Send Us Your Con Men and Women

Christianity, Europe, IMMIGRATION, Islam, Morality

What do you know, a day after The Decider (Bush’s nickname for himself) praised millions of illegal immigrants for heroically forging documents and lying to employers about their status in the country, The American Enterprise Institute has opened its arms to a prominent Dutch counterfeiter, and is, evidently, sponsoring her immigration to the United States.

She’s the Somali-born Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whom I’ve mentioned—favorably—before. Ali’s an outspoken and brave critic of Islam. She assisted Theo van Gogh, the slain Dutch filmmaker, in exposing the enslavement of women in Muslim countries. It goes without saying that followers of the religion of peace want to kill her.

Little did I know that she is liberal only with respect to views she endorses. According to Lawrence Auster, Ali has sought to ban conservative, Christian, and immigration restrictionist parties in Europe. Writes Auster:

She was also among the 12 signers of a leftist anti-Islam manifesto in March 2006 that said, ‘It is not a clash of civilisations nor an antagonism of West and East that we are witnessing, but a global struggle that confronts democrats and theocrats.’ The clear implication is that Christian ‘theocrats’—which by contemporary standards means anyone who actually believes in Christianity—are Ali’s enemy as much as jihadists are.

Ali, moreover, lied on her Dutch asylum application. Duly, after being a Dutch citizen for 14 years, and a member of that parliament, to boot, immigration minister Rita Verdonk has revoked her citizenship.

I’m not saying I support this ruling. The details are sketchy, and Ali claims to have “admitted lying to win asylum in the Netherlands when she was vetted as a candidate for parliament in 2002.” What makes me even more suspicious is that “a Dutch court ruled that she must leave her home in The Hague because neighbours felt she was a security risk.” That’s preposterous! What right has the court to evict her from her home because thugs have threatened her life? Let the court banish the thugs from the country!

I’d say that Ali is a candidate for asylum in the United States, although I’m not sure she’d be better protected here than in Europe. What I question is her candidacy for a fellowship with an American think tank.

Wait a sec, what am I thinking? Having no coherent political philosophy or lacking veracity—even talent—are not always impediments to being hired by such places. For example, Rachel Marsden, a convicted Canadian stalker, worked for Paul Weyrich’s D.C. think tank, the Free Congress Foundation, which is dedicated to fighting America’s “long slide into cultural and moral decay.” I’m sure there are other examples—of lack of talent, at least, if not of out-and-out wrongdoing.

* Image courtesy Point Of Inquiry.

Is Israel Done For?

Britain, Israel, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Politics

I suspect Joseph Farah is right; Israel is a lost cause. It is now a thoroughly left-liberal, post-Zionist society, bereft of a sense of the goodness of its history and institutions. Its secondary and tertiary schools have adopted the evil Palestinian and radical Left propaganda as Bible from Sinai.
In many ways, Israel is not unlike Britain, which forfeited the Whig interpretation of history in favor of a negative view of the nation’s past and liberal institutions. Or the United States: it too has come to reduce its founding to a narrative of the oppressed and the excluded.
Israelis now accept that they must expiate for—rather than celebrate—the “miraculous revival of an old people in a spirit of humanism and freedom, on a barren piece of land,” to quote Walter Laquer.
I was overcome with similar sentiments to Joseph Farah’s after recently reestablishing contact with “girls” I grew up with in Israel. The one, a pedagogue, tells me sans shame that her daughter refuses to study Hebrew in high school (apparently she is accorded such an option.). The girl also refuses to be identified as a Jew in her identity document. She confuses a show of hatred for her culture—language and religion—with a sign of sophistication and individualism, not realizing that hers is the herd’s position. These days deracinated liberalism is the norm—it takes courage to be a proud Jew. The girl comes from a fine family of pioneers.
Another friend, a single woman with a doctorate in math, also from an admirable family, is a rank leftist, who berates Bibi (Netanyahu) for having freed up the Israeli economy considerably during his tenure, and for retaliating against Palestinian barbarism. Turn the other cheek is her motto.
What worries is not so much the policy of this or the other Israeli administration. I expect little from politicians. Given the views my friends express, I worry, as Joseph Farah does, that the “people—themselves fail to discern right from wrong.”

Jihad Means One Thing Only

BAB's A List, Islam

And it isn’t an “inner struggle‿ or a soul search: “There is just one historically relevant meaning of jihad despite contemporary apologetics,‿ says the brilliant Andrew Bostom, scholar of Jihad, in a speech entitled “The Legacy of Jihad in Historical Palestine,‿ delivered at the Heritage Foundation’s Lehrman Auditorium.

Bostom’s seminal best seller, The Legacy of Jihad, “provides a comprehensive, meticulously documented compilation, which includes Muslim theological and juridical texts, eyewitness historical accounts by both Muslim and non-Muslim chroniclers, and essays by preeminent scholars analyzing jihad (‘holy war’) and the conditions imposed upon the non-Muslim peoples conquered by jihad campaigns.‿

“The Legacy of Jihad reveals how, for well over a millennium, across three continents – Asia, Africa, and Europe – non-Muslims who were vanquished by jihad wars, became forced tributaries (dhimmi in Arabic), in lieu of being slain. Under the dhimmi religious caste system, non-Muslims were subjected to legal and financial oppression as well as social isolation. Extensive primary and secondary source materials, many translated here for the first time into English, are presented, making clear that jihad conquests were brutal, imperialist advances, which spurred waves of Muslims to expropriate a vast expanse of lands and subdue millions of indigenous peoples. Also examined is how jihad war, as a permanent and uniquely Islamic institution, ultimately regulates the relations of Muslims with non-Muslims to this day.‿

Here is an excerpt from the speech, which is available in its entirety on Dr. Bostom’s website:

“The only Marxist philosopher I appreciate—Groucho—once said:

Beside a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside a dog, it’s too dark to read.

Groucho’s satirical wisdom explains the lack of general knowledge about the two uniquely Islamic institutions I will introduce today—jihad and dhimmitude. Both are copiously documented in chronicles and documents and books whose brilliant light remains concealed by the darkness of denial, obfuscation, and apathetic ignorance. Jihad and its corollary institution dhimmitude have shaped events in historical Palestine—modern Israel, Judea, Samaria, Gaza, and Jordan—from 634, through the present. This living legacy, including the initial jihad conquest and imposition of Muslim rule in historical Palestine, set in place archetypal patterns which are still quite evident.

There is just one historically relevant meaning of jihad despite contemporary apologetics. The noted 19th century Arabic lexicographer E.W. Lane, who studied the etymology of the term, observed, ‘Jihad came to be used by the Muslims to signify wag[ing] war against unbelievers.’ Jihad was pursued century after century because jihad embodied an ideology and a jurisdiction. Both were formally conceived by Muslim jurisconsults and theologians from the 8th to 9th centuries onward, based on their interpretation of Koranic verses and long chapters in the ‘hadith,’ or acts and sayings of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, especially those recorded by al-Bukhari [d. 869] and Muslim [d. 874].
Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), jurist, renowned philosopher, historian, and sociologist, summarized these consensus opinions from five centuries of prior Muslim jurisprudence with regard to the uniquely Islamic institution of jihad:

‘In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the [Muslim] mission and [the obligation to] convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force… The other religious groups did not have a universal mission, and the holy war was not a religious duty for them, save only for purposes of defense… Islam is under obligation to gain power over other nations.'”

Barely a Blog has also featured an exclusive–and related–essay by Dr. Bostom: “Death for Apostasy as Islamic as Apple Pie.‿ Read it here.

Exposing the Islamist Lobby

Islam

Courtesy of an administration that has anesthetized Americans to the essential Islam (and thus continued its predecessor’s multicultural mission), Muslims with ominous beliefs and agendas have managed to infiltrate every security agency, from the FBI to the Pentagon. Sperry warns that the FBI, freighted by anti-discrimination laws and pathological political correctness, now harbors Muslim translators with ties to “various foreign military and intelligence agencies in Syria, Egypt, Pakistan, and Turkey.” (Could this help explain why urgent intercepts are often left untranslated or are mistranslated? Easily the most scandalous anecdote in the book is that of FBI agent Sibel Edmonds walking into the Washington field office after 9/11, to find the Middle Eastern linguists making merry—passing around date-stuffed cookies to celebrate the occasion on which America got its just deserts. Were they fired? Stripped of their top-secret security clearances? Au contraire! More of their ilk were hired. Meanwhile, Arabic-speaking Sephardic Jews have been rejected for the job. There were “loyalty concerns,” or so the bureau said.

An excerpt from my review for The New Individualist of Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington by Paul Sperry. Read it in its entirety here. The review appeared in the issue that featured the Muhammad cartoon on the cover. The New Individualist was the only magazine in the country to have featured this most controversial drawing, smack-dab where it can’t be missed.