Category Archives: Islam

Reality on the Palestinian Ground

Islam, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Having superimposed their phantasmagoric narrative about Iraq on the world, Bush and Rice have set about validating the Palestinian parallel universe. They are now forcing Israel to let Hamas, whose plank includes the destruction of Israel, to campaign openly in East Jerusalem. Bush thinks he can change reality by announcing that forthwith, Hamas is just another party in the smorgasbord of Palestinian ‘democracy.’

Semantics, however, don’t alter facts. No amount of wanking with words is going to change that Palestinians, unlike their Israeli neighbors, don’t live under the rule of enlightened Western law, don’t have a free and ferociously critical media or liberal courts, and are more likely to approve when their coreligionists strap on belts of nails and dynamite and blow up innocents…

The excerpt is from “Reality on the Palestinian Ground.” Feel free to comment.

Preemptive Defense

America, Islam, Just War, War

The president is cocksure about the need to keep America’s borders open. He is as confident about unleashing his version of the STASI secret service on nationals and non-nationals alike within the United States. Vanquishing foreigners in faraway lands is yet another of his drunk-with-power “defensive” strategies. However, Bush ought to acquaint himself with the duty of a constitutional government: repel foreign invaders. It is incumbent on him to attempt to stop potential enemies of the U.S. before they enter this country. Unlike preemptive assault in the absence of a clear and present danger, preemptive defense is perfectly proper.
Thus Bush might have reinstated the pre-1965 national-origins restrictions in immigration policy. A culturally coherent immigration policy is the logical complement to rational profiling. Both are defensive rather than offensive.
Thomas Jefferson warned J. Lithgow in 1805 about the desirability of welcoming “the dissolute and demoralized handicraftsmen of the old cities of Europe.” Jefferson feared that immigrants under “the maxims of absolute monarchies”—and he was not talking about the monarchies of Buganda or Ethiopia—may not acclimatize to “the freest principles of the English constitution.” What would he say about arrivals from Wahhabi-worshiping wastelands whose customs not only preclude “natural right and natural reason,” but include killing their hosts?!
The state compels Americans to bear the consequences of a multicultural, egalitarian, immigration quota system, which divides visas between nations with an emphasis on mass importation of people from the Third World (more often than not of the Islamic faith). It brands as xenophobes patriotic Americans who reject open borders and indiscriminate immigration and demand that rational profiling be conducted at America’s ports of entry. Yet after refusing to restrict admission into the U.S., government proceeds to spy on these “worthies” once they’re in the country.

Neoconservatives, Reality, And Religious Relativism

Islam, Neoconservatism, Religion

In Get With The Global Program, Gaul, I mention a book with which a number of prominent neoconservatives seem enthralled. Olivier Roy, the author of Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah, draws parallels between radical Islamists and the broader movement of born-again Christians. You heard me. If that makes you shake in your boots (I’m being cynical, of course. Would that the asinine analogy held; we’d be safe), thank your lucky stars. The author believes these Islamic revivalists are doomed to become “a remote, detached community, like the Hasidic Jews and the Exclusive Brethren.” If only the comparison worked. If I were able to wave a magic wand so that born-again Christians and Exclusive Brethren usurped Islamists in the world, I’d do it in a heart beat. Islamism, sadly, is said to have hundreds of millions of active adherents, who do not come in peace. Still. at least two of the neoconservatives I cite in the column dig the book’s religious relativism. Is that significant?
The author, Roy, also sees Islamic radicalism as a revolt against—and a sign of—rapid acculturation, triggered by contact with the West. Islam, apparently, is in the throes of modernization; its atavism is actually advancement in disguise. Neoconservatives don’t care for reality, and they are anything but uncreative when it comes to subverting it. Thus they are in agreement when evidence against a theory is cast as evidence for a theory, as it is in this book. Like magpies to trash, they are also (at least these two) drawn to superficially clever ideas which are not truly insightful because their relationship to reality is at best tangential.

French, Romans, And Countrymen

Free Will Vs. Determinism, IMMIGRATION, Islam, libertarianism, The State

I’d like to preface what Bill Anderson writes by saying that my column, Rah-Rah for Rioters, is more than sardonic about the French Welfare State, and about state intervention, in general. Witness the comments about affirmative action. Or those about the state, not German civil society, being responsible for liquidating Jews. Can one be more direct than that? However, the thrust of my writing is not deterministic. Sure welfare destroys. But people’s actions, good or bad, are not reducible to a single cause. Some libertarians take the position that it’s all the state’s fault. More accurately: it’s all the American State’s fault. What an utterly unserious stance. Entitlements are available to all who choose them as a way of life. Ditto violence. People have a good degree of free will. They can choose to reject both. One embodies Left-Liberalism if one has succumbed to seeing human motivation as unidirectional and lacking volition. Cleese’s delicious (and brilliant) “What Have the Romans Ever Done For Us” is a spoof just up my alley. Yeah the Romans were the bad guys, but hell, the Jews could be a handful. Then again not everyone shares my sense of the absurd.

From: WILLIAM ANDERSON
Sent: Friday, November 11, 2005 3:38 AM
Subject: Rah-Rah for Rioters

Very, very good.

People need to understand—and I think you do—that the French “system” of suffocating bureaucracy and antipathy to private enterprise definitely destroys a real future, not only for the Muslims, but also for everyone else. I had a conversation with a Canadian in Vancouver a couple summers ago and his point was that what was left for people like him were government jobs, something he realized in and of themselves were dead end.
Now, this hardly counts as “oppression” CNN style, but the insistence that people on the left make that “economic security,” as peddled by the Europeans, is a REALLY GREAT THING do not realize the longer term implications of destroying private initiative.
That, however, was not your point. Your larger issue was that the so-called CNN reasons for rioting were, to put it mildly, something that emanates from the rear end of a bull, and with that, I heartily concur.
—Bill

Jay D. Homnick writes this on The Reform Club’s blog. His guiding lights are the prophets of the Hebrew Testament. They are mine too (It wasn’t always uncool to look up to a prophet, you know.):

“CALL ME ISHMAEL (WHILE I BURN YOUR CAR)

Is Ilana Mercer an absolute genius or what? What does it say about the conservative movement in America to have this level of passion and talent?
Her article today eclipsed my understanding of the media France coverage, left me feeling like a rank amateur in understanding the depth of the kulturkampf. I had contented myself with the lazy observation that the media was disposed to “excuse” criminality when it wore a liberal-political fig leaf.
Ilana digs much deeper. She explains that the miscreancy is itself cited as “proof of virtue”.
Her brilliant insight hit me like an epiphany. I felt like I could actually hear Isaiah (5:20):
“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil; who assert that darkness is light and light is darkness; who assert that bitter is sweet and sweet is bitter.” (My translation.)
POSTED by Jay D. Homnick at 10:17 AM

From: Lawren
Sent: Friday, November 11, 2005
Subject: Rah-Rah for Rioters

Thank you for your article on the unbelievable coverage of the French riots. One CNN pundit, with mike clutched to her bosom called the rioters “lads.” I immediately sent my monthly email to CNN that they again confirmed they are on the side of chaos and anarchy. Unbelievable.
Thank you again for giving a voice to the unheard.
—Lawren