Category Archives: Islam

‘Remembering the World Trade Center’

Every year since September 11, 2001, New Yorker Chris Matthew Sciabarra (who was graciousÂ enough to endorse my book) has written a tribute to the World Trade Center. In 2003 he penned this:

“We all knew that these buildings had come to symbolize so much of what made New York great. That’s one of the reasons they were targeted. It’s the kind of thing that led the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand to write in The Fountainhead, fifty years earlier, that New York’s skyline was ‘the will of man made visible. She wrote'”:

Is it beauty and genius people want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see this city from my window—no, I don’t feel how small I am—but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would like to throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.

Read Chris’ poignant yearly tributes here.

Adam Yahiye Gadahn Pearlman?

Government, Islam, Terrorism

The individual I mentioned in “Lunatic Government Occupies Airports” has surfaced again. Adam Yahiye Gadahn, now a propagandist for Al-Qaida in Pakistan, is originally a Pearlman from California.

Gadahn has called on Americans and other unbelievers to convert to Islam. You can read more about it here. I mentioned him in that column in the context of rational profiling at airports. I said that,

â€œIf young Jews were as well-represented among suicide bombers and airline hijackers as Muslims are, I’d want the TSA’s canine teams to sniff them out instead of being sicced on Joe Scarborough’s baby girl. Remember Adam Yahiye Gadahn of Al-Qaida, Pakistan? He turned out to be a Pearlman from California. Had Gadahn, aka Pearlman, represented the tip of a Jewish Jihadist iceberg, I’d recommend that young Jews be frisked. So far, this (partly) Jewish John Walker Lindh has proven to be an extreme exception to the rule, like the Tamils.â€?

A few readers wrote to correct me. For the purpose of the column, I had treated Gadahn as a Jew. But, they said, only his grandfather (and father too, until conversion, it would appear) were Jewish. That’s perfectly true: By rabbinical law, Gadahn was not Jewish. By Hitlerian law, he was and still is Jewish.

Although his Jewish lineage is indeed weak, had I not introduced him in the context of profiling, I’d have been accused of conveniently ignoring the possibility that young Jews, especially members of the left-liberal faith, could join a terrorist group and might need to be profiled. As I suggested to a law professor from the “Volokh Conspiracy,” I needed to rule out that eventuality.

From Bondage to Freedom

Islam, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Media, Middle East

Fox Correspondent Steve Centanni and cameraman Olaf Wiig were freed, after being held in Palestinian captivity for two weeks. Hostage taking is a developing industry in the PA, an import from “liberated” Iraq, it would seem. Better that than, say, working for a living.

I don’t mean to criticize the two men. They had to placate their captors. I fully understand and sympathize with that. I’m just not quite clear on the conclusions Centanni and Wiig drew from their harrowing ordeal:

Said Centanni: “the Palestinian people are very beautiful and kind-hearted,” a sentiment Wiig reiterated by expressing his fear that the plight of the Beauteous Ones would be left untold if such unlovely acts proliferated. (No such luck: the most rehashed story ever will continue to be rehashed, and the resolution of the so-called Palestinian problem tied to every treaty or agreement imaginable. I hear Pigmy tribes won’t parcel out a piece of rain forest without a promise that the plight of the Palestinian people be solved.)

Centanni related that they “were forced to convert to Islam at gunpoint.” But incase viewers took issue with Centanni’s use of the word “forced,” or if they understood him to mean he would not have converted voluntarily, Centanni quickly qualified: “Don’t get me wrong here,” he told Fox. “I have the highest respect for Islam, and I learned a lot of good things about it, but it was something we felt we had to do because they had the guns…”

Despite the oddly inverse conclusions the two freed media men drew from the experience, they hastily departed for Israel through the northern Erez border crossing. As the old adage goes, actions speak louder than words.

Letter of the Week: Muhammedan Vs. Mosaic Achievement

History, Human Accomplishment, Islam, Judaism & Jews

BAB reader Linda has forwarded these self-explanatory facts (she credits a friend for collating the data). The information about Jewish accomplishment has been gleaned from the Jewish Virtual Library. As Charles Murray has written, “Until the end of the 18C throughout Europe, and well into the 19C in most parts of Europe, Jews lived under a regime of legally restricted rights and socially sanctioned discrimination as severe as that borne by any population not held in chattel slavery.” Remember that when you make excuses for Muslims:

The Global Islamic population is approximately 1,200,000,000, or 20% of the world population.

They received the following Nobel Prizes:
Literature
* 1988 – Najib Mahfooz.

Peace
* 1978 – Mohamed Anwar El-Sadat
* 1994 – Yaser Arafat

Physics
* 1990 – Elias James Corey
* 1999 – Ahmed Zewail

Medicine
* 1960 – Peter Brian Medawar
* 1998 – Ferid Mourad

The Global Jewish population is approximately 14,000,000, or about 0.02% of the world population.

They received the following Nobel Prizes:

Literature
* 1910 – Paul Heyse
* 1927 – Henri Bergson
* 1958 – Boris Pasternak
* 1966 – Shmuel Yosef Agnon
* 1966 – Nelly Sachs
* 1976 – Saul Bellow
* 1978 – Isaac Bashevis Singer
* 1981 – Elias Canetti
* 1987 – Joseph Brodsky
* 1991 – Nadine Gordimer
* 2001 – Imre Kertesz
* 2005 – Harold Pinter

World Peace
* 1911 – Alfred Fried
* 1911 – Tobias Michael Carel Asser
* 1968 – Rene Cassin
* 1973 – Henry Kissinger
* 1978 – Menachem Begin
* 1986 – Elie Wiesel
* 1994 – Shimon Peres
* 1994 – Yitzhak Rabin
* 1995 – Joseph Rotblat

Chemistry
* 1905 – Adolph Von Baeyer
* 1906 – Henri Moissan
* 1910 – Otto Wallach
* 1915 – Richard Willstaetter
* 1918 – Fritz Haber
* 1943 – George Charles de Hevesy
* 1961 – Melvin Calvin
* 1962 – Max Ferdinand Perutz
* 1972 – William Howard Stein
* 1977 – Ilya Prigogine
* 1979 – Herbert Charles Brown
* 1980 – Paul Berg
* 1980 – Walter Gilbert
* 1981 – Roald Hoffmann
* 1982 – Aaron Klug
* 1985 – Herbert Hauptman
* 1985 – Jerome Karle
* 1989 – Sidney Altman
* 1992 – Rudolph Marcus
* 2004 – Avram Hershko, Aaron Ciechanover, and Irwin Rose

Economics
* 1970 – Paul Samuelson
* 1971 – Simon Kuznets
* 1972 – Kenneth Arrow
* 1973 – Wassily Leontief
* 1975 – Leonid Kantorovich
* 1976 – Milton Friedman
* 1978 – Herbert A. Simon
* 1980 – Lawrence Robert Klein
* 1985 – Franco Modigliani
* 1987 – Robert M.. Solow
* 1990 – Harry Markowitz
* 1990 – Merton Miller
* 1992 – Gary Becker
* 1993 – Robert Fogel
* 1994 – John Harsanyi
* 1997 – Myron Scholes
* 2001 – Joseph Stiglitz
* 2001 – George A.. Akerlof
* 2002 – Daniel Kahneman
* 2005 – Robert Aumann

Medicine
* 1908 – Elie Metchnikoff & Paul Ehrlich
* 1914 – Robert Barany
* 1922 – Otto Meyerhof
* 1930 – Karl Landsteiner
* 1931 – Otto Warburg
* 1936 – Otto Loewi
* 1944 – Herbert Spencer Gasser
* 1944 – Joseph Erlanger
* 1945 – Ernst Boris Chain
* 1946 – Hermann Joseph Muller
* 1947 – Gerty Cori
* 1950 – Tadeus Reichstein
* 1952 – Selman Abraham Waksman
* 1953 – Hans Krebs & Fritz Lipmann
* 1958 – Joshua Lederberg
* 1959 – Arthur Kornberg
* 1964 – Konrad Bloch
* 1965 – Francois Jacob & Andre Lwoff
* 1967 – George Wald
* 1968 – Marshall Nirenberg
* 1969 – Salvador Luria
* 1970 – Julius Axelrod & Bernard Katz
* 1972 – Gerald Maurice Edelman
* 1975 – David Baltimore & Howard Temin
* 1976 – Baruch Blumberg
* 1977 – Rosalyn Sussman Yalow & Andrew V. Schally
* 1978 – Daniel Nathans
* 1980 – Baruj Benacerraf
* 1984 – Cesar Milstein
* 1985 – Michael Stuart Brown & Joseph Goldstein
* 1986 – Stanley Cohen & Rita Levi-Montalcini
* 1988 – Gertrude Elion
* 1989 – Harold Varmus
* 1994 – Alfred Gilman & Martin Rodbell
* 1997- Stanley B.. Prusiner
* 1998 – Robert Furchgott
* 2000 – Paul Greengard
* 2002 – H. Robert Horvitz & Sydney Brenner

Physics
* 1907 – Albert Abraham Michelson
* 1908 – Gabriel Lippmann
* 1921 – Albert Einstein
* 1922 – Niels Bohr
* 1925 – James Franck & Gustav Hertz
* 1943 – Otto Stern
* 1944 – Isidor Issac Rabi
* 1945 – Wolfgang Pauli
* 1952 – Felix Bloch
* 1954 – Max Born
* 1958 – Igor Tamm & Il’ja Mikhailovich Frank
* 1959 – Emilio SegrÃ¨
* 1960 – Donald A.. Glaser
* 1961 – Robert Hofstadter
* 1962 – Lev Davidovich Landau
* 1963 – Eugene Wigner
* 1965 – Richard Feynman & Julian Schwinger
* 1967 – Hans Bethe
* 1969 – Murray Gell-Mann
* 1971 – Dennis Gabor
* 1972 – Leon Cooper
* 1973 – Brian David Josephson
* 1975 – Benjamin Mottleson
* 1976 – Burton Richter
* 1978 – Arno Allan Penzias & Pyotr Kapitsa
* 1979 – Stephen Weinberg & Sheldon Glashow
* 1988 – Leon Lederman & Melvin Schwartz & Jack Steinberger
* 1990 – Jerome Friedman
* 1992- Georges Charpak
* 1995 – Martin Perl & Fredrick Reines
* 1996 – Douglas D. Osheroff & David M. Lee
* 1997 – Claude Cohen-Tannoudji
* 2000 – Zhores I.. Alferov
* 2003 – Vitaly Ginzburg & Alexei A. Abrikosov
* 2004 – H. David Politzer & David Gross

The Jews are not demonstrating with their dead on the streets, yelling and chanting and demanding revenge. The Jews are not promoting the brain washing of children in military training camps; teaching them how to blow themselves up and cause maximum deaths of Jews and other non-Muslims.

The Jews don’t hijack planes, nor kill athletes at the Olympics, the Jews don’t traffic slaves, nor have leaders calling for Jihad and death to all the Infidels. The Jews don’t have the economic strength of petroleum, nor the possibilities to force the world’s media to see “their side” of the conflict.

Perhaps if the world’s Muslims could invest more in normal education and less in blaming the Jews for all their problems, we could all live in a better world.