Monthly Archives: February 2015

A Burning Question

What started as a rumor was soon just about confirmed on February 17, 2015. “Jihadist militants from Islamic State (IS),” reported BBC News, “have burned to death 45 people in the western Iraqi town of al-Baghdadi, the local police chief says.”

Exactly who these people were and why they were killed is not clear, but Col Qasim al-Obeidi said he believed some were members of the security forces.
IS fighters captured much of the town, near Ain al-Asad air base, last week.
Col Obeidi said a compound that houses the families of security personnel and local officials was now under attack.

The legions of Islam deniers—the kind who follow Imam Obama’s asinine excommunication of ISIS from the fold of Islam-–also insist that setting a human being on fire is un-Islamic. An example:

“Islamic Teachings Explicitly Forbid Death by Burning, But ISIS Did It Anyway,” by Jenna McLaughlin, Mother Jones, February 5, 2015 …

This burning question was tackled by Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch:

None of the Muslim leaders and spokesmen quoted in this article address this story from Ibn Ishaq’s eighth-century account of Muhammad’s conquest of Khaybar, even to explain why the conduct of the man whom the Qur’an holds up as the supreme example to be emulated by Muslims (33:21) is not to be emulated in this case: “Kinana b. al-Rabi`, who had the custody of the treasure of B. al-Nadir, was brought to the apostle who asked him about it. He denied that he knew where it was. A Jew came (T. was brought) to the apostle and said that he had seen Kinana going round a certain ruin every morning early. When the apostle said to Kinana, ‘Do you know that if we find you have it I shall kill you?’ he said Yes. The apostle gave orders that the ruin was to be excavated and some of the treasure was found. When he asked him about the rest he refused to produce it, so the apostle gave orders to al-Zubayr b. al-Awwam, ‘Torture him until you extract what he has,’ so he kindled a fire with flint and steel on his chest until he was nearly dead. Then the apostle delivered him to Muhammad b. Maslama and he struck off his head, in revenge for his brother Mahmud.” (Ibn Ishaq 515).

There is also this hadith, in which Muhammad says: “Certainly I decided to order the Mu’adh-dhin (call-maker) to pronounce Iqama and order a man to lead the prayer and then take a fire flame to burn all those who had not left their houses so far for the prayer along with their houses.” (Bukhari 1.11.626)

Yes, there is also a contradictory, as is so often the case, since most or all of the hadith literature was fabricated to support the positions of various factions vying for power in the eighth and ninth centuries: “Narrated ‘Ikrima: Some Zanadiqa (atheists) were brought to ‘Ali and he burnt them. The news of this event, reached Ibn ‘Abbas who said, ‘If I had been in his place, I would not have burnt them, as Allah’s Apostle forbade it, saying, “Do not punish anybody with Allah’s punishment (fire).” I would have killed them according to the statement of Allah’s Apostle, “Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him.”’” … (Bukhari 9.84.57)

MORE.

Bum’s Rush For Allison Williams (Daughter Of Brian Williams)

Film, Gender, Hollywood, Morality, Pop-Culture, Relatives, Sex

The phrase a “bum’s rush” means “throw the bum out!” Libertarians, the tinny kind that ignores the cultural aspect of liberty and civilization, will attack this post with hackneyed lines, such as that, Allison Williams, daughter of disgraced NBC anchor Brian Williams, is making her way in the free market. Leave her be. Don’t like what she does for a living? Don’t consume her crappy, pun intended, products (movies).

For one, it is arguable that Ms. Williams would be where she is were she not “a member of the media circle jerk,” courtesy of her father. For another, I never watch filmic effluent like “Girls,” in which Allison Williams apparently stars. All I know of this rubbish comes from perusing news headlines.

Like a lot of north American females, this girl acts and talks dirty (highlighted below). I’m no prude; do what you may in the bedroom, but why coarsen the public square? Whatever happened to privacy? Via Mediatie:

While we all watched the Golden Globes on Sunday evening, Gawker noted that HBO’s Girls began its fourth season with Allison Williams‘ character Marnie on the receiving end of some ol’-fashioned “booty eating” from her new beau.***

In advance of the episode, Vulture had a reaction from Allison’s father, NBC newsman Brian Williams, who gave pretty much the same answer he does every time his daughter is involved in a sex scene:

She’s always been an actress. For us, watching her is the family occupation and everybody has to remember it’s acting, no animals were harmed during the filming, and ideally nobody gets hurt.

For her part, Williams told EW about the scene’s creation, in which no butts were actually eaten:

I had a couple of days talking to wardrobe and makeup to get ready to rig the thing that I wore for the ass motorboating. It was an engineering achievement! I would manufacture it if more than one person a year needed it. [Laughs] It was so elaborate—it involved Spanx that we cut away and glued down and involved menstrual pads and two of those weird thongs. I’ve had to do scenes like this twice now.

The moment below, in GIF form here.

And head on over to Gawker if you want to view the actual scene.

***Prediction: This article’s comments section will be full of the predictable “this is disgusting” outcry, but take note, fainting-couch frequenters: The activity known as “booty-eating” is currently experiencing a cultural renaissance. [This is a non sequitur: An activity doesn’t become laudable just because the masses engage in it—ilana]

Yalta: Where Franklin D. Roosevelt Conceded To Communism

America, Britain, History, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Russia, UN, War

Richard Ebeling at Target Liberty (TL) reminded us in advance that “February 4th mark[ed] the 70th anniversary of the most famous and infamous Yalta Conference between Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin during February 4-11 of 1945,” who

… determined the fates of hundreds of millions of human beings:
All the people of Eastern Europe who were turned into the “captive nations” in the direct grip of Stalin behind the “Iron Curtain.” The destiny of mass of the Chinese population, as Stalin was given an entrée into Manchuria that opened the door for Mao’s communist conquest of China.
The division of Korea into North and South, that handed over the people of the North to a totalitarianism on a Stalinist model that stills rules today, and set the stage for the three-year Korean War that cost the lives of 50,000 American service men, and more than a million Koreans.
And FDR’s “dream” of the United Nations as a U.S. and Soviet-led organization to manage and redesign the world through the use of economic sanctions and global policemen using force to put down rebellions or disagreements with what the “Great Powers” believed was good for mankind.

At least in the excerpt provided at TL, Dr. Ebeling may have been hasty in lumping Winston Churchill with Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin. Yes, Churchill rolled over, because he was desperate for FDR’s financial support. But not before he attempted he save Greece, admittedly at a cost to the “rest of the Balkans.”

Franklin Roosevelt, in particular, like many pseudo-intellectuals of his time, explains historian Paul Johnson, regarded the Soviet Union as a “peace loving democracy, with an earnest desire to better the conditions of the working peoples of the world.” FDR’s advisers in Moscow considered Stalin a benevolent, genial democrat. “This monster, who was responsible for the death of 30 million of his own people,” was regarded by the American administration as “exceedingly wise and gentle.” “Grotesquely Stalinist” too were Harold Denny and Walter Duranty, the New York Times’ reporters in Moscow.

In his defense, Churchill was avowedly anti-communist and detested Stalin, which is why FDR thought of him as a “reactionary … an old incorrigible imperialist, incapable of understanding [Stalin’s] ideological idealism.” Against the wishes of Winston Churchill did FDR agree to “give Stalin what was not his to give.”

(A History of The American People by Paul Johnson, pp. 790-791.)

UPDATED: Contra Marie Barf, Here’s Why ISIS Acts Up, Just A Little (Ms. Barf, ‘Exhibit A’)

Foreign Policy, Islam, Jihad, Middle East, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Socialism, Terrorism

What do you get when you combine intellectual inconsequentialness, schoolmarmishess, tartishness and a generous dollop of fem affirmative action? Meet stumblebum Marie Harf, the sibilant spokeswoman at the State Department. It goes without saying that another ingredient in the making of this insufferable specimen is family ties, nepotism of the kind described in “Brian Williams: member of media circle jerk.”.

The weak-minded Barf offered up the root-causes rot as the reason members of ISIS are acting up:

We need in the medium to longer term to go after the root causes that leads [sic] people to join these groups, whether it’s lack of opportunity for jobs … We can work with countries around the world to help improve their governance. We can help them build their economies so they can have job opportunities for these people…

Barf forgot to include the unscientific, biological reductionism that would attach a medical diagnosis to any and all misbehavior. Personally, my read on Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is Attention Deficit Disorder. A cure all: anger management and medication.

UPDATE: Retired Lieutenant Ralph Peters—he’s no favorite due to his mad militarism—did, however, nail it on Hannity, offering that Marie Barf is exhibit A for the failure of the American education system. Like myself, Lieutenant Peters checked on Barf’s education. She has an MA in Foreign Affairs from University of Virginia.

Promulgated by Barf, the argument upon which “The Root-Causes Racket” rests is refuted analytically in CHAPTER 5 of “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa.”

A superb antidote to Barf’s widely shared boorishness is “What ISIS Really Wants,” by Graeme Wood, editor at The Atlantic:

[BEGIN EXCERPT]

“The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.” …

… We can gather that their state rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change, even if that change might ensure its survival; and that it considers itself a harbinger of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world.

The Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), follows a distinctive variety of Islam whose beliefs about the path to the Day of Judgment matter to its strategy, and can help the West know its enemy and predict its behavior. Its rise to power is less like the triumph of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (a group whose leaders the Islamic State considers apostates) than like the realization of a dystopian alternate reality in which David Koresh or Jim Jones survived to wield absolute power over not just a few hundred people, but some 8 million.[I disagree with this fatuous analogy, so typical of the liberal mindset.] …

… We are misled in a second way, by a well-intentioned but dishonest campaign to deny the Islamic State’s medieval religious nature. …

… In fact, much of what the group does looks nonsensical except in light of a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringing about the apocalypse. …

… his exhortation to attack crops directly echoed orders from Muhammad to leave well water and crops alone—unless the armies of Islam were in a defensive position, in which case Muslims in the lands of kuffar, or infidels, should be unmerciful, and poison away. …

… The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam. …

… Virtually every major decision and law promulgated by the Islamic State adheres to what it calls, in its press and pronouncements, and on its billboards, license plates, stationery, and coins, “the Prophetic methodology,” which means following the prophecy and example of Muhammad, in punctilious detail. Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do. But pretending that it isn’t actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combatted, has already led the United States to underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it. We’ll need to get acquainted with the Islamic State’s intellectual genealogy if we are to react in a way that will not strengthen it, but instead help it self-immolate in its own excessive zeal. …

… Denying the holiness of the Koran or the prophecies of Muhammad is straightforward apostasy. But Zarqawi and the state he spawned take the position that many other acts can remove a Muslim from Islam. These include, in certain cases, selling alcohol or drugs, wearing Western clothes or shaving one’s beard, voting in an election—even for a Muslim candidate—and being lax about calling other people apostates. Being a Shiite, as most Iraqi Arabs are, meets the standard as well, because the Islamic State regards Shiism as innovation, and to innovate on the Koran is to deny its initial perfection. (The Islamic State claims that common Shiite practices, such as worship at the graves of imams and public self-flagellation, have no basis in the Koran or in the example of the Prophet.) That means roughly 200 million Shia are marked for death. So too are the heads of state of every Muslim country, who have elevated man-made law above Sharia by running for office or enforcing laws not made by God. …

… Many mainstream Muslim organizations have gone so far as to say the Islamic State is, in fact, un-Islamic. It is, of course, reassuring to know that the vast majority of Muslims have zero interest in replacing Hollywood movies with public executions as evening entertainment. But Muslims who call the Islamic State un-Islamic are typically, as the Princeton scholar Bernard Haykel, the leading expert on the group’s theology, told me, “embarrassed and politically correct, with a cotton-candy view of their own religion” that neglects “what their religion has historically and legally required.” Many denials of the Islamic State’s religious nature, he said, are rooted in an “interfaith-Christian-nonsense tradition.” …

… Every academic I asked about the Islamic State’s ideology sent me to Haykel. Of partial Lebanese descent, Haykel grew up in Lebanon and the United States, and when he talks through his Mephistophelian goatee, there is a hint of an unplaceable foreign accent. …

… The Koran specifies crucifixion as one of the only punishments permitted for enemies of Islam. The tax on Christians finds clear endorsement in the Surah Al-Tawba, the Koran’s ninth chapter, which instructs Muslims to fight Christians and Jews “until they pay the jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” The Prophet, whom all Muslims consider exemplary, imposed these rules and owned slaves.

Leaders of the Islamic State have taken emulation of Muhammad as strict duty, and have revived traditions that have been dormant for hundreds of years. “What’s striking about them is not just the literalism, but also the seriousness with which they read these texts” …

… “ISIS, by contrast, is really reliving the early period.” Early Muslims were surrounded by non-Muslims, and the Islamic State, because of its takfiri tendencies, considers itself to be in the same situation.

If al-Qaeda wanted to revive slavery, it never said so. And why would it? Silence on slavery probably reflected strategic thinking, with public sympathies in mind: when the Islamic State began enslaving people, even some of its supporters balked. Nonetheless, the caliphate has continued to embrace slavery and crucifixion without apology. “We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women,” Adnani, the spokesman, promised …

… Tens of thousands of foreign Muslims are thought to have immigrated to the Islamic State. Recruits hail from France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Germany, Holland, Australia, Indonesia, the United States, and many other places. Many have come to fight, and many intend to die. …

… Baghdadi spoke at length of the importance of the caliphate in his Mosul sermon. He said that to revive the institution of the caliphate—which had not functioned except in name for about 1,000 years—was a communal obligation. He and his loyalists had “hastened to declare the caliphate and place an imam” at its head, he said. “This is a duty upon the Muslims—a duty that has been lost for centuries … The Muslims sin by losing it, and they must always seek to establish it.” Like bin Laden before him, Baghdadi spoke floridly, with frequent scriptural allusion and command of classical rhetoric. Unlike bin Laden, and unlike those false caliphs of the Ottoman empire, he is Qurayshi. …

… the Muslim who acknowledges one omnipotent god and prays, but who dies without pledging himself to a valid caliph and incurring the obligations of that oath, has failed to live a fully Islamic life. I pointed out that this means the vast majority of Muslims in history, and all who passed away between 1924 and 2014, died a death of disbelief …

… they regard[ed] the caliphate as the only righteous government on Earth, though none would confess having pledged allegiance. …

… That whole package [of the Sharia] … would include free housing, food, and clothing for all, though of course anyone who wished to enrich himself with work could do so. …

… The Islamic State may have medieval-style punishments for moral crimes (lashes for boozing or fornication, stoning for adultery), but its social-welfare program is, at least in some aspects, progressive to a degree that would please an MSNBC pundit. Health care … is free. (“Isn’t it free in Britain, too?,” I asked. “Not really,” he said. “Some procedures aren’t covered, such as vision.”) This provision of social welfare was not … a policy choice of the Islamic State, but a policy obligation inherent in God’s law. …

… the state has an obligation to terrorize its enemies—a holy order to scare the shit out of them with beheadings and crucifixions and enslavement of women and children, because doing so hastens victory and avoids prolonged conflict. …

… Islamic law permits only temporary peace treaties, lasting no longer than a decade. Similarly, accepting any border is anathema, as stated by the Prophet and echoed in the Islamic State’s propaganda videos. If the caliph consents to a longer-term peace or permanent border, he will be in error. Temporary peace treaties are renewable, but may not be applied to all enemies at once: the caliph must wage jihad at least once a year. He may not rest, or he will fall into a state of sin. …

… One comparison to the Islamic State is the Khmer Rouge, which killed about a third of the population of Cambodia. …

… The biggest proponent of an American invasion is the Islamic State itself. The provocative videos, in which a black-hooded executioner addresses President Obama by name, are clearly made to draw America into the fight. An invasion would be a huge propaganda victory for jihadists worldwide: …

… A few “lone wolf” supporters of the Islamic State have attacked Western targets, and more attacks will come. But most of the attackers have been frustrated amateurs, unable to immigrate to the caliphate because of confiscated passports or other problems. Even if the Islamic State cheers these attacks—and it does in its propaganda—it hasn’t yet planned and financed one. (The Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris in January was principally an al?Qaeda operation.) …

… Muslims can say that slavery is not legitimate now, and that crucifixion is wrong at this historical juncture. Many say precisely this. But they cannot condemn slavery or crucifixion outright without contradicting the Koran and the example of the Prophet. “The only principled ground that the Islamic State’s opponents could take is to say that certain core texts and traditional teachings of Islam are no longer valid,” Bernard Haykel says. That really would be an act of apostasy. …

… these men spoke with an academic precision that put me in mind of a good graduate seminar. I even enjoyed their company, and that frightened me as much as anything else. …

… the Islamic State[:] when they get to questions about social upheaval, they sound like Che Guevara.” …

… Western officials would probably do best to refrain from weighing in on matters of Islamic theological debate altogether. Barack Obama himself drifted into takfiri waters when he claimed that the Islamic State was “not Islamic”—the irony being that he, as the non-Muslim son of a Muslim, may himself be classified as an apostate, and yet is now practicing takfir against Muslims. Non-Muslims’ practicing takfir elicits chuckles from jihadists (“Like a pig covered in feces giving hygiene advice to others,” one tweeted). …

… most Muslims aren’t susceptible to joining jihad. The ones who are susceptible will only have had their suspicions confirmed: the United States lies about religion to serve its purposes. …

[SNIP]

MORE of this remarkable essay.