Category Archives: Islam

Moussaoui Not Mad, Just Bad (And Honest About It)

According to the Associated Press, Moussaoui said that “it made his day to hear accounts of Americans suffering from the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and he would like to see similar attacks—every day.”

Family members of Sept. 11 victims exited the courtroom adamant Moussaoui should die, his callousness and cruelty having sealed his fate. Had he sniveled, sworn he had experienced an epiphany, or accepted the diagnosis of schizophrenia he was generously offered, victims may have looked upon him more favorably—as a victim too, perhaps (I can just hear the cliché, “We are all victims of this Islamic deadly ideology.”)

But Moussaoui stuck to his guns. Indeed, the Islamic terrorist is perfectly candid about why he kills, or schemes on killing. He doesn’t resort to the-camel-ate-my homework excuses, but tells it like he sees it. He kills us because he hates us.

The common criminals inhabiting Western jails, however, have made an art of using the therapeutic idiom, which they imbibe from their psychotherapist tutors, to work backwards and discover the exculpating “roots” of their behavior. Islamic criminals are different. They haven’t yet learned that “Daddy doesn’t love me” is a sufficient excuse for any crime committed in the West. They don’t need excuses—they are proud of their faith and the ghastly deeds they say it commands. These brutes exhibit not the slightest need to give their barbarism a palatable pedigree. It is Western intellectuals and pundits, not Arabs and Muslims, who developed the root-causes theories of terrorism. This is why Islamic criminals are so much more believable. When they tell us why they kill, we can take them at their word.

The evil Moussaoui also mocked Navy Lt. Nancy McKeown, who wept on the stand as she described the death of two of her subordinates. “I think it was disgusting for a military person to cry,” he snarled. “She is military; she should expect people at war with her to want to kill her.” The sounds of her sniffing meekly in front of him, he said, had made his day.

Here I have to agree with him. A representative of the military crying in front of her assailant exudes mush, not mettle. As I pointed out in “Osama’s Snickering at our Military,” OBL and his ascetic Islamists know full well that “the mentality that pervades the military, including the top brass,” is the “let-it-all-hang-out credo,” and that one is encouraged to parade emotions like one would a Purple Heart. Islamists despise us for it. More importantly, they don’t fear us because of it.

Frankly, I think that in front of the enemy, the military should suck it up.

Morality Play Featuring Mohammed

Islam, Media, The Zeitgeist

There is no mystery as to why Comedy Central blackened out the image of Mohammed in a recent episode of South Park; the network openly confessed to mortally fearing Muslim reaction. But why was it almost compelled simultaneously to depict Jesus in such a demeaning position?
I think that, in stream-of-consciousness mode, the episode got out of hand, gathering its own momentum and becoming the stage for a little morality play. On display was the dynamic interaction between the bully barbarians and the civil and servile West, with the writers assuming the atavistic, base persona of the aggressors.
Thus, once the victim (the West) was deemed metaphorically supine and the aggressor had smelt his blood—and fear—he, Ã la the Muslim Ummah, moved in for the kill, compelling the dhimmi to squat and perform degrading acts. (I can almost hear cries of, “Dance, Jew, dance.”)

The Meta (Perspective) on Mark (Steyn)

Iran, Islam, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy

Mark Steyn’s essay, “Facing Down Iran: Our lives depend on it,” appears in the Spring-2006 issue of City Journal. The Journal is billed as “the nation’s premier urban-policy magazine… an idea factory” on policy questions.

Let me stipulate for the record that Steyn is an entertaining writer and fun to read. There is, moreover, a great deal that is valuable in this piece—and in his work, in general. However, I don’t think Steyn’s epistolary razzmatazz should be confused with in-depth analysis, or be passed as such in policy-oriented publications.

What do I mean in the context of his Iran run-down?

Just one example: Steyn is courting a confrontation of biblical proportions with Iran. But for me one of the profound questions is this: the West, including the U.S., consists of a bunch of deracinated nations, only relatively free, whose governments are engaged in indoctrinating their respective populations about the twin wonders of Islam and Muslim mass immigration. The Crusaders we are not.

On what philosophical basis, then, does Steyn wish to wage war on a belligerent Muslim country? What are we fighting for if we’ve surrendered already—we’ve welcomed their infiltration of our societies and institutions? (See my expose of this process in the winter issue of The New Individualist)

Surely the real war is at home? Surely the fight for self-determination—individual and national—must be waged against government and its sundering of our sovereignty, individual and national?

Apropos Mark (indirectly, that is), Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, a director of the International Foundation for Election Systems, recently wrote in Times Online: “Increasingly, bodies such as the AEI [American Enterprise Institute] are less keen on sponsoring thinking and research. They are giving desk space and star roles to a breed of fast-talking practitioners of the television soundbite.”

I think it’s fair to say this is a general trend.

A Saddamless Iraq — A Free Iraq

Bush, Democracy, Iraq, Islam, Neoconservatism, War

Genghis (Bush) and his gang have recently told Iraqis to get with the program: form a government, or else. There is something really screwy about this administration’s admonitions to Iraqis for not getting it together. As though Iraq ever had it together; Saddam’s reign was one of the more peaceful periods in the history of this fractious people, which did not, I might add, ask to be invaded—and “improved.”

Under our ministrations, Iraq has gone from a secular to a religious country; from rogue to failed state. Put yourself in the worn-out shoes of this sad, pathetic people. Would you rather live under Saddam—who was a brutal dictator, but did provide Iraq with one of the foundations of civilization: order or under a force made up of ideological terrorists and an “Ali Baba” element, all running rampant because they can, and where not even mosques provide a safe haven from these brutes and their bombs?

I know what my answer would be. But then I’ve actually had some experience—nothing compared to the experience of the Iraqis, but certainly something compared to the inexperience of the types (Hannity, O’Reilly et al.) who talk up this war.

I lived under a dictatorship in apartheid South-Africa. So did millions of Africans. Crime was never an issue then. Africans suffered indignities, but not much violence. Unless one made a point of clashing with the authorities, one’s life was secure. Now that “freedom” has come to South Africa, lawlessness is such that the “democratic” government has implemented “an official blackout” on national crime statistics. The place is one of the most violent spots on earth, after Iraq, Haiti, and some other African countries.

A few weeks back I got the news that my youngest brother and his family (wife and new baby) were attacked in their suburban fortress at 2:00am by a gang of Africans. The alarm was bypassed. Luckily they escaped with their lives.

In my father’s upmarket neighborhood, another dad was shot point-blank in front of his little girls, as he exited his car to open the garage gates. The loot? A cell phone and some cash. He begged the savages to take his car and all his possessions and spare his life. Two of my husband’s colleagues are dead; one shot in broad daylight as he left his girlfriend’s apartment.

South-Africa is heaven on earth compared to Iraq. So don’t speak to me about “liberation.” The removal of Saddam is not to be equated with liberty in Iraq; a Saddamless Iraq is not necessarily a free Iraq.

Let us stipulate for the record that Saddam Hussein was a killer, a wicked man indeed. Yet even the invasion’s most avid supporters cannot but agree that Iraq was not a lawless society prior to our merciful faith-based intervention.

In addition to their society’s cultural limitations vis-a -vis the attainment of democracy, if Iraqis appear ungrateful or disoriented it is because they are busy… busy dying at rates much much higher than those claimed by the Saddam = Hitler crowd. In the final days of Saddam’s reign of terror, i.e., in the 15 months preceding the invasion, the primary causes of death in Iraq were natural: “heart attack, stroke and chronic illness,” according to a Lancet report. Since Iraq became another neocon object lesson, the primary cause of death has been violence.

As I once wrote, people “whose lungs are airless, whose hearts are not beating, and whose eyes and limbs are missing are not free and will never be free.” And people who risk such a fate daily are not free in any meaningful way.