Category Archives: Islam

Updated Again: Is Hirsi Ali the Only Lionheart In America?!

America, Islam, Israel

That blithering idiot Glenn Beck interviewed Ayaan Hirsi Ali (transcripts are here). In contrast to the slobbering incoherence of her host —my father has recently ventured that ours is The Age of the Idiot —Hirsi Ali was a model of lucidity. It helps that she looks like a model too. However, when asked by the hyperbolic host whether anyone in the USA was warning of the dangers of “radical Islam” —a redundancy Beck adheres to religiously —Hirsi Ali took full credit for being The Only One.

How did she do so? I repeat, when Beck asked her if anyone in the US was warning of “radical Islam,” she conceded only that we were slightly more aware of the dangers than were the Europeans, but not much.

Now that the transcripts are up, I can excerpt from the exchange:

BECK: Have you met with anyone here in the United States that you thinks — that you think really gets it and is willing to stand up next to you? Is there — is there anybody here? Is there a woman’s organization? Is there a Muslim organization that says, we’re with you?

ALI: I’ve met several individuals, several organizations and all very concerned. To be honest, I think vigilance in the United States seems to me to be today better than the one in Europe. What I haven’t seen in the United States is people who are aware of the problem here today in the U.S. Most Islam, as a foreign policy (ph), jihad in this country.

She clearly failed to acknowledge some heroic scholars-cum-warriors I’m proud to call friends: Robert Spencer and Andrew Bostom. (Spencer has even been addressed by an al Qaida emissary in a propaganda broadcast.) Nor was there any mention of Bat Ye’or, who was the first to expose the Islamization of Europe, and whose terminology we all use. Hirsi Ali cannot claim ignorance of another European woman on whose shoulders she stands.
Nor did Hirsi Ali offer a nod to Daniel Pipes’ efforts (he departs from the rest, and myself, in holding to a belief in a moderate Islam). The host is too dim to know much about anything, so he just effused and gawked and demonstrated that the force of his intellect matches his social etiquette: Beck told his guest that she was “not going to die of natural causes.”

Updated: I clean forgot Paul Sperry. He has done his share of courageous reporting and has received little TV time. Read my review of his Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington.
My sources also confirm that Hirsi Ali knows a number of the aforementioned individuals. That they were not credited for their indefatigable efforts was no innocent mistake. In any case, intellectual dishonestly is inexcusable and ought to be exposed.

Ellison Talks Taqiyya

Democrats, Islam

Democrat Keith Ellison, aka Hakim Mohammad, the first Muslim US congressman, is already talking Taqiyya. After pledging allegiance to the US on a Qur’an that belonged to Thomas Jefferson, he went on to burble something about America’s third president recognizing that wisdom can be gleaned from many sources, including “the Muslim book of Jihad.”

No, that was not quite how Ellison referred to the Qur’an; but Ted Sampley, editor of U.S. Veteran Dispatch, does. In the essay, “What Thomas Jefferson Learned from the Muslim Book of Jihad,” Sampley dispels the myth Ellison is trying to cultivate: Jefferson, a man of the Enlightenment, communed with Mohammad, his absolute antithesis.

“At the time Jefferson owned the book,” writes Sampley, “he needed to know everything possible about Muslims because he was about to advocate war against the Islamic ‘Barbary’ states of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Tripoli.”

“Ellison’s use of Jefferson’s Quran as a prop illuminates a subject once well-known in the history of the United States, but, which today, is mostly forgotten – the Muslim pirate slavers who over many centuries enslaved millions of Africans and tens of thousands of Christian Europeans and Americans in the Islamic ‘Barbary’ states.” [Sic]

“When American colonists rebelled against British rule in 1776, American merchant ships lost Royal Navy protection. With no American Navy for protection, American ships were attacked and their Christian crews enslaved by Muslim pirates operating under the control of the “Dey of Algiers” —an Islamist warlord ruling Algeria.”

The rest of the column reminds Americans that Jefferson sent “American Marines and many of America’s best warships” to defeat the Muslim Barbary States. Being indeed a “visionary,” he sought first to learn about these pirates from their manual of war, the Qur’an.

‘Iraq and the Christian Conscience’

Christianity, Iraq, Islam

A regular reader recently asked me if I know of other writers “like yourself,” as he put it, “who get the Islamic threat, but are also principled Old Rightists, who’ve been against the war on Iraq all along.” He explained that the Arabist American Conservative and like-minded libertarians were just too whacky for his liking.

I replied: only Paul Sperry.

And so it came as no surprise when on the day my column, “At Least Saddam Kept Order,” came out, I received a note from Paul, “Great minds think alike…” (Someone has to pat us on the collective shoulder occasionally.) Paul’s column, “Iraq and the Christian Conscience” echoes my sentiments exactly:

“Bush turned Iraq into the most violent place on the planet—3,700 civilians killed last month alone—and he removed from power and put on death row the only person who can restore order there, the guy who after all the prewar demonizing turned out to be a toothless tinhorn, more a threat to his dentist than anyone else.

Did you know that more innocent Iraqi civilians—mostly children—have been killed and maimed under President Bush than under Saddam Hussein? It’s true. As a Christian, I am absolutely repulsed by this statistic. You don’t hear that one on talk radio, for good reason….

I also cringe every time I hear a minister preach or pray about us ‘fighting for freedom’ in Iraq, or fighting to ‘liberate the Iraqi people.’ Please, the Iraqi people never invited us to invade and occupy their country, and they don’t even want our form of freedom (they enshrined Islamic law in their ‘new and improved’ constitution). Here’s another statistic you won’t hear on Rush Limbaugh or Fox News, and it’s from the State Department’s own recent survey in Iraq: 91 percent of Sunnis in Iraq want us to leave, and 74 percent of Shi’ites also want us out.

Another poll found that more than 3/5 of Iraqis say they back attacks on U.S. troops!

The inconvenient truth is, there is nothing noble or heroic about the war Bush and Cheney started in Iraq. It was political, not strategic. It had nothing to do with 9/11. We were sold a bill of goods. As a Christian, I cannot support a lie, especially one that continues to grind up other people’s kids for no good reason (while still not protecting us from the true threat from Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda Central, as opposed to the backbenchers and second-string wannabes in Iraq).

Did Bush, a supposed ‘born-again Christian,’ lie us into war? I’ve read the prewar intelligence estimates. I don’t believe as some do that Bush knew Saddam didn’t have WMD and attacked him anyway. No, Bush didn’t know Saddam didn’t have WMD, but he knew better than to say he had ‘proof’ that he did. The intelligence community had no such proof—the NIE dossier was full of caveats regarding WMD. Yet Bush and Cheney told us they had solid proof. They misled us…

But in the case of the alleged prewar al-Qaeda connections, they did know better—and they just plain lied to us. They said Saddam and Osama were collaborating and implied that Saddam was behind 9/11. The prewar Iraq dossier, the NIE, said exactly the opposite—no collaboration, no ties to 9/11 or any anti-American terror anywhere in the world, ever. Bush and Cheney knew that and deliberately lied to the public. (And Cheney’s still lying.)…”

Read the entire column. Being an impressive “shoe-leather investigative journalist,” as I called him in my review of his recent book, Sperry always packs his work with facts.

'Iraq and the Christian Conscience'

Christianity, Iraq, Islam

A regular reader recently asked me if I know of other writers “like yourself,” as he put it, “who get the Islamic threat, but are also principled Old Rightists, who’ve been against the war on Iraq all along.” He explained that the Arabist American Conservative and like-minded libertarians were just too whacky for his liking.

I replied: only Paul Sperry.

And so it came as no surprise when on the day my column, “At Least Saddam Kept Order,” came out, I received a note from Paul, “Great minds think alike…” (Someone has to pat us on the collective shoulder occasionally.) Paul’s column, “Iraq and the Christian Conscience” echoes my sentiments exactly:

“Bush turned Iraq into the most violent place on the planet—3,700 civilians killed last month alone—and he removed from power and put on death row the only person who can restore order there, the guy who after all the prewar demonizing turned out to be a toothless tinhorn, more a threat to his dentist than anyone else.

Did you know that more innocent Iraqi civilians—mostly children—have been killed and maimed under President Bush than under Saddam Hussein? It’s true. As a Christian, I am absolutely repulsed by this statistic. You don’t hear that one on talk radio, for good reason….

I also cringe every time I hear a minister preach or pray about us ‘fighting for freedom’ in Iraq, or fighting to ‘liberate the Iraqi people.’ Please, the Iraqi people never invited us to invade and occupy their country, and they don’t even want our form of freedom (they enshrined Islamic law in their ‘new and improved’ constitution). Here’s another statistic you won’t hear on Rush Limbaugh or Fox News, and it’s from the State Department’s own recent survey in Iraq: 91 percent of Sunnis in Iraq want us to leave, and 74 percent of Shi’ites also want us out.

Another poll found that more than 3/5 of Iraqis say they back attacks on U.S. troops!

The inconvenient truth is, there is nothing noble or heroic about the war Bush and Cheney started in Iraq. It was political, not strategic. It had nothing to do with 9/11. We were sold a bill of goods. As a Christian, I cannot support a lie, especially one that continues to grind up other people’s kids for no good reason (while still not protecting us from the true threat from Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda Central, as opposed to the backbenchers and second-string wannabes in Iraq).

Did Bush, a supposed ‘born-again Christian,’ lie us into war? I’ve read the prewar intelligence estimates. I don’t believe as some do that Bush knew Saddam didn’t have WMD and attacked him anyway. No, Bush didn’t know Saddam didn’t have WMD, but he knew better than to say he had ‘proof’ that he did. The intelligence community had no such proof—the NIE dossier was full of caveats regarding WMD. Yet Bush and Cheney told us they had solid proof. They misled us…

But in the case of the alleged prewar al-Qaeda connections, they did know better—and they just plain lied to us. They said Saddam and Osama were collaborating and implied that Saddam was behind 9/11. The prewar Iraq dossier, the NIE, said exactly the opposite—no collaboration, no ties to 9/11 or any anti-American terror anywhere in the world, ever. Bush and Cheney knew that and deliberately lied to the public. (And Cheney’s still lying.)…”

Read the entire column. Being an impressive “shoe-leather investigative journalist,” as I called him in my review of his recent book, Sperry always packs his work with facts.