Category Archives: Islam

Update III: Beck Blasts Bush (But Praises Diablo)

Bush, Glenn Beck, History, Islam, Politics, Pseudo-history, Republicans, States' Rights, Terrorism

It’s official. Glenn Beck gets his own category/archive on Barely A Blog. He deserves it. In addition to his other attributes—you can now track my analysis of Beck’s progression as a force for liberty by clicking on the BAB Beck category—he is the only conservative, mainstream TV commentator to treat Bush with the contempt he reserves for Obama.

The tirade against “W” begins 3 minutes or so into the broadcast.

“Debt, spending; this was insane what G. W. Bush was doing. Spending us into oblivion. National security. How about you declare a war and fight to win? How about you secure our borders? … Some people wanted global warming. The rest of us wanted us out of the Middle East; use our own energy. The Republicans had a crack at it, but what did we get? GB, in his last year, lost 3 million jobs. Debt. Spending: How about $4.9 trillion? He increased discretionary spending almost 50 percent. Fiscal year 2004 and fiscal year 2000: Bush almost spent double than President Clinton. And who can forget the $550 billion prescription drug fiasco? He abandoned the free-market system to save it with a $700 billion TARP slush fund. … The border was left wide open. Corruption was rife. Oh, and global warming: the biggest schemes of all times not only supported by Republicans, but by leading Republicans. Lindsey Graham, Tim Pawlenty, John McCain. All pro cap-and-trade.

Update I Feb. 16): In the same program, Glenn conducted a devotional to Diablo—Abraham Lincoln—rejecting some of the most solid historical revisionism.

One of the reasons a volume like The Real Lincoln is so sound is that it does NOT refute historical facts; most historians agree about what transpired during the War of Northern Aggression; it’s the interpretation of these fact.

With Diablo it boils down to deciding matters of natural law: did the states create the union or vice versa (dah Diablo)? Was secession legitimate” Is it right to sic brother on brother so as to coerce the one to remain with the other? Suspend the Bill or Right?

The “Church of Lincoln” says “Yes” to all; we who are with liberty say NO.

A reminder that I’m not adjudicating Lincoln in this post; but Beck’s progress toward the founders’ freedoms. It’s one step forward, two steps back with Beck.

Update II: To follow on RG’s excellent post, this from my “Classical Liberalism And State Schemes”:

“We have a solemn [negative] duty not to violate the rights of foreigners everywhere to life, liberty, and property. But we have no duty to uphold their rights. Why? Because (supposedly) upholding the negative rights of the world’s citizens involves compromising the negative liberties of Americans—their lives, liberties, and livelihoods. The classical liberal government’s duty is to its own citizens, first.”

Update III (Feb. 18): This post went off-topic, because some would rather rehash their convictions despite the answers provided. So, in reply to,”Do you believe those 500 million people form a serious military threat against which we must defend ourselves?”

For one, there are about 1 billion Muslims in the world. In the previous post, I replied to the same question. I’m reproducing the update:

Polls show a respectable percentage of Muslims condone Jihadi pursuits (search for some fresh data; I like those). If equaled by as many Jews and Christians, liberals and libertarians and elements on the American Right always helping to make the “Islamikazes'” case would protest as loud as you lot squealed over placing a bug in Abu Zubaydah’s cage. Hence the issue of fifth-column immigrants.

Back in 2005, “a leaked Whitehall dossier revealed that affluent, middle-class, British-born Muslims were signing up to Al-Qaida in droves. Translated into official speak by Timesonline, only ‘3,000 British-born or British-based people have passed through Osama Bin Laden’s training camps.’

And if that doesn’t allay unwarranted fears, ‘Intelligence indicates that the number of British Muslims actively engaged in terrorist activity, whether at home or abroad or supporting such activity, is extremely small and estimated at less than 1%.'”

In other words, 16,000 homicidal sleepers are loose in England!

These figures, of course, probably replicable in the US, are statistically significant—stupendously so—given the barbarism they portend. It is over this sort of astoundingly consequential number that our liberal-minded readers are jumping for joy.

Such is the liberal mindset.

Update III: Murder By Majority (Or Mercy Killing)

Barack Obama, Homeland Security, Islam, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Military, Propaganda, Terrorism, War

Barack Obama needed a war he could call his own. In Afghanistan, OB has found such a war. A meaty presence in Afghanistan has morphed into an all-out onslaught, with the attendant slaughter of innocence.

It wasn’t a daisy cutter of the Bush era, but a Himars rocket, an acronym for High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, that killed at least 10 people, including 5 children, in Marja, a Taliban stronghold in Helmand Province, to where Obama has taken his war.

The place is dotted with rural villages and villagers, so some are bound to be incinerated by American bombs. So far nothing about BO’s shame in the op-ed pages of the LA Times or the NYT.

Most Americans may approve of BO’s pet war, but murder by majority approval is still murder. Those Afghans who died today are involuntary conscripts—they get to partake of the wonders of American democracy only indirectly: a mob (of Americans) in a far-away land decided their fate. And by golly what a splendid job this mob has done.

Update I: THE MIGHTY TALIBAN.

“I don’t think you can really describe them militarily. It seems like a few guys taking potshots … and not terribly effectively, with some exceptions.”

That’s NYTs correspondent ROD NORDLAND describing the Taliban on the PBS News Hour today.

His Boy Obama and his General get top marks for mercy killings. When Bush finished off civilians it wasn’t nearly as kindly as when McChrystal does it under the divine inspiration of BO:

Remember “the — the wedding, one of several, actually, that was bombed a year or two ago,”? … “the Bush administration, you know, they just — it took them months to ever admit they had even done anything wrong.”

Barack, by contrast, is positively killing these kids with kindness:

“They were so quick to announce that, in fact, that it turns out they exaggerated, apparently, the number of civilians they killed. It turned out it was actually only nine, and there were also three Taliban in the house who were shooting from the house, and thereby, at least arguably, making it a legitimate target.”

To listen to NORDLAND, you’d think that BO brought back from the dead three civilians thought dead.

In fairness to this correspondent, the NYT was all for the previous warbot’s war as well.

During Bush’s war, “Fox News was able to create the perception of a parallel universe in Iraq replete with big (nuclear) bangs and miraculously materializing al-Qaida terrorists because its Hollywood-inspired vision resonated with viewers. The ratings provided proof. By popular demand, MSNBC, CNN, and the New York Times (This means you, Judith Miller) adopted a similar faux patriotism devoid of skepticism and serenely accepting of every silly White House claim.”

Everything is as it is in the USA.

Update II (Feb. 16): Thanks you Van Wijk for reminding the errant folks that, as I put it, “Our adventurous foreign policy might be a necessary condition for Muslim aggression but it is far from a sufficient one.”

Update III: I loathe rehashing arguments I’ve already won on this space many times over. Alas, this is the human condition.

Myron: Polls show a respectable percentage of Muslims condone Jihadi pursuits (search for some fresh data; I like those). If equaled by as many Jews and Christians, liberals and libertarians and elements on the American Right always helping to make the “Islamikazes'” case would protest as loud as you lot squealed over placing a bug in Abu Zubaydah’s cage. Hence the issue of fifth-column immigrants.

Back in 2005, “a leaked Whitehall dossier revealed that affluent, middle-class, British-born Muslims were signing up to Al-Qaida in droves. Translated into official speak by Timesonline, only ‘3,000 British-born or British-based people have passed through Osama Bin Laden’s training camps.’

And if that doesn’t allay unwarranted fears, ‘Intelligence indicates that the number of British Muslims actively engaged in terrorist activity, whether at home or abroad or supporting such activity, is extremely small and estimated at less than 1%.'”

In other words, 16,000 homicidal sleepers are loose in England!

These figures, of course, are statistically significant—stupendously so—given the barbarism they portend. Over this sort of astoundingly consequential number, our Myron is jumping for joy.

Such is the liberal mindset.

Updated: Jihadis Really Really Hate Us

Foreign Policy, Intelligence, Islam, Jihad, Journalism, Terrorism

Says John Brennan, Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Adviser for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, in an interivew with CNN’s Gloria Borger: “We have made quite a bit of progress this year in degrading the capabilities of Al Qaida organization. We’ve taken the battle to them. We have eliminated a number of their senior leaders and operatives. But that doesn’t mean that they still don’t have a capability of carrying out attacks. And that’s what they’re doing. They’re trying to look for ways and vulnerabilities in our system to get their operatives either here to the United States or in other places to carry out these attacks.”

Replies MICHAEL SCHEUER, the chief of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999: “Mr. Brennan is blowing smoke. You have some dead bodies — I agree with that; it’s all to the good — but no impact on the overall organization. … I think it’s stronger than it was at 9/11, certainly because the support and opposition across the Muslim world to American foreign policy is far greater today than it was in 9/11.”

I’ve covered Michael Scheuer, former chief of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit, favorably: “When I think of a libertarian-leaning patriotic warrior, I think of Michael Scheuer. The chief of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, Scheuer is also the man behind the enhanced interrogation methods, which the hard-left and their friends on the libertarian left would have you believe are as heinous as the war crime at Hiroshima.”

Still, I’m not sure what he’s advising.

“Yemen is bin Laden’s ancestral home,” Scheuer comments. “More Yemenis than any Arab nationality fought against the Soviets. There would have been more Yemenis in the 9/11 attacks, except they couldn’t get visas as easily as the Saudis.”

And he recommends that, “We stop depending on surrogates. We stop depending on Pakistan. We stop depending on Yemen and use our own strong right arm. There is no — there’s no clause in the Constitution that says President Obama can delegate the defense of America to a Yemeni dictator.”

I don’t know what that means. Do you? Gloria doesn’t inquire. Like most journalists today, she possesses very little intellectual curiosity.

Update (Jan. 4): Is there a reason to so carefully distinguish “Islam” from “Jihadist Islam”? The latter is a redundancy. Jihad is part of Islam.

Updated: The Barbarian West

Europe, Free Speech, Islam, Jihad, libertarianism, Terrorism, The West

What’s another bout with a 48-hour flu, my second this season, compared to the ordeal the heroic Kurt Westergaard—illustrator of the the 12 Jyllands-Posten cartoons, depicting the connection between Muhammad and the violence that disfigures the Muslim world—must live with day-in and day-out.

Satire is a highly civilized and refined way of exposing “folly, vice, or stupidity,” to follow the dictionary. For lampooning the connection between Muhammad, author of Islam, and the savagery and atavism that grip the Muslim world today, Westergaard’s life has been continually threatened.

“On Friday night, a 28-year-old Somali man, armed with an ax and a knife, tried to enter the home of Kurt Westergaard in Aarhus Denmark. Westergaard was at home with his visiting 5-year-old granddaughter when he heard the suspect trying to break in. ‘I locked myself in our safe room and alerted the police.'” (The Examiner.com.)

“Unable to smash the front door with his ax, the suspect was shot once in the knee and once in the hand by police. The wounds are not life-threatening.” [Why not?]

AND:

“Police were aware of the Somali suspect’s background from previous activities in east Africa and had a permit to live in Denmark.”

A pattern.

I’ve said it again and again: This is not a failure of Jihad; Jihad is doing just fine for itself, functioning as it ought to. Rather, attacks on the lives of the likes of the late Theo van Gogh, Geert Wilders, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Westergaard, and Wafa Sultan showcase the West at its miserable emasculated worst.

Contrary to some libertarian opinion, a free society is not one in which civilized courageous, peaceful human beings fear for their lives, but one in which such individuals thrive, as their assailants cower in dank corners, hunted and exterminated like vermin.

Updated (Jan. 4, 2010): A little timid for my taste, but well worth a read: “Heeere’s Muhammed!”