Greetings from the French Hill: Is It Possible That Muslim Terrorism May Actually <i>Save</i> America???

-Well, a fellow blogger seems to think so. I don't necessarily agree with everything that Russell Wilcox has to write, but he does make a compelling argument for himself. READ THE REST...

Muslim Terrorism May Save America
Occasionally I will hear a friend say, as he contemplates the utter wasteland our urban public schools have become, and as he views the deterioration of American society, "what this country needs is another depression”. Having been a young child during the ‘Great Depression’, and having therefore the interest in learning all I could about it, I do not agree with the thought. I do not agree that we need to go through another era when millions lived in abject poverty. I do agree with the concerns for our country, as teachers, numbed by classroom experiences and handcuffed by politically correct views on discipline and curriculum, go through the motions until blessed retirement comes; and young American men eschew marriage while huge numbers of young women stagger from bars on their way to one-night stands – as they both celebrate their dedication to pleasure and have little concern for their survival needs or their morality as their depression-era grandparents did.

I will agree that our young people do need a life-threatening challenge to engage them and change their focus from themselves to a larger concern. As we sink deeper and deeper into prime-time pornography, fatherless children on Ritalin, and selfish, irresponsible adults who hate America in their guilt-ridden and aimless lives, we do need something to pull us out of this slime before our civilization goes the way of all others that went down this path.
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-As has already been reported here, while Islamicts are in the process of conquering, by the sword, or in this case; guns and death, the entire north-east region of Africa, nobody is saying a damn word about it. No emergency UN Security Council session. No emergency Human Rights meeting. NOTHING. Well, it seems the situation is getting even more dire as Muslim militias have captured Somalia's third largest city and port city of Kismayo. Mogadishu has already been conquered, and it is only a matter of time before all of Ethiopia's major ports and trading points are completely over-run also. Get ready for the new Pan-Arabia staging point.

-Speaking of staging points, as Britain readies itself for dhimmitude, one of its biggest newspapers, The Guardian has stood up in the forefront to defend the violence and murderous aftermath of Muslim world's "reaction" to the Pope's comments from last week.

[...] Armstrong on Monday published a piece in The Guardian entitled “We cannot afford to maintain these ancient prejudices against Islam: The Pope’s remarks were dangerous, and will convince many more Muslims that the west is incurably Islamophobic.” It is exquisitely ironic that she would term the Pope’s remarks, rather than the Muslim reaction to them, “dangerous” – particularly after a nun in Somalia and a lay Christian in Iraq were murdered in apparent expressions of anger against the Pope. The Pope’s words didn’t kill these people, violent Muslims did; but that fact, and the inappropriate violence of their reaction, forms no part of Armstrong’s calculus. As far as she is concerned, violent Islamic rage against the West, including the rage against the Pope, is all the fault of the West.
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Yet to Armstrong, acts of Islamic aggression were nothing more than “fearful fantasies created by Europeans.” Among these “fearful fantasies” she also mentions the anti-Semitic blood libel that circulated among Christians during the time of the Crusades – the charge that Jews killed Christian children and used their blood to make Passover matzo. But she of course makes no mention of the fact that the blood libel is alive and well today, not in the Christian or post-Christian world, but in the House of Islam. Syria in 2003 and Jordan in 2005 aired during Ramadan a viciously anti-Semitic TV series dramatizing the murder of a Christian child by wicked Jews, who then used the child’s blood in baking Passover matzo. The blood libel has also been spread recently on official Iranian TV. Why have Muslims taken up this ancient Christian slander? Armstrong doesn’t say.
[....] READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE...

-When it comes to defending the Muslims' reaction to the Pope's comments, Charles Krauthammer says that it's time for the left and liberal alike to realize that tolerance is a two-way street. He also happens to agree with my defintion of irony.

Religious fanatics, regardless of what name they give their jealous god, invariably have one thing in common: no sense of humor. Particularly about themselves. It's hard to imagine Torquemada taking a joke well.

Today's Islamists seem to have not even a sense of irony. They fail to see the richness of the following sequence. The pope makes a reference to a 14th-century Byzantine emperor's remark about Islam imposing itself by the sword, and to protest this linking of Islam and violence:

· In the West Bank and Gaza, Muslims attack seven churches.

· In London, the ever-dependable radical Anjem Choudary tells demonstrators at Westminster Cathedral that the pope is now condemned to death.

· In Mogadishu, Somali religious leader Abubukar Hassan Malin calls on Muslims to "hunt down" the pope. The pope not being quite at hand, they do the next best thing: shoot dead, execution-style, an Italian nun who worked in a children's hospital.

"How dare you say Islam is a violent religion? I'll kill you for it" is not exactly the best way to go about refuting the charge. But of course, refuting is not the point here. The point is intimidation.

First Salman Rushdie. Then the false Newsweek report about Koran-flushing at Guantanamo Bay. Then the Danish cartoons. And now a line from a scholarly disquisition on rationalism and faith given in German at a German university by the pope.

And the intimidation succeeds: politicians bowing and scraping to the mob over the cartoons; Saturday's craven New York Times editorial telling the pope to apologize; the plague of self-censorship about anything remotely controversial about Islam -- this in a culture in which a half-naked pop star blithely stages a mock crucifixion as the highlight of her latest concert tour.

In today's world, religious sensitivity is a one-way street. The rules of the road are enforced by Islamic mobs and abjectly followed by Western media, politicians and religious leaders.
[....]READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE...

-Was there a message for the world's jewry embedded within the Pope's speech last week?

-When it comes to cynicism regarding the situation in the Middle East, it seems that comedians can't top the truth.

-As the hype and controversy of last week's visit and speech by Iran's President at the UN dies down, the question to be asked is, "what's next?" An interesting analysis of the impact of President Bush's speech comes from David Frum, a former head speech writer for the President. He believes that the President's speech, to him, undoubtably signals to the world that the United States will not be stopping Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons and that Iran is going to become a nuclear power. If that is true, it is once again up to Israel, ALONE, to stop Iran's plans to destroy her.

Do you think that the U.S. is on the verge of striking the Iranian nuclear program? Think again. President Bush's speech to the United Nations this week did not even refer to Iranian defiance of the Security Council's Aug. 31 deadline for ceasing and desisting from uranium enrichment. Instead the President praised Iranian culture and offered friendship to the Iranian people -- following a new strategy that tacitly accepts an Iranian nuclear bomb as all but inevitable.

What is this new strategy?

David Ignatius, a journalist who often reflects the thinking of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, described it thus in a January column in The Washington Post: "The administration hopes [the European allies, Russia and China] will work with Washington to change Iranian behaviour on issues such as terrorism and regional stability. Officials don't like the Cold War term 'containment,' believing that it connotes a static policy, but the word suggests the strategic commitment they want on Iran."

Three years of negotiations with Iran have definitively failed. The U.S. and its allies offered Iran trade benefits, weapons technology, even civilian nuclear reactors. No sale. The Iranians want a nuclear bomb more than they want anything the West can offer them.

Rice's big idea is based on the experience of the Cold War, when the U.S. isolated, deterred and challenged the legitimacy of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was surely a more dangerous adversary than Iran. If containment worked then, why not now?

But the advocates of today's neo-containment are deluding themselves. They cannot hope to isolate Iran. No American ally will sign on to such a plan. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that total trade between Iran on the one hand and France, Germany, Russia and China on the other has increased from US$18-billion to US$22-billion in the past year. Germany is Iran's number one supplier; France, number two. President Jacques Chirac only last week urged that the Security Council "renounce" all economic sanctions against Iran.

Deter Iran? After the Khobar Towers terror attack of 1996, in which Iran killed 17 U.S. service personnel, the Clinton administration threatened war if Iran ever did such a thing again. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration safeguarded Kuwaiti oil tankers against Iranian missiles by reflagging them as U.S. vessels. But America will not find it so easy to defend its friends against an Iran that can threaten nuclear retaliation against the U.S. The problem is not to deter Iran; it is to prevent Iran from using its nuclear weapons to deter the U.S. from protecting its friends.
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-Well, the possibility of UN sancations to assist in stopping Iran from developing nuclear weapons was further damaged last week when France's President Chirac stated very clearly that "there will be no war against Iran".

[...] "There will be no war against Iran," Chirac is reported to have told a special emissary of the Islamic Republic who visited him in Paris last week. "Anything other than negotiations would be resolutely opposed by France." History may not be repeating itself, but it is hard not to remember similar pledges Chirac gave to Saddam Hussein up to March 2003, just weeks before the US-led coalition invaded Iraq.

It is now clear that Chirac's assurances played a crucial role in persuading Saddam Hussein not to offer the concessions that might have prevented war and regime change.
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Just hours before he flew to New York to attend the UN General Assembly, Chirac dropped the only condition that the 5+1 group - the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany - had demanded of Teheran as a prelude to negotiations.

"Iran should not be asked to stop uranium enrichment as a precondition," Chirac said. "And there is no sense to refer the Islamic Republic back to the Security Council."

THIS MEANS that the Bush administration loses the only concession it received from its European allies as an inducement to join talks with Iran. Thanks to Chirac, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appears to have scored a major diplomatic victory over President George W. Bush.
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-Finally, in a very bold move, the IDF military court over-turned a ruling by stating that arrested Hamas lawmakers would reamin in custody until the end of legal proceedings against them.

[...] In his decision, Judge Col. Shaul Gorden said that the Hamas officials could not live "in two different worlds," one, the democratic world where they were elected as officials in democratic elections, and the other, the world of a known terror group.

"Due to their senior status in the Hamas organization, there is no choice but to order their continued confinement, even if they did not play a direct role in terror activities," Gorden said.

The judge continued by saying that the State of Israel wages a daily battle against terror groups operating with the clear goal of destroying and killing Israeli citizens. As high ranking as the Hamas officials were, "they cannot hide behind names and titles to be able to continue and implement their illegal goals," Gorden wrote.
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