged, young girls sexually exploited, Jews and other minorities assaulted, the police rarely if ever intervening. This is what Boby wishes to prevent by legal means. A mosque is not like a church or a synagogue; it can just as easily turn into a command center and a source of civic violence as furnish a space for harmless worship, and it is exactly this that needs to be taken into consideration. Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was not far wrong when, citing a 1912 poem by nationalist poet Ziya Gokalp, he described mosques as “our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets, and the faithful our soldiers.”</p>
<p>Boby, it is fair to say, was not here on a vigilante mission of his own but merely to warn that a genuine menace exists. His purpose was to point out that there are accessible legal means to avert the despoliation of ordinary blue-collar neighborhoods whose residents, as Janice Fiamengo <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/janice-fiamengo/fact-busters-and-the-mosque-buster/">writes</a> in an important <em>FrontPage</em> article, often “lack the financial resources or cultural confidence to protest” and who know “that their concern will be dismissed by local councillors as racist.” Boby, who works pro bono, is merely helping these people “to use the legal channels created precisely to foster citizen involvement in town planning.”</p>
<p>Nevertheless, Boby has come in for blistering and defamatory attacks, not only from the usual dubious suspects like CAIR-Canada and a pusillanimous fellow-traveling media consortium, but also from social and political conservatives who shrink from negative publicity and insist on a hard-and-fast distinction between Islamism and Islam. The unacknowledged motive for such tame insipidness is most likely fear—fear of savage reprisal but also fear of derision from our politically correct and craven contemporaries. For these people, a mosque is merely a house of worship serving a demographic composed largely of “moderate Muslims.” <a href="http://www.meforum.org/2931/american-mosques">Polls and surveys</a> revealing that a majority of mosques tend to operate as recruitment centers for aspiring jihadists are either ignored or discounted. The evidence is overwhelming, and anyone who disregards it is living not in this world but in some imaginary construct.</p>
<p>From their bully pulpits in the mosque, or in the migrating televangelical version of it, Muslim flamens <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/9859804/Preachers-of-hate-who-spread-their-violent-word-on-British-TV-channels.html">promulgate</a> with impunity various forms of hate speech and even incitements to violence. But many anti-Islamists draw back from facing the issue squarely. To bring such unpalatable facts to the light of print will do nothing, a conservative correspondent writes me, “to ingratiate us with Muslims who have no quarrel with democracy, just want to get on with their lives…” It is not to our advantage to be “adversarial.” Besides, “the problem in Europe is worse by magnitudes,” there is “a qualitative difference in the types of immigrants you get there,” and broad-brush condemnation “drives open-minded Muslims into the hands of the bad guys.”</p>
<p>Each of these arguments can be readily parried. Why “ingratiate” ourselves with immigrants who are coming to the West to enjoy the prerogatives and benefits of our way of life? Is that what we’ve come to? Should it not be the other way around? Is the host beholden to the guest or the guest beholden to the host? The European experience is not so remote as we may think; it is now becoming the Canadian and American experience as well. Are Muslim immigrants to Europe really so “qualitatively different” from ours, whatever that might mean? In Boby’s England, there was initially very little civil disturbance as the first generation strove to integrate into the heritage culture. In flocked the radical imams, who infected the second and third-generation immigrants with their extremist agenda. This is not an issue we can pussy-foot around. When neighborhoods are being blighted from one end of Europe to another and the same is beginning to happen here and in the U.S., perhaps this is precisely the time to become “adversarial.” It is no accident that CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) has become materially involved in monitoring terrorist plots and has succeeded in preventing local jihadists from attacking public institutions and high-profile public officials, <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/id/13150516/">including the prime minister</a>. CSIS is worried about radicalization, not because of people like Gavin Boby—who are only a reaction to what is already taking place—but because of those firebrand preachers who alight upon the mosques and proceed to convert their parishioners to the species of violence urged by the Koran and the Hadith. This is an issue of growing concern in Canada (as elsewhere)—“a problem,” according to the <a href="http://digital.nationalpost.com/epaper/viewer.aspx"><em>National Post</em></a>, “that is putting Canadians at risk” as young men, native Muslims and converts, are indoctrinated by radical imams.</p>
<p>My correspondent’s concluding charge, that vigorous analytical criticism of Islam and its social influence will only harden moderates and drive them into the arms of the fundamentalists, seems wholly counter-intuitive. Why should it not have the opposite effect: to alert the moderates to what is amiss in the sacred texts and practices of their faith so that they can oppose these blemishes? Why should pointing out that a religion behaves like a bully turn those who dislike bullying into bullies themselves? This is the same backwards logic unjustly hurled against Boby’s presence among us by two well-known, ostensibly conservative figures, Fred Litwin who runs the Free Thinking Film Society in Ottawa and Muslim author Salim Mansur, in an editorial for the <em>Ottawa Citizen</em>, titled “<a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/opinion/op-ed/Mistaking+Islamism+Islam/7884240/story.html">Mistaking Islamism for Islam</a>.”</p>
<p>We must, these luminaries inform us, under no circumstances offend the community of “moderate Muslims” who represent the last best hope for both Islam and for us. And yet, after the atrocity of 9/11, the more than 20,000 terrorist attacks since then, the continued spilling of blood, the travesty of the Arab Spring and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, the virulent, Muslim-spawned Jew hatred on campuses across the nation, the civil wars, the bloated casualty counts, the barbarism of resurgent Sharia and more, where, we are entitled to ask, are the vast multitudes of moderate Muslims marching in our streets under banners proclaiming “Not In Our Name”?  Quite the contrary. Democracy advocate Zuhdi Jasser’s recently convened American Islamic Forum for Democracy attracted only a handful of supporters during a demonstration in New York. Meanwhile, <a href="http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/04/12/11166773-us-rights-appointee-zuhdi-jasser-hits-raw-nerve-for-american-muslims?lite">according to NBC News</a>, “a coalition of 64 groups representing Muslim lawyers, students, Arab Americans and mosques and an array of advocacy organizations” protested his Senate appointment to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. Jasser’s intentions are noble and Litwin and Mansur would surely approve of this standard bearer for moderation. The problem is that it won’t work—the majority of his fellow Muslims won’t permit it.</p>
<p>Like many of their brethren, Litwin acts as amanuensis to the propagators of a despairing conciliation while Mansur is desperate to redeem the unredeemable. It is thus no surprise that they have been profoundly influenced by Bassam Tibi’s 2012 book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Islamism-Islam-Bassam-Tibi/dp/0300159986/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1360433959&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=bassam+tibi"><em>Islamism and Islam</em></a>. What they don’t mention is that the reputable German scholar Clemens Heni, in his more recent <em>Antisemitism: A Specific Phenomenon</em>, points out that that Tibi lauds German-Muslim scholars “who are at the forefront to denounce criticism of the Iranian threat, Islamism, and anti-Semitism”; Heni singles out a certain Naika Foroutan whose thesis advisor Tibi is. Foroutan praises Shia theolgian Mohammad Khatami (who on October 28, 2008, in an <a href="http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=121417">address</a> to the University of Freiburg in Germany, referred to Zionism as a “continuation of fascism” and portrayed Israel as “an incurable wound on the body of Islam…that really possesses demonic, stinking, contagious blood”), argues that the West has been looking for a new enemy and found one in Islam, and blames the “state terrorism” of Ariel Sharon for 9/11. Tibi “even wrote a foreword to this highly problematic study.” Heni goes on to say that “The shocking thing is that a scholar like Bassam Tibi supports this kind of counter-productive scholarship” which rejects “any substantial analysis and criticism of Islamism, Islamic anti-Semitism, Sharia Law and Islamic jihad.” This is the sort of bilge that Tibi condones and oversees. It is to the detriment of their argument that Litwin and Mansur have so naively and conveniently allowed their thinking to be shaped by this man.</p>
<p>The late comedian Lenny Bruce used to tell the joke about a convicted murderer who, when queried about what launched him on his nefarious career, replied: It started with bingo in the Catholic Church. Just a joke, of course, but one with a modern application. It starts with a mosque or community center, advertised as appealing to multiple ethnicities, to advance the presumably benign aims of the “religion of peace.” In far too many cases, it does not end there. For when taken seriously, the religion of peace is anything but.</p>
<p>Here is a short <a href="http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2013/02/09/another-busy-busy-week-for-jihadists-4/">account</a> of typical events for February 7 and 8, 2013, on which I write. In Kalaya, Pakistan, Muslim fundamentalists bombed a marketplace selling videos and CD’s, killing at least sixteen. In Shomali, Iraq, fourteen Iraqis at a bus stop were targeted by Islamic State of Iraq bombers, and in Baghdad, “holy warriors” detonated two car bombs at an animal market popular with Shias, slaughtering at least seventeen. In Kano, Nigeria, Islamists gunned down nine female polio vaccination workers in two attacks after clerics accused the program of being a conspiracy against Muslim children, similar to what occurred a few weeks earlier in Afghanistan. In Garissa, Kenya, Islamists shot two Christian pastors, killing one. In Kishindih, Afghanistan, the Taliban took out four locals with a roadside bomb. A few days before, the <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2273171/Fayhan-al-Ghamdi-raped-tortured-daughter-5-death-escapes-light-sentence.html#axzz2JyLsKo7j">news broke</a> of a popular Saudi preacher and televangelist who raped, tortured and murdered his five year old daughter. Meanwhile a Sri Lankan guest worker was <a href="http://www.israpundit.com/archives/52769">beheaded</a> in the public square in Riyadh. And a few days before that in London, a young black woman had <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6uGNiGJ6LI">acid thrown in her face</a> by a figure clad in a burka. Around the same time, Danish journalist Lars Hedegaard, who has repeatedly warned that press freedom is under threat from Islam, narrowly escaped an <a href="http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/02/06/the-bullet-flew-past-my-right-ear-danish-islam-critic-narrowly-escapes-assassination-attempt/">assassination attempt</a> by an assailant whom Danish police drolly described as “foreign.” The Jewish inhabitants of Malmo are leaving in droves and highly respected <em>Jerusalem Post</em> columnist Caroline Glick has <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/caroline-glick/britain-is-no-place-for-jews/">advised</a> Jews to emigrate from an increasingly anti-Semitic Britain, owing to an alliance between the intellectual elite and rabid anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist Muslim advocacy. France is not much better. Boby, who is also a passionate friend of the Jewish people, quotes a French correspondent of his who writes that “young French Jews are deciding to get educated, get ready, and get out” (personal communication).</p>
<p>But it is not only Jews who are at risk from the invasive forces of Islam—although, as Boby affirms, the fate of Jews is a “touchstone issue.” It is also the unsuspecting, vulnerable, generally working class householders and pensioners who eventually find themselves no longer welcome in their own neighborhoods and who are often forced to sell their homes at a fraction of their original value. The more privileged may succeed in preserving their neighborhoods, their lives and their livelihoods, but it is their successors who will bear the brunt of their wavering, their condemnation of the messengers who have come to warn us, and their penchant for refined nuances and textured distinctions, such as Islam/Islamism, when we are under subversive and sustained attack, physically, politically and demographically. It is our progeny who will pay for our failure to make a stand, not only at the gates of Vienna, but at the gates of Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto, New York, London, Oslo, Paris, Malmo, Marseilles, Brussels…</p>
<p>When terrorist attacks occur, the immediate response is to rename them as something else: instances of “workplace violence,”  well-deserved retaliations for our multifarious sins, or the work of a pathological fringe. In the aftermath of such enormities, the next impulse of the media and officialdom is to caution citizens to avoid a “backlash” against the innocent and suffering Muslim community—which, be it said, almost never happens. When journalist and film director Theo van Gogh was slaughtered in the streets of Amsterdam by a second-generation Moroccan immigrant, Queen Beatrix’s reflex was to visit a Moroccan community center with pledges of sympathy and support, “a gesture of mind-boggling dhimmitude,” as Bruce Bawer puts it in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Surrender-Appeasing-Islam-Sacrificing-Freedom/dp/0767928377/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1360778742&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=bruce+bawer+surrender"><em>Surrender</em></a>. Nor did the Queen see fit to attend van Gogh’s funeral. And naturally, the buzzword of ”Islamophobia” is duly trotted out in such cases, suggesting a sentiment and expression regarded as reprehensible—a misnomer if ever there was one since a phobia is an irrational fear, but there is nothing irrational about it. Such attitudes have become ecumenical.</p>
<p>In the midst of all this programmatic obfuscation, an even more insidious threat unfolds, weakening the fibres of the social and cultural fabric. Terrorism is an effective Islamic tactic, but “entryism”—the penetrating of academia, the media, government, labor unions, protest groups and the very social climate—is even more so. What we are observing is the practice of subversion which, in the words of Derek Nelson and John Thompson of the Mackenzie Institute in their 2013 <a href="http://www.mackenzieinstitute.com/2013/CM1301%20A%20Primer%20on%20Subversion.html"><em>Primer on Subversion</em></a>, “seeks to supplant or distort the normal political process” and to transform our culture and law “in areas such as free speech, open courts, family values, and religious freedoms to make them compatible with Sharia law, itself incompatible with liberal democracy.” The neighborhood mosque, as we have seen, is only the beginning of our troubles. If its pacific nature cannot be guaranteed and its respect for local statutes and civic life assured, its effects will spread outward in waves of destabilization, one of the chief aims of the Muslim Brotherhood, as per its 1987 <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=1235"><em>Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America</em></a>,</p>
<p>Cultural authorities and commentators like Gavin Boby, Geert Wilders, Robert Spencer, Bat Ye’or, Andrew Bostom, Philippe Karsenty, Diana West, Jamie Glazov, Pam Geller and Bruce Bawer, among a small platoon of truth-tellers and prophetic voices, speak and write to alert us to the imminent danger that confronts us. Unlike our cultural elect, they refuse to pay Dane geld to a supple and formidable adversary. But it’s an uphill battle, for they are opposed and disparaged by an army of intellectuals, politicians, media quislings and liberal appeasers who serve as the Praetorian auxiliaries for a newly hegemonic Islam. Nonetheless, despite the odds, Boby for one is optimistic. “We will win,” he asserted at the conclusion of his Ottawa lecture. May the future bear him out.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>The Four Als</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/david-solway/the-four-als/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-four-als</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 10 Jan 2013 04:40:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Solway]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[al gore]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[al jazeera]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[current]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Global Warming]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=172671</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[More reminders of how prohibition, of one kind or another, inevitably leads to injurious consequences.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/david-solway/the-four-als/al4/" rel="attachment wp-att-172792"><img class=" wp-image-172792 alignleft" title="al4" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/al4-450x299.jpg" alt="" width="315" height="209" /></a>Who can forget Al Capone, the Chicago mobster who profited from Prohibition and murdered and swashbuckled his way to a pot of gold before meeting an untimely end? Forbidding things that people want always seems to lead to violent or insidious forms of exploitation while generating a cast of power-hungry and sometimes flamboyant characters in the process. Today alcohol flows for the taking although other manifestations of constraint, interdiction and taboo flourish as exuberantly as ever. Certain words and phrases have been rigorously proscribed under the rubric of Political Correctness and cadres of petty tyrants and bureaucrats in the media, the political echelon and the academy are raking in obscene salaries applying the rules of speech. Criticism of the reigning shibboleths—readily obtainable abortion as a subsidized right, gay marriage, social entitlements, affirmative action, the campaign against the right to bear arms,  big government, the obsolescence of the Constitution—is met with sanctimonious rectitude and programmatic suppression while the enforcers are promoted to high office, social cachet or plush employment.</p>
<p>No less crucial, the prohibition against carbon, ostensibly to avert “climate change” and to compel industrial temperance, has now become one of the most lucrative enterprises of our time. We should make no mistake about this; the war against carbon is both a repressive imposition and big business. It is prohibition writ large. Many rather colorful if unscrupulous individuals are filling their coffers advocating carbon teetotalism—one thinks of Rajendra Pachauri who heads the IPCC at the United Nations and sits on the boards of companies poised to gain from the “climate change” hoax, including his The Energy Research Institute (TERI), Canadian climate evangelist David Suzuki who benefits from ample foundational largess, and, of course, the redoubtable Al Gore who has not allowed moral principle and practical consistency to interfere with his profiteering agenda. In the <a href="http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2013/01/04/of-complexities-contradictions-and-second-chakras/">words</a> of Ed Driscoll, “Al lives <a href="http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/al-gores-home-in-nashville.jpg">in a mansion</a>, flies around <a href="http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2637593/posts">in a private plane</a>, and, this, along with his various business ventures, gives him an overall carbon footprint the size of, well, one giant Manbearpig.”</p>
<p>As I  document in my recent <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Global-Warning-Trials-Unsettled-Science/dp/0981276784/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1357411932&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=david+solway+global+warning">Global Warning: The Trials of an Unsettled Science</a></em>, Al has done extremely well for himself, buying carbon offsets from the company he co-owns and chairs, Generation Investment Management, partnering with the venture capital investment firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield &amp; Byers that is behind Terralliance, an oil wildcatter, and earning royalties from Pasminco Ltd. for a highly toxic zinc mine on his property. Then there are the tendentious books and erroneous films, and public appearances for which he charges hundreds of thousands of dollars. Al is now well on his way to amassing an indecent fortune that would make Al Capone’s stash look picayune by comparison.</p>
<p>As if this were not enough to satisfy any ordinary man’s craving for enrichment, our aspiring carbon billionaire and homegrown catastrophist has just concluded a deal with yet another Al, to wit, Al Jazeera, to whom he has <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/01/04/the-real-problem-with-al-gores-100-million-payday-from-selling-current-to-al-jazeera/">sold</a> his part-owned Cable TV company for a cool $500 million, yielding a personal profit of $100 million. The fact that Al Jazeera, who lives in fundamentalist Qatar and works for theocratic despot Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, is notoriously anti-American and a source of jihadist propaganda, along with the fact that the sale represents a bargain with presumably hated big oil, does not weigh heavily, apparently, on Al Gore’s conscience. “While conservatives and liberals have plenty to argue about,” <a href="http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2013/01/04/the-al-jazeera-liberals-al-gore/">writes</a> Jonathan Tobin, “one would have hoped that they would be united in their revulsion against the kind of bias that Al Jazeera exemplifies.” And as Forbes Magazine <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/01/04/the-real-problem-with-al-gores-100-million-payday-from-selling-current-to-al-jazeera/">comments</a>, “Gore is <a href="http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/01/a-match-made-in-heaven.php">helping a foreign government spread propaganda</a> in the U.S.! He’s doing business with a network that’s <a href="http://newsbusters.org/blogs/matthew-philbin/2013/01/03/al-s-jazeera-gore-sells-current-network-aligned-views">sympathetic to terrorists</a>! He’s <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/01/03/liberal-al-gore-becomes-very-rich-hypocrite-with-sale-current-tv/">taking oil money</a>! He’s <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2013/01/04/oreilly-rips-al-gore-for-tax-hypocrisy-in-current-tv-sale/">trying to avoid paying taxes</a>!” (The former vice president sought to close the sale before January to <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2013/01/03/al-gore-hoped-to-sell-current-tv-before-fiscal-cliff-tax-increases/">avoid higher taxes</a> in the new year.) It all starts with the prohibition against carbon and petroleum economies. It ends with unseemly opulence at the expense of national well-being and the public good.</p>
<p>Although American Al is taking something of a beating these days from scattered sources, (although not, obviously, from <em><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/04/opinion/al-jazeera-in-america.html?ref=opinion&amp;_r=1&amp;">The New York Times</a></em> and the major networks), his arrangement with Muslim Al will eventually fade from public and media awareness, thanks to the intervention of the most dangerous Al of them all, namely, Al Zheimer. How many American citizens recall—or are even taught—the significant dates of American history, the wisdom and provisions of the <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Federalist-Papers-Alexander-Hamilton/dp/1936594404/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1357428500&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=federalist+papers">Federalist Papers</a></em>, the Articles of the Constitution, the existence of the Marshall Plan that saved Europe from collapse, and an uncountable trove of important muniments? How many even remember the ravages wrought by Prohibition and the Temperance League of the 1920s and 30s? It is truly astonishing how effective Al Zheimer can be, plying his trade of selective erasure and historical abridgment. We may remember the first three Als as figures in popular lore, but the fourth Al will see to it that we forget the precise nature of the events that bind them in a fraternity of malfeasance, just as we obliterate from consciousness the malign chronicle of Prohibition in all its manifold aspects.</p>
<p>How easily we lapse into that species of collective senescence which forgets that legislative forbidding results mainly in prodigies of mischief and corruption. It would be a blessing if we could only remember how prone we are to forgetfulness. It would be a great advantage if we could bring to mind how Prohibition of one kind or another, from booze to carbon to the study of Islam, inevitably leads to injurious unintended (or intended) consequences. The growing prominence of fiscal and political bootlegging should be entirely expected. But Al Zheimer and the destructive influence of the prohibitionary impulse go hand in hand and guarantee the prosperity and power of the most unsavory characters among us.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>The Argument for Guns</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/david-solway/the-argument-for-guns/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-argument-for-guns</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 27 Dec 2012 04:44:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Solway]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[assault rifle]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Defense]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Guns]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Military]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Second Amendment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[violence]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=171132</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[And for fighter planes, destroyers, and state of the art military technology. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/david-solway/the-argument-for-guns/woman-shooting/" rel="attachment wp-att-171207"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-171207" title="woman-shooting" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/woman-shooting-450x299.jpg" alt="" width="270" height="179" /></a>Following the latest shooting atrocity in the U.S., the Second Amendment has once again come under fire. Advocates of gun control claim that the easy availability of guns leads to a demonstrable increase in violence and to the kinds of murderous outbreaks we have seen in public schools, as in Columbine and Newtown. Defenders of the right to own and carry firearms argue on the contrary that an individual who is armed is not only better able to resist mortal attack but is also in a position to defend others from wanton massacre.</p>
<p>The debate has now become particularly heated. Witness the <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/19/piers-morgan-gun-control-larry-pratt_n_2330948.html?utm_hp_ref=media">exchange</a> between Piers Morgan of CNN and Larry Pratt, director of Gun Owners of America. Morgan contended that America is an inherently violent country with the worst rate of gun crime in the civilized world while Pratt countered that the right to bear arms actually makes people safer. Breaching professional etiquette, Morgan vilified Pratt as “an incredibly stupid man,” to which Pratt calmly responded “It seems to me you are morally obtuse.” Morgan’s statistics are provably wrong, and his comportment was ballistic, hurling verbal loogies at his guest; Pratt pointed out, correctly, that lethal turmoil in Europe and Australia eclipses that in the U.S., and unlike his intemperate host, he spoke with poise and composure. Another case in point: University of Rhode Island professor Erik Loomis <a href="http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2012/12/18/professor-i-want-nra-vice-presidents-head-on-a-stick-n1469395">denounced</a> the NRA for having “murdered some more children,” considers it “a terrorist organization,” and wants its Vice President Wayne Lapierre’s “head on a stick.”</p>
<p>Loomis, like Morgan, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, and others of their ilk, refuses to face <a href="the%20fact">the fact</a> that crime rates are much lower in areas where citizens enjoy the right to bear arms. According to the <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1196941/The-violent-country-Europe-Britain-worse-South-Africa-U-S.html#ixzz2FhEqnXQu"><em>Daily Mail</em></a>, the “gun-free” U.K., Morgan’s home country, has one of the worst rates for violence of any Western nation, 2,034 crimes for every 100,000 residents compared to 466 in the U.S. No matter. The NRA’s chief executive Wayne LaPierre has met with almost universal mockery and horror in the media—<a href="http://www.google.ca/#hl=en&amp;gs_rn=1&amp;gs_ri=serp&amp;ds=n&amp;pq=national%20post%20wayne%20lapierre&amp;cp=24&amp;gs_id=14&amp;xhr=t&amp;q=national+post+editorial+wayne+lapierre&amp;pf=p&amp;tbo=d&amp;tbm=nws&amp;sclient=psy-ab&amp;oq=national+post+editorial+wayne+lapierre&amp;gs_l=&amp;pbx=1&amp;bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.&amp;fp=28cf67">“Wacko Wayne,” “gun-crazed maniac”</a>—for <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/dec/23/nra-wayne-lapierre-schools-gun-control">recommending</a> that armed guards be stationed in the schools. But the guards are already there, at least in some of the schools. The<em> Washington Post</em> <a href="reports">reports</a> that there are currently &#8220;in excess of 10,000 gun-carrying police assigned to schools,” citing figures from the National Association of School Resource Officers. Private schools routinely retain the services of armed personnel; indeed,  <a href="http://minutemennews.com/2012/12/school-obamas-daughters-attend-has-11-armed-guards-2/">Sidwell Friends School</a> attended by Obama’s daughters currently employs 11 security guards and is looking to hire more. As AWR Hawkins at <em>Breitbart</em> <a href="His%20children%20sit%20under%20the%20protection%20guns%20afford,%20while%20the%20children%20of%20regular%20Americans%20are%20sacrificed.">deplores</a>, “His children sit under the protection guns afford, while the children of regular Americans are sacrificed.” Virginia state legislator Bob Marshall <a href="http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/12/24/legislator-who-wants-to-offer-gun-training-to-teachers-faces-off-with-opinionated-anchor/">comments</a>, “The political elite in this city has their children in schools with armed guards…We just need to have the same protection that they have for themselves applying to the rest of America.”</p>
<p>It is not just conservatives who recognize the utility of armed protection for students. We recall that in 2000 president Clinton <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2000/apr/16/news/mn-20323">pledged</a> $120 million in federal grants to place more police officers in schools. And on December 23, 2012, Democratic senator Barbara Boxer <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/336244/sen-boxer-proposes-deploying-national-guard-schools-eliana-johnson">introduced an act</a> that would enable the deployment of the National Guard at schools across the country. Where is the liberal/progressive condemnation of these sensible proposals? What we are seeing on the part of those liberals who are driving the gun-control paddy wagon is an unsavory mix of walleyed ignorance, selective moral outrage and calculated hysteria.</p>
<p>True, much of the animus against guns is directed at the proliferation of assault rifles and high capacity ammunition clips. This seems to make good sense until we realize that the situation is not quite that simple. Charles Krauthammer, for example, takes a far more reasonable and mature approach to the issue than most national commentators do. In an article titled “<a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/author/200446/latest">The Roots of Mass Murder</a>,” Krauthammer writes that he has “no problem in principle with gun control. Congress enacted (and I supported) an assault-weapons ban in 1994. The problem was: It didn’t work…Even the guns that are banned can be made legal with simple, minor modifications.” On the problem of efficacy, Bruce Thornton <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/contempt-of-bitter-clingers-fuels-gun-control/">notes</a> that “murders increased after the 1968 Gun Control act, and later declined after the 1994 assault weapons ban expired.”</p>
<p>With respect to assault rifles, there is yet another issue to consider. Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution <a href="provides%20for">provides for</a> states to form militias, and for citizens to <em>organize and train themselves</em> in those instances when the state is found remiss. This ordinance is highly controversial, and its purpose today would surely be different from its original <em>raison d’être</em>. Nonetheless, a citizen militia might conceivably be mobilized to quell anarchic unrest or even as a last-resort resistance against a Federal behemoth drastically exceeding its mandate. A citizen militia armed only with 22-caliber rifles and 9-millimeter handguns would not last long in a guerrilla campaign against overwhelming force. This scenario is admittedly rather farfetched. But as long as Article 1, Section 8 remains on the books, assault rifles must also remain available.</p>
<p>The furor over gun control must be studied in still another light, that is, from the perspective of an ostensibly pacifist Administration that has been anti-gun and anti-American from the beginning of its tenure. It seems credible to assume that the disgraceful Fast and Furious operation was intended by the Obama administration not so much to track the activities of the Mexican cartels as to create the conditions for an attack on the Second Amendment. What better way to influence the public to gut the provisions of the Second Amendment than to craft a situation in which spillover gun violence acquires ever more media prominence? This reading of the ongoing scandal, which the DOJ and the president are doing everything in their power to suppress, begins to make sense when placed in the context of Obama’s disastrous foreign policy, his downplaying of American exceptionalism, and his reduction of American military might through budgetary sequestration.</p>
<p>It is not only that the president wishes to take guns out of the hands of American citizens, aka “bitter clingers”; he is also intent on taking warships out of the water, warplanes out of the skies, bombs out of the arsenals, and advanced weapons technology out of the experimental labs. Guns are only a subset of canons. Obama’s agenda, then, seems to be double-edged. On the one hand, he is rendering American citizens vulnerable within their own borders—criminals, after all, will not surrender their guns, and weapons can always be obtained illegally by those who wish to abuse them. On the other hand, Obama seems determined to render the U.S. permeable to its enemies: he has lost the Middle East, empowered the Muslim Brotherhood both at home and abroad, allowed American personnel to be slaughtered in Benghazi, installed <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35409150/ns/world_news-south_and_central_asia/t/troops-strict-war-rules-slow-afghan-offensive/">strict rules of engagement</a> in Afghanistan that result in greater American casualties, given China crippling influence over the American financial system, reset relations with Russia on Russian terms, ceded undue authority to a UN run amok, and seen to it that the U.S. as a corporate citizen of the world community is increasingly at the mercy of an international mafia of corrupt aggressors.</p>
<p>To focus exclusively on the liberal and media offensive against the gun lobby is to miss the more comprehensive issue. One needs to perform an act of extrapolation. The target is America itself, in both its civil and global dimensions. It is neither love of country nor moral solicitude that governs the “progressive” mindset. On the contrary, it is the distrust of the ordinary citizen to manage his own affairs coupled with a rancorous contempt for a presumably imperial America that animates our academic, intellectual, media and much of our political elite. The local campaign against guns and assault rifles is merely part of a much larger operation, put in practice by an ultra-liberal constituency and a Left administration, to weaken the U.S. both domestically and internationally. It starts with removing the common pistol; it ends with cutting back on the F-22 Raptor.</p>
<p>This is why law-abiding citizens must preserve the right to defend themselves not only in their homes and schools, but also in the diplomatic corridors of power and the arenas of international conflict. For they are now at risk in both domains.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>If You Build It, They Won’t Come</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/david-solway/if-you-build-it-they-wont-come/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=if-you-build-it-they-wont-come</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 11 Dec 2012 04:29:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Solway]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[abbas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[houses]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[israelis building]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=168812</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How to make Israel’s field of dreams real.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/david-solway/if-you-build-it-they-wont-come/israel55/" rel="attachment wp-att-168815"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-168815" title="israel55" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/israel55-444x350.jpg" alt="" width="266" height="210" /></a>In response to the UN upgrading of Palestinian status to that of observer state, a <em>de facto</em> abrogation of the Oslo Accords, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has authorized plans for building in East Jerusalem and for the construction of 3000 homes in the E1 corridor that connects the community of Ma’aleh Adumim to the capital, a distance of only five miles. Critics have accused the Israeli government of precluding an eventual contiguous Palestinian state (though bypass roads could easily be constructed), of engaging in reprisal tactics from a spirit of pique and rancor (despite legal justification to act as it did), and of sabotaging the groundwork for peace (though it is precisely the Palestinian refusal to negotiate that has put the prospect for peace in jeopardy). These are some of the stale clichés and bromides that pass for reasoned political analysis these days. An Israeli house is a fearsome thing, apparently.</p>
<p>In his essay collection <a href="http://www.amazon.ca/Poetry-Language-Thought-Martin-Heidegger/dp/0060937289/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1354992284&amp;sr=1-1"><em>Poetry, Language, Thought</em></a>, philosopher Martin Heidegger—admittedly no friend to Jews or Israel—compared a house to a kind of ship moving through time. A house, or a “dwelling,” breasts the waters of the future, “design[ing] for the different generations under one roof their journey through time.” What may be true of houses in general is even more so for Israeli houses, which navigate not only the years ahead but the turbulent medium of threatening and unpredictable political weather. The Israeli house is purpose-built and, so far as possible, unsinkable. Its function is to prevent foundering and to ensure survival.</p>
<p>For political columnist <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/the-deadly-israeli-house/">Daniel Greenfield</a>, an Israeli house, say a “five-floor apartment building complete with hot and cold running water,” is a cutting-edge offensive weapon. Greenfield’s ironic perspective is bracing and timely, countering not only the Palestinians’ overheated and lying rhetoric about Israeli refractoriness and putative aggression, but puncturing the duplicitous diplomatic furor over Israel’s pursuing its historic and legal rights in Jerusalem and the areas in Judea and Samaria over which it exercises juridical control. But according to our diplomatic apparatchiks and a jaundiced media, the peace process could be irreparably damaged by Israeli brick-and-mortar far more than by Palestinian rocket-and-mortar. Israeli houses endanger the hope for peace, Greenfield wryly continues, “by creating ‘facts on the ground,’ a piquant phrase that only seems to apply to houses with Jews. Muslim houses in no way create facts on the ground, even though they are built out of the same material and filled with people. Or perhaps they create the good kind of facts on the ground. The kind of preemption of negotiations that the professional peacemakers approve of.”</p>
<p>Discounting the Muslim and Third-World countries whose animus against the Jewish state is well understood and unavoidable, it is obvious that the reason the vast majority of Western nations either abstained or voted for the Palestinian initiative has nothing to do with moral or legal principle, but with calculations of naked venality. Australian foreign minister Bob Carr made this abundantly <a href="http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/national/foreign-minister-bob-carr-says-backdown-justified/story-fndo317g-1226528143763">clear</a>. “If we had voted no,” he explained, “that would have been a body blow to our interest in over 20 Arab countries”—all of which, let us remember, are vehemently anti-Semitic, anti-Western, dictatorial and socially and politically regressive regimes.</p>
<p>Moreover, when it comes to <a href="http://www.theettingerreport.com/OpEd/OpEd---Israel-Hayom/Fact-Checking-Judea-and-Samaria-Settlements.aspx">illegal building</a>, the onus falls on the Palestinians: more than 1000 illegal Arab homes are built annually in Jerusalem and many thousands more in Judea and Samaria. Palestinian construction in the region, <a href="http://www.theettingerreport.com/OpEd/OpEd---Israel-Hayom/Fact-Checking-Judea-and-Samaria-Settlements.aspx">points out</a> former Israeli ambassador Yoram Ettinger, “is dramatically larger than Jewish construction there.” Every stone laid by the Palestinians is a violation of the Oslo Accords (no less, as we have noted, than Mahmoud Abbas’ unilateral initiative at the UN). Jewish building, on the other hand, is undeniably legal, as per Article 80 of the UN Charter, which upholds the Palestine Mandate of 1922. As Eugene Rostow, former U.S. Undersecretary of State and a co-author of the pivotal UN Resolution 242, <a href="http://www.tzemachdovid.org/Facts/islegal1.shtml">writes</a>, “Jews have the same right to settle in [Judea and Samaria] as they have to settle in Haifa.” Indeed, the legal documentation in question considered Judea and Samaria, the official name used by both the Mandate and the UN between 1922 and 1948, as part of the Jewish National Home.</p>
<p>In addition, writing in the <em>American Journal of International Law</em>, Rostow <a href="http://www.israelmilitary.net/showthread.php?t=11164&amp;page=43">clarifies</a> in his discussion of 242 that Israel was “certified by the Security Council” to remain in the captured territories and “would not be required to withdraw without a prior agreement of peace.” And such a hypothetical withdrawal would be <em>selective</em>. Further, as the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs correctly argues, “The right of the Jewish people to settle in Palestine has never been terminated for the West Bank&#8221; (<a href="http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Government/Law/Legal%20Issues%20and%20Rulings/ISRAEL-S%20SETTLEMENTS%20-%20CONFORMITY%20WITH%20INTERNATION"><em>American Journal of International Law</em>, vol. 84, July 1990, p. 718</a>). Interestingly, <em>there are no 1967 borders</em> to which Israel would be required to return. In fact, there are only armistice lines, and the Jordanian peace agreement with Israel specified that these armistice lines would have no bearing on future negotiations to determine final borders. Lord Caradon himself, Britain’s ambassador to the United Nations and, along with Rostow, one of the chief framers of Resolution 242, stated in the <em>Beirut Daily Star</em> for June 12, 1974 that “It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967, because those positions were undesirable and artificial.”</p>
<p>As I wrote in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Hear-O-Israel-David-Solway/dp/0973406534/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1355015379&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=david+solway+hear%2C+o+israel"><em>Hear, O Israel!</em></a>, the bald truth is that <em>there are no pre-existent, officially-recognized pre-1967 borders, only armistice lines reflecting the reality of the end-of-war situation in 1949</em>—and these were not graven in treaty-stone. Clause 5(2) of the Rhodes Armistice Agreement specifies that “In no sense are the ceasefire lines to be interpreted as political or territorial borders” and that they do not affect “the final disposition of the Palestine question.” This is as true post 1949 as it is post 1967. These boundaries, known at present as the Armistice Demarcation Line, or Green Line, have yet to be finally determined, but as Resolution 242 makes plain, Israel is not expected to return to a prior, unsettled, indefensible position. Meanwhile there is nothing preventing Israel from building in officially designated territories, including Jerusalem and parts of Judea and Samaria. There is no getting around this fact except by the routes of deception, ignorance or willful myopia, aka the “road map.” In an <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/david-horowitz/reflections-of-a-diaspora-jew-on-zionism-america-and-the-fate-of-the-jews/">address</a> delivered to the Zionist Organization of America on September 6, 2012, David Horowitz clinches the matter in his usual forthright way: “After 2,000 years of exile, the oldest surviving indigenous people in the world has won the right to some of its stolen homeland. I look forward to the day when Judea and Samaria, the historic centers of Judaism, become part of the Jewish homeland as well.”</p>
<p>Every Jewish home in Jerusalem and in the permissible surrounding areas is a sort of Noah’s Ark, a vessel intended to withstand the flood of a clamant and expansionist Palestinian effort to acquire territory to which it is not entitled. According to both international jurisprudence and historical reality, the territory in question was <em>never Palestinian land</em> in the first place. As Ted Belman of <a href="http://www.israpundit.com/archives/51322#more-51322"><em>Israpundit</em></a> writes, “At best they are Israeli lands and at worst they are disputed lands.” But they are not occupied lands. And there is no legal instrument that denies Israel the right to build in Jerusalem and parts of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Location_map_Israel_shomron">Shomron</a>.</p>
<p>Let us not be in doubt about what Israelis call the <em>matsav</em>, or situation. For the enemy, all of Israel is a “settlement.” East Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria are the equivalent of Tel Aviv, Haifa and Beersheba. The Palestinians are on the march, militarily (Hamas) and diplomatically (the PA), with the intention of destroying Israel either in a single holocaust or by piecemeal disintegration. Israel must continue to build wherever it can, to solidify its frontiers, to establish its existence as a <em>fait accompli</em>, and to forestall a predatory antagonist from building in its stead. “Build, Bibi, Build,” urges David Efune in <a href="The%20Algemeiner"><em>The Algemeiner</em></a>. Whether regarded as a liner sailing through time or a form of military hardware, the Israeli house is what keeps the country rooted in its legitimate allodium and prohibits the intrusion of squatters.</p>
<p>For Israel to make real its field of dreams, the current Mandate is clear. If you build it, they won’t come.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Why Israel Must Act</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/david-solway/why-israel-must-act/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-israel-must-act</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 04 Dec 2012 04:28:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Solway]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[It is always preferable to be damned for strength than for weakness.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/david-solway/why-israel-must-act/640x392_49252_176219/" rel="attachment wp-att-167910"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-167910" title="640x392_49252_176219" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/640x392_49252_176219-450x337.jpg" alt="" width="270" height="202" /></a>Israeli leaders, by and large, appear not to have understood, in their dealings with the “international community,” that they are damned if they do, damned if they don’t. Those of us who are often critical of the failure of the nation’s leadership caste to act decisively in perilous situations, whether diplomatic or military, recognize the multitude of factors and pressures among which it must navigate. It must maintain its alliance with its American ally and also manage to keep European markets open to its exports.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, the cost of its political and economic prudence may be higher than the advantages it seeks to gain. There are times when prudence can scarcely be distinguished from timorousness. Why, for example, does Israel persist in supplying its sworn, genocidal enemy Hamas with electricity and allow the transfer of enormous quantities of goods and materials through the checkpoints, thus empowering an adversary that has launched over 8,000 rockets at civilian centers since the withdrawal from Gaza? Such counter-productive largesse has deterred neither the terrorist enclave from continuing to attack the Jewish state nor the “international community” from continuing to condemn it.</p>
<p>Similarly, in the wake of the P.A. seeking national status in violation of the Oslo Accords by appealing directly to the United Nations rather than pursuing the negotiation route, why has Israel not abrogated the Accords and subsequently implemented an independent policy of annexation of those areas of the so-called “West Bank” over which it has juridical authority? More to the point, why in its various wars against Hezbollah in 2006 and Hamas in 2008-2009 and 2012, has it not extended its campaign and delivered a crushing blow against its enemies, settling not for stalemate but for victory?</p>
<p>In every case, it has been denounced and vilified despite its lack of fortitude while permitting the terrorist cadres to re-arm and grow ever more menacing and intransigent. Would any other country in the world with a military edge and fighting for its very survival have courted what amounts to <em>de facto</em> defeat with such exemplary devotion?</p>
<p>In an <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=294217">article</a> for <em>The Jerusalem Post</em>, co-founder of the Jewish National Initiative Ariel Harkham points out that Israel has embraced a siege mentality, concentrating mainly on “passive defense” rather than a strategy of determined offence that would “incite fear in and wreak havoc against Hamas and Hezbollah.” Even the successful Iron Dome anti-missile technology focuses on deterrence instead of surgically removing the threat under which the country perpetually suffers.</p>
<p>There is another respect in which deterrence may not be ultimately viable: expense. Iron Dome scored an <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=294216">85% success rate</a> in neutralizing incoming missiles, but at a cost of $50,000 per interception, altogether between $25-30 million during the recent hostilities. The terrorist intention is thus double-pronged, namely, to harm and terrify Israeli civilians and to severely impact the Israeli economy. The IDF estimates that 200,000 missiles are currently aimed at Israel. Should these be launched, and every one intercepted, Israel would be bankrupted. Of course, this is not likely to happen, but it is clear that Israel cannot afford to maintain a defensive posture indefinitely. It must act, as it did in the 1967 war, to eliminate those forces that impinge on its ability to survive and prosper—and thus place itself in a better position to confront new threats that will inevitably arise.</p>
<p>But in order to do so, the governing class must realize the eternal paradox of Israeli existence in a hypocritical and inimical world: damned if it does, damned if it doesn’t. When conciliation is fruitless or contra-indicated, it is always preferable to be damned for strength than for weakness.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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