Category Archives: History

How Imam Obama Apostatizes Against Islam

“How Imam Obama Apostatizes Against Islam” is the current column, now on Britain’s Libertarian Alliance. An excerpt:

The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) is not Islamic, announced Barack Obama, during a White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism (with an emphasis on violence inspired by the Judeo-Christian tradition). “They [ISIS] are not religious leaders, they are terrorists,” he asserted—an assertion that begs the question, as it assumes that a terrorist cannot be a religious leader as well.

President Obama further ventured that when we call them “Islamic,” we grant ISIS the “legitimacy” for which they thirst. For they are “desperate to portray themselves as religious leaders, holy warriors in defense of Islam.” Yet another non sequitur: Christening the group Islamic or not is unlikely to change that its members and a good many Muslims across the Ummah regard ISIS as thoroughbred Islamic.

What else did Imam Obama—who professes Christianity—proclaim in the name of the ISIS Islamic eschatology? Obama claimed that ISIS has “perverted the religion [of Islam]” and that it is peddling a “twisted ideology used to incite others to violence.”

“Weighing in on matters of Islamic theological debate,” warns Graeme Wood, editor at The Atlantic, is something Western officials would probably do best to avoid. “When he claim[s] that the Islamic State [is] ‘not Islamic,’” Obama, in fact, has “drifted into takfiri waters,” explains Wood. For “non-Muslims cannot tell Muslims how to practice their religion properly.”

“In Islam, the practice of takfir, or excommunication, is theologically perilous,” cautions Wood, in a seminal exposé on the Islamic State entitled “What ISIS Really Wants.” “‘If a man says to his brother, ‘You are an infidel,’ the Prophet said, ‘then one of them is right.’ If the accuser is wrong, he himself has committed apostasy by making a false accusation. The punishment for apostasy is death.”

His theologically and existentially perilous practice of takfir, notwithstanding, Obama lies about ISIS being antagonistic to Islam. Wood portrays “the group [that] seized Mosul, Iraq, last June, and already rules an area larger than the United Kingdom,” as Islamic as the Prophet Muhammad of the later, Medina period. …

Read the rest. “How Imam Obama Apostatizes Against Islam” is the current column, now on Britain’s Libertarian Alliance. An excerpt:.

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.)

Valor, Honor, Courage, Thy Name Is … Robert E. Lee

America, History, States' Rights

“The attacks on his name and fame in recent years coincide exactly with the progressive deterioration of all the higher values of American tradition,” laments Clyde Wilson about one of the great heroes of this nation, and certainly of mine: Robert E. Lee. (I admire Stonewall Jackson, but, if I’m not mistaken, he executed deserters. Can’t abide that.)

Your host outside “the plantation office building where Stonewall Jackson died in Guinea Station, Virginia.”

On January 19, “the birthday of one of the greatest of all Americans,” Clyde wrote the following:

… Robert E. Lee was born in Tidewater Virginia in 1807. Two uncles signed the Declaration of Independence and his father was a notable cavalry officer in the War for Independence. He was later to wed the granddaughter of Martha Washington.

He was graduated second in his class at West Point, an institution of which he was later a distinguished superintendent. As an army officer he worked on many useful engineering projects and was distinguished under fire in the Mexican War and later on the Texas frontier. Unlike the greatest figure on the other side of the great sectional conflict of 1861—1865, who was an inveterate office-seeker but never performed any service for his fellow citizens.

In 1861 he was offered command of all the armies of the United States, the height of a soldier’s ambition. But the path of honour commanded him to choose to defend his own people from invasion rather than do the bidding of the politicians who controlled the federal machinery in Washington.

His command of the Army of Northern Virginia is one of the greatest military epics of human history. By genius, daring, and the valour of his men he again and again defeated immensely larger and better supplied armies. He was aided by a lieutenant whose birthday is only two days later: “Stonewall,” born of January 21 in 1824. In the last days of the war his army inflicted casualties on the enemy that were greater than its own numbers, but he succumbed finally to an enemy commander willing to make any sacrifice of his men to exhaust the dwindling numbers of Confederates.

His actions after the war illustrate his nobility. …

MORE from Professor Wilson (whose review of my book is excerpted here).

UPDATE II: The ‘Selma’ Or ‘Sniper’ No-Brainer

Affirmative Action, Film, History, Hollywood, Just War, Military, Race

“Sniper” Or “Selma”? Which flick would you rather see? I will pass on both. However, if forced to choose between a 2-hour long, historically inaccurate guilt trip, laid on thick by the MOPE (Most Oppressed People Ever), and an action movie about an all-American “son, husband, father, and, most of all, decorated military man”; I can see why “American Sniper” is a box office sensation, while “Selma” circles the drain. “Sniper” grossed $105.3 Million on the week-end of its release; “Selma” $11.5 million.

Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, the subject of the “Clint Eastwood’s biopic,” in my opinion, squandered his talents as an assassin for Uncle Sam. Kyle’s claim to fame, by the news media’s telling, is that he “held the record for number of kills by an American sniper. The Pentagon has confirmed more than 150 of his kills. The previous record was 109.”

As I wrote at the time the SEAL passed away, “live by the sword, die by the sword. Or in hippie speak: Kyle had bad karma.”

I’m quite comfortable stating that poor Kyle was not in the business of defending American liberties, as the mouths on neoconservative media insist. That the war over in Iraq saved lives stateside is a dubious proposition at best. To the contrary, there is more proof of the opposite; that picking off women and children and other invaded species, “when he [thought it] necessary,” increased the danger to Americans stateside from the victims’ community. (Unfriend and unfollow me all you like; that doesn’t change this immutable truth.)

Still, if “American Sniper” is an apolitical rendition, a human story about a controversial, conflicted assassin for the state—much like “The Hurt Locker” was—I can see the appeal.

UPDATE I: A day after I wrote “Live By The Sword, Die By The Sword” (02.03.13), Ron Paul tweeted out the same (02.4.13). He was denounced, of course.

UPDATE II: Writes pat Buchanan, in “Selma, 50 years on”: … “The era of marching for civil rights was over, and the era of Black Power, with Stokely Carmichael, Rap Brown and The Black Panthers eclipsing King, had begun.”