Category Archives: Ancient History

A Burning Dilemma Among America’s Dhimma

America, Ancient History, Barack Obama, Bush, Ethics, History, Islam

“A Burning Dilemma Among America’s Dhimma” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

… While dhimmis contemplate what to do with the decaying corpse of a Muslim mass murderer, consider what General Sir Charles James Napier counseled about the valiant defense of Western values. The general (on an admittedly imperial mission to India) was confronted with the local Hindu practice of Sati, “the custom of burning a widow alive on the funeral pyre of her husband.”

When “Hindu priests complained to him,” as Wikipedia tells it, “about the prohibition of Sati by British authorities,” Napier replied:

“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”

In the West, we do not dispose of the dead on open-air funeral pyres, as is still done in India, Bali, south of Indonesia, and Nepal. But we do cremate. Cremating Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s remains is commensurate with what ought to be American values: It conserves resources and leaves (almost) nothing behind.

Incinerate Tsarnaev’s corpse. It’s the moral thing to do.

It matters not that “Islam strictly forbids cremation.” True Christians and Jews forbid the murder of innocents. Those are the values that trump Islam.

Besides, Islam is a highly derivative (and distorted) belief system. Tamerlan believed that “the Bible was a cheap copy of the Koran.” However confused Muslims like him are about historical chronology, they do claim to accept the Ten Commandments, bequeathed in the Hebrew Bible’s Exodus and Deuteronomy, centuries before Muhammad. If so, the Sixth Commandment is unequivocally clear: “Thou shalt not kill.”

He who kills innocents has forfeited his right to religious burial rites—especially if these are to be administered by the killer’s victims. …”

The compete column is, “A Burning Dilemma Among America’s Dhimma.” Read it on WND.

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UPDATE II: CNN Leads The Day’s ‘News’ With Death Of A … Mouseketeer (Margaret Thatcher’s Magnificent Mind)

Ancient History, Britain, Conservatism, Economy, Education, Feminism, Free Markets, Gender, History, Journalism, Media, Propaganda, Reason

The one and only Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, passed away today of a stroke. She was 87. CNN led its piss-poor hourly programing—activism, really—with news about the death of mouseketeer Annette Funicello.

What comes immediately to my mind is that Margaret Thatcher stood for the gradualism of Ronald Reagan, when it came to delivering South Africa to the sainted Nelson Mandela’s communists. As noted on page 147 of “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa”:

…public intellectuals … thought nothing of delivering South Africa into the hands of professed radical Marxist terrorists. Any one suggesting such folly to the wise Margaret Thatcher risked taking a handbagging. The Iron Lady ventured that grooming the ANC as South Africa’s government-in-waiting was tantamount to ‘living in cloud-cuckoo land.’

Tell me that fools are not attempting to redefine, à la postmodernism, the very definition of news. And why not? Academics have similarly broken down the ancient concept of the intellectual discipline.

“Intellectual disciplines,” historian Keith Windschuttle has written, “were founded in ancient Greece and gained considerable impetus from the work of Aristotle who identified and organized a range of subjects into orderly bodies of learning. … The history of Western knowledge shows the decisive importance of the structuring of disciplines. This structuring allowed the West to benefit from two key innovations: the systematization of research methods, which produced an accretion of consistent findings; and the organization of effective teaching, which permitted a large and accumulating body of knowledge to be transmitted from one generation to the next.” (The Killing of History, Keith Windschuttle, Encounter, pp. 247-250)

Failing to lead the news with coverage of Mrs. Thatcher’s passing is in-itself big news.

UPDATE I: MSNBC’s odious Martin Bashir, a Briton, is dismembering Thatcher. His correspondent’s source of analysis: Meryl Creep’s depiction in “The Iron Lady.”

As I said, disciplinary breakdown.

Of course, many of Thatcher’s moves I‘d oppose, however it is undeniable that she was perhaps the only true great female leader other than old Golda Meir. I cannot think of a woman with a Thatcher-like intellect in international politics. Golda didn’t have that intellect, but she was quite the character. Both were nothing like today’s whiny, idiot fems.

UPDATE II: Don’t bother searching the articles penned by the presstitutes in the UK and the US, about Baroness Thatcher. Her remarkable oratory they call simple—to these cretins plain-spoken reason is counter-intuitive and hence, simplistic. The so-called 10 best quotes from Mrs. Thatcher’s are really stupid things said about her by her intellectual inferiors in Labor.

Here is Mrs. Thatcher displaying that incisive intellect of hers:

“…What the honorable member is saying is that he would rather the poorer were poorer, provided the rich were less rich.”

Watch the above bit of parliamentary flyting as only the British can do, and tell me the woman was not brilliant. Even her opponent delights in her retort.

“I detest every one of her domestic policies,” the Member tells the PM. To which she replies without flinching, in that crisp beautiful English:

“The honorable gentleman knows that I have the same contempt for his socialist policies as the people of East Europe who’ve experienced it have.”

On the famous U-Turn:

“For those waiting with bated breath for that favorite media catch phrase the U-Turn, I have only one thing to say: ‘You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning.'”

The exchange below with the pompous Peter Mansbridge of CBC is particularly relevant to the empty talk about “compromise” infesting current debates:

What perturbs Peter Mansbridge, a Canadian institution in his own right—a stuffy, ossified, yet rather able lefty journo—is what he calls “the uncompromising style of Thatcherism.” A liberal doesn’t like a debate about substance, for it demands intellectual argument. Rather, the liberal is compelled to make silly points about style for those allow for an emotional approach (“Baroness, you make me feel bad; you hurt my self-esteem”).

Mrs. Thatcher offers up a gorgeous metaphor for the pursuit of truth: “When you’re starting a journey over the seas, you steer by stars that are always the same in the heavens. If you haven’t any stars to steer by, then it’s a pretty nondescript journey. …consensus doesn’t seem to be a very good star to steer by.”

Exquisite.

And Mrs. Thatcher’s coup de grâce: “Why are you so interested in compromise and consensus? Why are you not interested in having clear objectives; and having been elected on clear objectives, knowing full-well that the difficulties would emerge first and the benefits later?”

UPDATE IV: “Jesus, No Radical”? (Jesus’ Jewishness)

Ancient History, Christianity, Classical Liberalism, Hebrew Testament, Islam, Judaism & Jews, Justice

“Jesus was no political radical or rebel. He was God” is how the ever-provocative Jack Kerwick introduces his latest Belief.Net blog to Facebook Friends.

Maestro, pray tell, why are the two categories of the title—“G-d” vs. “political radical”—mutually exclusive?

One might have theological reasons for designating “G-d” and “political radical” as mutually exclusive, but reason is reason. It has to work a priori, surely?

Jews (at least those who think) think of Jesus as a preacher in the great tradition of the classical Hebrew prophets, whose genius, courage and yes, radicalism is hard to match—they were forever telling the stiff-necked people where to get off in no uncertain terms.

UPDATE I: “Yiddishkeit.” In reply to the thread on Facebook: Jesus was indeed a Jew (or a Hebrew), with everything that being a Hebrew would imply. A lot of people describe Jewish traits negatively. But you can be sure that Jesus was not without a dose of “Yiddishkeit,” as my blond, blue-eyed, Jewish mother would call it.

UPDATE II: Meathead: One should never place Russell Kirk in the company in which you placed him. For one, Kirk was against the wars Buckley embraced as a matter of principle. As I read Kirk, he was a classical liberal of enormous talent.

UPDATE III (June 14): The “because” is unfairly placed in yours sentence below, Jack Kerwick.

As for Ilana’s contention that Jesus was a “radical” because, like the prophets of old, He told “the stiff necked people where to get off in no uncertain terms,” how does that make Jesus, or anyone, a radical?

Here is what I wrote in the post above:

In punctuation, the sentence indicates that the last clause is but an example of the “genius, courage and yes, radicalism” of the prophets, and hardly exhaustive.

In meaning, how does the last clause, which you rightly seem to disparage as inexhaustible, qualify the words “genius, courage and yes, radicalism”?

It doesn’t. Yours is a somewhat unfair read of the sentence.

As for conflating, as you do Jack, the views of Jews on Christ with those of Muslims: That, in my view, is a grave error.

UPDATE II: Wasted Words (& ‘Lost Cause’)

Ancient History, Hebrew Testament, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Jihad, Judaism & Jews, Middle East, Terrorism, UN

Benjamin Netanyahu speaks on a level incomprehensible to his audience. One doesn’t have to agree with everything Israel’s prime minister says to respect his patriotism, the incisive points he drove home, and his command of history and reasoned argument. I’ve often argued that American leaders—Republican, Democrat and other, wannabe effetes—are unpatriotic. At bottom, they dislike the historic people and work against their interests. Not so Netanyahu. The Arabists on CNN are agreed: Both James Rubin (correspondent Christian Amanpour’s beau) and Hussein Ibish claimed Netanyahu lost. They’re probably right. As usual, the text of the address is not yet out there. The UN feed doesn’t enable a rewind. I’ve replaced it with this C-SPAN hyperlink. I hope an embed of Netanyahu’s speech becomes available shortly.

UPDATED I (Sept. 26):

UPDATE II: My father, whom I have just called in South Africa to wish Shanah Tova, said this about Netanyahu’s “lost cause”: If you were to propose a resolution in the UN that the world is flat, you’d get a majority vote.