Apropos Of Nothing

Hurrah! Much to my surprise and relief, the two Fox News journalists have been freed by their Palestinian captors. Michelle Malkin has a thorough roundup on the story, from which I learned that a) the culprits were known to the authorities in the Palestinian Authority almost immediately after the snatchings, and b) they are the same people who killed three Americans in a roadside bombing in 2003. They got clean away with those murders and will obviously get away with these abductions as well.

I hate to quibble — the important thing is that these guys are safe; I realize that — but I can’t help it. Two things rankle about this.

One: It made my skin crawl slightly that one of the two captives, after describing the experience of being abducted, hooded, tied up, thrown on a concrete floor, held captive for two weeks by people who are perfectly capable of murder, forced to mouth the offensive words of the “militants” onto videotape, and then forced at gunpoint to convert to Islam, still felt it necessary to sugar-coat the nightmare with a comment about what a swell religion Islam is. Yep — those terribly sensitive Muslim sensibilities are the real story here, not the kidnapping and terrorizing of two Western journalists by jihadist thugs.

And Two: Would those journalists have been given the option of converting to Islam to save their skins if they had been Jewish?

Just asking.

Now this is an interesting editorial choice. The Jerusalem Post has a story ostensibly about the sham of a meeting the Fatah old-guard cronies are holding in Jordan at which they are pretending to discuss necessary reforms. But graf 2 begins with a truly eye-popping “meanwhile”:

Meanwhile, a radical Islamic group called Hizb al-Tahrir (Liberation Party) is planning to declare the birth of an Islamic caliphate in the Gaza Strip on Friday.

Come again?

Turns out these guys are “more extreme than Hamas” and have been substantially buoyed in popularity by the Hezbollah “victory” over Israel in south Lebanon.

When this group made similar noises in Jordan, this was the response:

Jordanian security forces recently foiled a similar attempt by the party’s followers in the kingdom and arrested most of their leaders. Ramzi Sawalhah, the leader of Hizb al-Tahrir in Jordan, was arrested shortly after he delivered a sermon in a mosque in which he called for replacing the monarchy with an Islamic caliphate.

Abbas is too impotent to do much of anything and the Hamasniks probably love the idea, so I suggest to anyone planning on visiting Gaza in the near future to start either growing a beard or shopping for a burqa, as the case may be.

By the way (I’m posting in haste as my daughter needs to nurse) the abduction of the two Fox journalists over a week ago by Palestinian thugs is boneheaded even by their own elevated standards. Nothing like terrorizing journalists out of coming to broadcast your version of the story to win the day.

Also by the way, the name of that wacky let’s-start-the-Caliphate-in-Gaza gang sounds familiar. Would any of you know whether it’s the same group as the one to which that Guardian terrorist/journalist who made headlines about six months ago belonged?

As has been pointed out by several commenters and emailers, there’s quite a bit of positive spin out there about the cease-fire, and it all may turn out to be well-grounded. Lots of people view the fact that a Hezbollah violation of the cease-fire will put them, not us, in the hot seat as an important step forward.

The problem is that the responsibility for evaluating non-compliance lies with Kofi Annan, who is — now here’s a surprise — already waffling. He stated to Israeli television last night that “dismantling Hizbullah is not the direct mandate of the UN,” notwithstanding that pesky UN resolution that was just passed. Just to hammer home the urgency, in Annan’s mind, of the protection of Israelis from Hezbollah, he went on to comment that the deployment of the UN-mandated international force on the border will take “weeks or months” rather than days, as was originally expected.

So we have a situation in which we are expected to rely for the implementation of the resolution on a blatantly biased UN Secretary General (as the Israeli prime minister’s office pointed out, his insistence on morally equating a genocidal aggressor who deliberately targeted our civilian population inside its own border with our defensive response clearly reveals whose side he’s on); UNIFIL, which, despite some big talk, will apparently continue to be toothless (their hoped-for use of mysterious, unspecified “strong measures” appears to exclude actual engagement of weapons-wielding Hezbollah terrorists); and the Lebanese government, which has already agreed to throw that awkward “disarm Hezbollah” clause of the cease-fire agreement into the garbage. The Lebanese Army is hopelessly ill-equipped to overcome Hezbollah resistance, and we shouldn’t be asking them to do so anyway, since Hezbollah is represented in the democratically elected Lebanese government. So much for the disarming of Hezbollah.

There are reasons why Nasrallah is loudly proclaiming the trouncing of his “militia”, the destruction of great swaths of South Lebanon and the new international focus (however short-lived that interest will be) on his own aggressions a “blessed, huge victory“. Essentially, Nasrallah seems to feel that his not being dead is enough to characterize his folly as a victory, and in the historically warped view of the Arab world toward its wars with Israel, it is (see also Nasser’s self-described “victory” over Israel in 1967). But there’s more going on than grandstanding. Nasrallah’s Hezbollah is Iran’s spearhead, and I believe that one of Iran’s objectives is the takeover by Hezbollah of Lebanon as an opening salvo in the sharia-zation of the Middle East. (Hit the democracies first; they’re a soft target.) Hezbollah will apparently continue to be armed by Iran via Syria, and no one will do anything about it — the IDF will not engage the convoys, and the Lebanese army obviously won’t go near them either. Meanwhile, Nasrallah is busy touting Hezbollah as the great humanitarian organization that will reconstruct the shattered lives of the south Lebanese. It remains to be seen whether it will occur to most Lebanese to inquire who was responsible for that devastation, but if the thinking of the Hamas-electing Palestinian majority is anything to go by, I can’t feel too optimistic.

Cox & Forkum’s cartoon sending up the Reuters photo-doctoring scandal is making the rounds in the blogosphere. I thought I’d link to a different recent cartoon of theirs that is (as always) right on the mark:

By the way, Scribbling Monk has suggested that the exposure of “the media’s fakery and use of stringers who favor and lie for the terrorists” is a tenth reason to be relatively optimistic about the war. I agree. For those interested in a close fisking of Reuters’ coverage of the war, have a look at Michelle Malkin and especially Charles Johnson, who first broke the story of the doctored Reuters photo of an Israeli strike in Lebanon.

Hello readers! I hope I still have some after this long absence. My lovely twin babies are now three months old. The quiet on the blog reflects mostly lack of time to sit, think and write, but also a reluctance to look too hard at events outside the home just now. I haven’t been able to resist, though, and so I’m popping back into blogworld to toss in my own two cents.

Things certainly look grim, but to my mind, there are also some striking signs of light. Today is a particularly bad day, and it feels a little inappropriate to be talking positive — but perhaps there’s all the more reason today to try to find reasons for hope. Here are a few.

1. The exposure of UNIFIL. A good proportion of the hundreds upon hundreds of rockets Hezbollah has been raining down on us from southern Lebanon are being shot off from relatively small launchers. There’s small and there’s small, though. You can get some of these launchers onto the back of a pickup truck, but you can’t, say, hide them in your breast pocket or under your hat. You can’t, in other words, install hundreds of rocket launchers in civilian backyards without anyone ever seeing any of them.

UNIFIL (UN Interim Force in Lebanon), which has always protested that its only function is to observe (a point it demonstrated by quietly watching the abduction in 2000 of three Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah), has somehow managed to miss a long-term, wide-scale deploying of these weapons all over civilian areas throughout south Lebanon. Even if you absolve UNIFIL of moral bankruptcy and willful blindness here (although I’m hard pressed to imagine why we should, considering the decades of sanctimonious moral grandstanding we’ve had to put up with from the UN), they surely give new dimension to the terms “incompetent”, “inept”, and “useless”. As we have seen, the deployment of huge quantities of weaponry all over Lebanese civilian areas placed those civilians in the ultimate line of fire. We all know the UN is not on the Israeli side in any conflict, but UNIFIL has demonstrated the UN’s inability even to protect those civilian populations it does give a damn about. Israel has agreed that UNIFIL can have a role in maintaining a cease-fire, but only if it is issued a new mandate and is given the power to take action.

2. The exposure of the cracked “united Arab front”. A top-dog Saudi cleric has just issued a fatwa forbidding Muslims from praying for Hezbollah or otherwise supporting them. He has labeled them “the party of the devil”, which sounds about right. Granted, this reflects the Sunni-Shiite divide rather than any sudden recognition of the soundness of Israel’s position in this conflict, but so what? (The Saudi cleric is Wahhabist Sunni; i.e., a spiritual kinsman of Osama bin-Laden; Hezbollah is Shiite.) Hezbollah, for all its big talk about representing the “Muslim nation”, has antagonized a significant portion of that nation and may ultimately receive a good kicking from its own brethren. Extremist Wahhabists are not interested in being dragged into a mess created by Shiite heretics, and moderate Muslims don’t especially want their interests hijacked by Iranian imams and their totalitarian wet dreams. This is far from a united front.

3. The restoration of an Israeli sense of unity and moral imperative. Reacting with force to so unequivocal an attack on Israeli civilians is entirely appropriate. No one seriously disputes the necessity of taking up this fight. We withdrew from Lebanon six years ago. The self-described “resisters” of Israeli “aggression” in Lebanon, flummoxed by the lack of actual Israelis in the neighborhood, got a little ahead of themselves and attacked Israel proper, thereby revealing their true agenda. Obviously Israel had to defend itself — a point that is clear even to Israelis, who are notorious for being their own worst critics.

4. Parts of the Muslim world see the folly of Nasrallah’s actions — and are saying it out loud. The rest of the Muslim world — that is, the non-extreme Muslim world — has expressed disgust and impatience with the Hezbollah “adventure”. Editorials have appeared in news organs across the Arab world, including the London-based, wide-circulation al-Hayat, criticizing Hezbollah’s unprovoked aggression against us. This astonishingly public acknowledgement of an Israeli side of the story has largely dried up, but it is refreshing and encouraging that we saw it at all.

5. Even parts of Europe get it. Notoriously biased European news organs have shown signs of recognizing Israel’s right to defend itself against deadly assaults on its civilian centers. In the first few days of the war, I sat open-mouthed in front of the television while British commentators expressed sympathy with Israel. This was on the BBC, mind you; these weren’t token non-anti-Semitic Brits wheeled in for color on Fox News. They even pinioned a hapless Palestinian roundtable panelist with just the variety of lip-curling borderline contempt they usually reserve for us. The disaster at Qana dented this support, and rightly so; but I was heartened by the speed with which there was talk in Europe about the possibility that much of the carnage was staged. We’ve come a long way from the wide-eyed credulity of the Mohammad al-Dura/Jenin “massacre” age.

6. The exposure of the extent of Syria’s relationship with Iran, and the vocal resistance to the Syrian-Iranian influence over the lives of innocent Lebanese. As Dennis Ross neatly put it, “Iran will fight Israel to the last Lebanese”. The Lebanese, rightly proud of their nascent democracy, are not interested in being pawns of pathetically backward Bashar al-Assad or batshit-crazy Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. And they’re speaking up.

7. The general recognition that Iran is behind this aggression, and the consequent refocusing of attention on Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

8. The exposure of the cynicism of the enemy. Israeli soldiers put children behind them in order to protect them, and Hezbollah puts children in front of them in order to protect themselves. When the IDF harms enemy civilians — even when those civilians have been deliberately placed in harm’s way by their own side — they recognize the horror of what they have done and apologize for it. Hezbollah, by contrast, would consider a Qana-sized strike in Haifa or Hadera or Netanya — a strike, in other words, that killed dozens of Israeli men, women and children, but with the critical difference that their targeting was deliberate — a great success. The resulting death and destruction suffered by those Lebanese unfortunate enough to live beside the launchers from which the rockets were lobbed would, grotesquely, add to Hezbollah’s perception of its success.

I imagine that much of the unprecedentedly public criticism of Hezbollah that we’ve seen within the Muslim world in the past few weeks stems from a reluctance to be associated with such disgusting and transparent contempt for Muslim lives.

9. The honesty of the enemy. I am always enormously reassured when Israel’s enemies call it the way they really see it. None of this Arafat-esque, forked-tongue, EU-salving bullshit for old Nasrallah. The object is to kill all of us in Israel: to aim directly at my living room and take down as many people like me, my husband and my children as possible. Ahmedinejad, too, continues to ratchet up the tough talk, aiming not only at the erasing of Israel from the face of the earth but the destruction of the United States as well. Not even the dimmest bulb at the State Department can ignore that kind of language, and only Mel Gibson would argue that in the face of a clearly expressed threat of total annihiliation we have no right to defend ourselves. Keep talking, fellas!

Claire Berlinski has called my attention to a new push among European Union officials to clamp down on language that “cause[s] frustration among Muslims and increase[s] the risk of radicalisation”. A prime example of a necessary change is the banning of the phrase “Islamic terrorism” to describe…uh…Islamic terrorism. The phrase that should be used instead is “terrorists who abusively invoke Islam”.

This new phrase is part of a “non-emotive lexicon for discussing radicalisation” the EU officials have devised. They plan to submit it for adoption by European governments, the European Commission and the European Parliament.

Well, I think this is a swell idea. Heaven knows that when faced with a billion-strong religion well-stocked with highly vocal people eager to kill you and your children and destroy every vestige of your civilization, what’s needed is to call a spade an unembossed multi-functional gravy ladle and earth re-sifter.

Frankly, I don’t think the Europeans have gone far enough. It’s all well and good to instruct ignorant Westerners on how to communicate effectively with members of the Religion of Peace. But the next step, surely, is to instruct us on how to interpret the language the Religion of Peace uses towards us.

I’ll just kick off with a couple of easy ones and you boys in Brussels can take it from there.

1. “Israel should be wiped from the map.” — Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of Iran

We must first of all congratulate Ahmadinejad for bravely using the word “Israel”, which was for many years verboten among the more radical Islamic regimes. His use of “Israel” in a speech to be broadcast to the Arab street — rather than “Zionist Entity” or “Little Satan” — can only be interpreted as a sign of his desire to bring peace to the Middle East. The subtlety of his expression of a desire for peace, particularly to so notoriously difficult an audience, should be applauded, not denounced.

Note too that he does not say “I want to wipe Israel from the map” or “We will wipe Israel from the map,” which are expressions of intent. He says, “Israel should be wiped from the map,” which is an expression of preference. Civilized people do not censor one another’s opinions and desires, and they certainly don’t attack one another because of them. Indeed, Ahmadinejad is to be again congratulated for expressing himself with words and not actions. We might suggest that the Israelis take a lesson from this while they’re firing up their F-16s.

There is no reason to infer future hostile action on Ahmadinejad’s part from this simple statement of opinion. We are aware that there are those — particularly on the American right coast, if you catch our drift — who interpret his nuclear program as hostile, but he has stated repeatedly that his intentions are entirely peaceful. To disbelieve him without ample hard evidence would be unconscionably racist. And besides, even if he were putting together a bomb or two, it’s entirely his right, given that Israel has the bomb already. It is not our place to pick and choose who is capable of precipitating global nuclear annihilation. That wouldn’t be fair.

Also, we feel compelled to point out: Ahmadinejad didn’t say Europe should be wiped off the map. He said Israel. Israel’s an awfully small country, and it’s caused quite a lot of trouble. He might be onto something is all we’re saying. Think big picture.

2. Muslim demonstration grab-bag from the Cartoon Jihad: “Behead”, “Slay,” “Exterminate”, “Massacre,” “Annihilate”, “Holocaust”.

Here we have to be careful to avoid the temptation — all too often the downfall of our friends across the Atlantic, alas — to be too literal-minded. True, the terms listed above are startling to Western eyes, but remember that the Muslims who paraded them through British and European streets were simply yearning to be heard in the wake of an appalling provocation.

If we truly believe in the right of freedom of speech, we cannot condemn selected individuals for exercising that right on our own soil. Indeed, the incendiary language of the Muslim protests stands as an eloquent rebuke to our own hypocrisy, particularly since the protesters stopped short of actually slaughtering any large groups of Europeans. Such dignified restraint in the face of our contempible disrespect for their sensibilities was intended to humiliate us. It did, and we deserved it.

Drop me a line if you need any more text interpretations. I’m happy to help.

Quelle breath of fresh air!

Courtesy of LGF, I happened across this encouraging bit of news: the French citizens of Saint-Genis-Pouilly, a hamlet on the border with Switzerland, are standing up to Muslim tyranny. What could the Muslims possibly have done to rouse them?

They dissed Voltaire.

Concurrently with the cartoon jihad, Muslims in this Alpine community decided they just couldn’t tolerate French people in a French village reading aloud a 265-year-old play by a French literary master — a master who is remembered not only for his barbs and literary flair (“If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him”) but for his position as representative of Europe’s unalterable (we hope) commitment to secular enlightenment. The play in question is called, pointedly enough, “Fanaticism, or Mahomet the Prophet,” and as the article cited above puts it, it “uses the founder of Islam to lampoon all forms of religious frenzy and intolerance”. To the surprise of no one, the Muslims protested the reading by expressing religious frenzy and intolerance.

A Muslim cafe-owner named Said Akhrouf — who, though of Moroccan descent, was born and raised in France and thus might have had some inkling as to the value of Voltaire to the culture of which he is an intimate part — got together for a powwow with three “Islamic activists” to decide how they were going to deal with this intolerable provocation. They wrote a letter to the town’s mayor, Hubert Bertrand, demanding that their sensibilities be appeased by canceling the show. The letter stated the cancellation was required “in order to preserve peace” — pretty thin code for a shakedown.

To his great credit, Bertrand told them to buzz off, called the police and arranged protection for the theater for the night of the reading. When he announced — flanked by French security officials — that the show would go on, he read aloud the portion of the French constitution that guarantees free speech.

Sure enough, on the night of the performance a “small riot” broke out, in which a car and garbage cans were set on fire. Policemen spent the evening chasing Muslim “youths” through the streets. Mayor Bertrand, who I gather quite enjoyed this little run-in, described the riot as “the most excitement we’ve ever had down here”.

It appears that stomping on Voltaire might be the most effective way of shaking the French people out of their drowsy complacency. As the article points out,

Supporters of Europe’s secular values have rushed to embrace Voltaire as their standard-bearer. France’s national library last week opened an exhibition dedicated to the writer and other Enlightenment thinkers. It features a police file started in 1748 on Voltaire, highlighting efforts by authorities to muzzle him. “Spirit of the Enlightenment, are you there?” asked a headline Saturday in Le Figaro, a French daily newspaper.
…
…the name Voltaire — and the Enlightenment tradition he embodies — has frequently been cited by pundits across Europe commenting on the Danish cartoon furor. That controversy has triggered violent clashes in Pakistan, Nigeria, Libya, Syria and elsewhere, leaving scores dead…Sunday in the Pakistani city of Karachi, about 50,000 people, many chanting “Hang those who insulted the prophet,” rallied to protest the cartoons. The protest, held a day after a visit to the country by President Bush, also featured chants of “Death to America.” In a video broadcast Sunday, Osama bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, also denounced the Danish drawings…

“Help us Voltaire. They’ve gone mad,” read a headline last month in France Soir, a daily newspaper.

Voltaire himself had a taste of the oppression French Muslims are trying to oppose on his country — only then, the fanatical tyrants were Christians:

When Voltaire wrote the play in 1741, Roman Catholic clergymen denounced it as a thinly veiled anti-Christian tract. Their protests forced the cancellation of a staging in Paris after three performances — and hardened Voltaire’s distaste for religion. Asked on his deathbed by a priest to renounce Satan, he quipped: “This is not the time to be making enemies.”

The French director of the reading, Herve Loichemol, “says he wasn’t trying to provoke Muslims but knew from experience his production might anger some. He pushed ahead anyway. Banning blasphemy ‘admits private beliefs into public space,’ he says. ‘This is how catastrophe starts.’”

Well done, Saint-Genis-Pouilly. And may I suggest to Muslim cafe owner Akhrouf: you might want to consider packing up your croque monsieur pan and your lace curtains and opening a nargila parlor in Marrakech. You might feel a little more at home.

I’m linking to this news item not to vent my outrage (I don’t think this forum can contain it) but to draw your attention to the response of the Parisian public prosecutor.

The facts of the case, in brief:

1. Ilan Halimi, a 23-year-old Parisian Jew, was lured from his shop, overpowered, abducted, stripped, tortured for weeks, set on fire, then dumped, naked, handcuffed, gagged, with burns covering 80 percent of his body, at a suburban train station. In the words of the judiciary police chief heading the investigation, “[The kidnappers] acted with indescribable cruelty.” Halimi died on the way to the hospital.

2. The 13 people arrested for this crime are all Muslims of North African descent.

3. The kidnappers have specifically targeted Jews in the past. In their ransom conversations with Halimi’s family, in response to their pleas that they couldn’t come up with 500,000 euros, they said, “Go to the synagogue and get it.”

4. The response of the Parisian public prosecutor to the family’s belief that this crime had something to do with anti-Semitism: “[N]o element of the current investigation could link this murder to an anti-Semitic declaration or action”.

Of course not. The monsters might be offended if we suggest that they are anti-Semites. And remember, everybody — under no circumstances must we ever offend the monsters.

The invaluable Norm Geras has posted a piece on the Third International Congress of Terror Victims, which was held on February 13 in Valencia, Spain. The Congress is a gathering of survivors and family members of victims of terror attacks across the globe, including, among many others, the 9/11 assault on the US, the 2004 Beslan elementary school massacre, and the 2005 London transit bombings. In view of the extraordinary deference being shown to those coreligionists of the terrorists who are taking the Danish cartoon controversy as an opportunity to openly espouse mass murder (and, indeed, to commit murder), an event like this warrants more publicity, to say the least.

On opening day, a powerful speech was made by Israeli Arnold Roth, whose 15-year-old daughter Malki was murdered by Palestinian terrorists in the Sbarro restaurant bombing in Jerusalem on August 9, 2001. Roth makes many points worth reading — about the terrible human need for explanation that can impel one to find rationality where there is none, about the complete inability of the United Nations ever to take the side of the victims, about the fatal lack of clarity in the news media about the very meaning of the word “terrorism”. The following are excerpts:

…it is not beautiful to be a victim of terror. It is not romantic. It is not transcendental and it is not heroic. It is not like the movies. It is a nightmare and the deepest, most painful tragedy that most people will ever experience in their lives…

This process of becoming a victim makes very little sense to those of us who have experienced it. But the societies in which we live seek to understand terror. They try to get to the bottom of the anger and the hatred which animate terror by looking for root causes that explain it, that rationalize it. We have seen this done by journalists, by politicians, by community leaders, by our own neighbors…

A committee of the United Nations has been trying for the past nine years to write a convention against terrorism. For ordinary people like us, this does not sound like the most difficult thing for lawyers and diplomats to do. We know that terrorism means the deliberate targeting of civilians for injury and death. But there is an international association of states – I will not name it – comprising some 57 countries, nearly 30% of the 191 member states of the United Nations. For nine years, this association has frustrated the writing of the United Nations anti-terror convention by insisting that terrorism must be defined not by the nature of the act but by its purpose…

Their definition is not at all interested in how barbaric that act may be. Or how random. Or how defenseless and innocent the victims.

I am neither a diplomat nor a politician. But I have consulted with some academic experts and it is clear to me what this means. It means that terrorism when it is done for a bad cause is bad. Terrorism when it is done for a good cause is good. An individual citizen, a diplomat, a journalist or a country which holds to this view is not against terrorism at all but simply opposed to bad causes.

The effect of this regimented attention to semantics is that in its entire history the United Nations has failed time and time again to express an unequivocal condemnation of terrorism…

To dismiss this depressing chain of events by calling it a difference of opinion over definitions is to miss the point. There is an actual, practical life-and-death question here which we, assembled here in this hall, are uniquely placed to answer: Is it ever legitimate to target women, children and other noncombatants? For nations comprising some 30 per cent of the United Nations, the answer – tragically, astonishingly – is yes.…

Some of the men and women who murdered my child are in prison in Israel. Others are alive and well and free and active. Some of them have even become newly-elected members of parliament – not the parliament of my country but the parliament of the neighbour with whom we desperately want to live in peace.

Since the death of my daughter Malki, I read [newspapers] carefully and I pay close attention to the words [journalists] use. You may have noticed that the media seldom use the word “terrorist”. Instead, the men and women who kill innocent civilians in restaurants, who place bombs on train carriages and buses, who stab and beat children in kindergartens and playgrounds – these are called fighters, activists, protesters, militants, insurgents, anything except what they actually are: murderers, terrorists, barbarians.

I believe that this avoidance of plain and clear language happens because journalists, editors and publishers are unsure, themselves, of what terrorism is. They need to hear our voices. They need to understand – to really understand – that terrorism is not some kind of romantic struggle for dignity. It is not a noble alternative form of warfare. It is the purest, most physical expression of hatred and intolerance. [emphases added.]

Roth concludes by citing a line that appears in the Jewish Talmud:

“He who is compassionate to the cruel will ultimately become cruel to the compassionate”.

?? ????? ?? ?????? ???? ???? ?????? ???????

Read the whole thing.

Courtesy of Damian, the following was written by Winston Churchill in 1899:

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy.

The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live.

A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.

Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it.

No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytising faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.

From Sir Winston Churchill, The River War, first edition, Vol. II, pages 248-50 (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1899).

Apropos of the danger to Europe, I’d like to commend to you a forthcoming book, Menace In Europe: Why the Continent’s Crisis Is America’s, Too by Claire Berlinski. The book addresses the profound degree to which Islamic fundamentalism has sunk, with Europe’s drowsy acquiescence, into the fabric of European culture. She looks at the frightening way the spiritual void of Europe has been filled — quite effortlessly, it appears — by fanatical Islam, which demands the “respect” of its European hosts even as it aspires to destroy it. Claire wrote me bulletins while she was researching and writing this book and I assure you, it is gripping stuff. It’s being released this week and I recommend it heartily.