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July 2007 Stats for The Big Picture.
I've got the flu big-time this week. Posting may continue to be light for a few days.
RADICAL ISLAM -- GLOBALIZATION FOR LOSERS
Don't miss Mark Steyn on Iran. A few excerpts:
If you dust off the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, Article One reads: "The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states." Iran fails to meet qualification (d), and has never accepted it. The signature act of the new regime was not the usual post-coup bloodletting and summary execution of the shah's mid-ranking officials but the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran by "students" acting with Khomeini's blessing.
...Yet Iran paid no price. They got away with it.
...With the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, a British subject, Tehran extended its contempt for sovereignty to claiming jurisdiction over the nationals of foreign states, passing sentence on them, and conscripting citizens of other countries to carry it out. Iran's supreme leader instructed Muslims around the world to serve as executioners of the Islamic Republic-and they did, killing not Rushdie himself but his Japanese translator, and stabbing the Italian translator, and shooting the Italian publisher, and killing three dozen persons with no connection to the book when a mob burned down a hotel because of the presence of the novelist's Turkish translator.
Iran's de facto head of state offered a multimillion-dollar bounty for a whack job on an obscure English novelist. And, as with the embassy siege, he got away with it.
...If you've also "recently acquired" a significant Muslim population and you're not sure how to "adjust" to it, well, here's the difference: back when my Belgian grandparents emigrated to Canada, the idea was that the immigrants assimilated to the host country. As Kofi and Co. see it, today the host country has to assimilate to the immigrants: if Islamic law forbids representations of the Prophet, then so must Danish law, and French law, and American law. Iran was the progenitor of this rapacious extraterritoriality, and, if we had understood it more clearly a generation ago, we might be in less danger of seeing large tracts of the developed world being subsumed by it today.
...Iran has an impressive three-decade record of talking the talk and walking the walk-either directly or through client groups like Hezbollah. In 1994, the Argentine Israel Mutual Association was bombed in Buenos Aires. Nearly 100 people died and 250 were injured-the worst massacre of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. An Argentine court eventually issued warrants for two Iranian diplomats plus Ali Fallahian, former intelligence minister, and Ali Akbar Parvaresh, former education minister and deputy speaker of the Majlis.
Why blow up a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires? Because it's there. Unlike the Iranian infiltration into Bosnia and Croatia, which helped radicalize not just the local populations but Muslim supporters from Britain and Western Europe, the random slaughter in the Argentine has no strategic value except as a demonstration of muscle and reach.
Anyone who spends half an hour looking at Iranian foreign policy over the last 27 years sees five things:
1. contempt for the most basic international conventions;
2. long-reach extraterritoriality;
3. effective promotion of radical Pan-Islamism;
4. a willingness to go the extra mile for Jew-killing (unlike, say, Osama);
5. an all-but-total synchronization between rhetoric and action.
This is a brilliant analysis no one else has done so far. Steyn specifies the danger we're in, and the urgent need to remove Iran's nuclear capability.
...Once again, we face a choice between bad and worse options. There can be no "surgical" strike in any meaningful sense: Iran's clients on the ground will retaliate in Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, and Europe. Nor should we put much stock in the country's allegedly "pro-American" youth. This shouldn't be a touchy-feely nation-building exercise: rehabilitation may be a bonus, but the primary objective should be punishment-and incarceration. It's up to the Iranian people how nutty a government they want to live with, but extraterritorial nuttiness has to be shown not to pay. That means swift, massive, devastating force that decapitates the regime-but no occupation.
The cost of de-nuking Iran will be high now but significantly higher with every year it's postponed. The lesson of the Danish cartoons is the clearest reminder that what is at stake here is the credibility of our civilization. Whether or not we end the nuclearization of the Islamic Republic will be an act that defines our time.
Read the whole thing.
Iran is exposed as deceiving the International Atomic Energy Agency:
Officials said Iran could produce enough fissile material to produces at least one nuclear warhead per year through a 3,000-centrifuge cascade. They cited a claim by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was developing the advanced P-2 centrifuge, said to be four times faster than the P-1.
"Now we have this extraordinary situation where for a couple of years the Iranians told the IAEA we're not engaged in P-2 centrifuge research and then the president of Iran last week said we are engaged in P-2 centrifuge research," Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns told the briefing.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management is working on getting oil out of the Utah and Colorado oil-shale fields. It's believed that America's oil-shale would provide enough fuel to make America energy-independent for the next 100 years.
In recent news, the BLM has decided to exclude Exxon from the list of companies approved to do research and development leases on the Utah and Colorado land in the current test. Exxon wasn't ready to even start until 2014 -- that's why they're out.
The article states that "commercial operations ... could start as early as mid-2007."
Daniel Pipes has started a new organization, "Islamist Watch:"
Summary: Islamist Watch combats the ideas and institutions of nonviolent, radical Islam in the United States and other Western countries. It exposes the far-reaching goals of Islamists, works to reduce their power, and seeks to strengthen moderate Muslims.
Introduction: The Threat of Lawful Islamism
Islamists ultimately seek hegemonic control via a worldwide caliphate that applies the Islamic law in full. Afghanistan under the Taliban offers one model of what they would establish globally.
Terrorism is one method to advance these projects but it is not the only one. Indeed, the activities of nonviolent Islamists arguably will prove a more effective tactic in the long term. For while the public intuitively understands the threat of terrorism and is mobilized by it, and while states have well-developed institutions (law enforcement, intelligence agencies, the military, the justice system) to protect and fight against it, the activities of nonviolent extremists are not alarming and institutions do not exist to deal with this problem. And how can terrorists impose their will on whole societies?
The Progress of Lawful Islamism
Quietly, lawfully, peacefully, Islamists do their work throughout the West to impose aspects of Islamic law, win special privileges for themselves, shut down criticism of Islam, create Muslim-only zones, and deprive women and non-Muslims of their full civil rights.
Lawful Islamists advance their cause through lobbying politicians, intimidating the media, threatening international boycotts, making predatory use of the legal system, advancing novel legislation, influencing the contents of school textbooks, and in other ways exploiting the freedoms of an open society. They advance their agenda in incremental steps, each of which in itself is minor but in the aggregate point to fundamental changes in society.
Pipes' new organization is taking the lead in the work of protecting the U.S. Constitution and way of life, from the strategy of immigration without assimilation, that radical Islam has used so effectively to put so much of Europe into grave danger. For more on this, see my article earlier this week, "More Dangerous than Terrorism: Immigration without Assimilation."
Many are once again talking about Iraq as a quagmire that's taking us too long to get out of. I just don't get it. We're changing a nation from a dictatorship to a democracy in a part of the world that has no experience in democracy. It's only been a few years. How can it possibly be argued that it's taking longer than it ought to?
Many are saying that the cost in lives of American soldiers is too high. But the number of lives lost is historically low for a war. 58,226 American soldiers died in Vietnam, versus 2,400 so far in Iraq. Our soldiers are heroes for risking their lives, and we should be proud that such a historically low percentage of them have given their lives to protect America.
For a historic, world-changing event such as this to happen in a few years, with such a historically low number of troops lost, is unprecedented.
Chris Simcox, of the Minutemen, describes the architecture of the planned border fence. Check out how smart this is. (Via Pajamas Media):
Start with a 6-foot deep trench so a vehicle can't crash through; behind it, roll of concertina (coiled, razor-edged barbed wire), in front of a 15-foot high heavy-gauge steel mesh fence angled outward at the top.
Behind the fence will be a 60- to 70-foot wide unpaved but graded dirt road, along with inexpensive, mounted video cameras that can be monitored from home computers. On the other side of the road will be a second, 15-foot fence, with more concertina wire on its outside.
So if people scale the first fence, in many cases there will be enough time to catch them before they can scale the second fence.
This makes a previous comment from Governor Janet Napolitano, D-Ariz., look pretty silly. In December, she said:
"You show me a 50-foot wall and I'll show you a 51-foot ladder at the border. That's the way the border works," Napolitano told the Associated Press.
Actually working hard to solve a problem doesn't seem to have been of interest to Governor Napolitano. Once again the Minutemen are leading the way in defense of our border.
Wednesday's episode of South Park was not only extraordinarily tasteless and unfunny -- it also didn't have any of the show's main characters in it. Not one.
I don't think I'm too far out on a limb to say that the South Park writing staff may be on strike due to last week's censorship of their efforts to show a cartoon of Mohammed.
I wouldn't put it past Matt and Trey for one second. They're the biggest profit center of the network. They may be on strike -- that is, refusing to do an episode with the main characters, and refusing to do a remotely funny episode -- until they get uncensored. And you know what? They'll win. They'll win precisely because the network has shown that they can be bullied, when it censored them in response to radical Islamist intimidation. And the network is in more immediate danger from the loss of its biggest income-generator -- South Park -- than it is from some hypothetical response from the radical Islamists.
This may be the gutsiest move we've ever seen from the writing staff of a TV show.
And by the way -- if that's what's really happening -- Wednesday's episode was hilarious: it was intentionally unfunny.
Let's see how this plays out.
The strategy of terrorism is just a diversion, a distraction, and a cover for the still more dangerous strategy, of infiltration and refusal to assimilate, that makes radical Islam a cancer on the West.
In the LA Weekly, staff writer Brendan Bernhard reviews The Force of Reason, the new book by Oriana Fallaci:
In The Force of Reason, the controversial Italian journalist and novelist Oriana Fallaci illuminates one of the central enigmas of our time. How did Europe become home to an estimated 20 million Muslims in a mere three decades?
How did Islam go from being a virtual non-factor to a religion that threatens the preeminence of Christianity on the Continent? How could the most popular name for a baby boy in Brussels possibly be Mohammed? Can it really be true that Muslims plan to build a mosque in London that will hold 40,000 people? That Dutch cities like Amsterdam and Rotterdam are close to having Muslim majorities? How was Europe, which was saved by the U.S. in world wars I and II, and whose Muslim Bosnians were rescued by the U.S. as recently as 1999, transformed into a place in which, as Fallaci puts it, "if I hate Americans I go to Heaven and if I hate Muslims I go to Hell?"...The book is also animated by a world-class journalist's dismay that she could have missed the story of her lifetime for as long as she did. In the 1960s and '70s, when she was a Vietnam War correspondent and a legendarily ferocious interviewer going mano a mano with the likes of Henry Kissinger and Yasser Arafat, Fallaci was simply too preoccupied with the events of the moment to notice that an entirely different narrative was rapidly taking shape - namely, the transformation of the West. There were clues, certainly. As when, in 1972, she interviewed the Palestinian terrorist George Habash, who told her (while a bodyguard aimed a submachine gun at her head) that the Palestinian problem was about far more than Israel. The Arab goal, Habash declared, was to wage war "against Europe and America" and to ensure that henceforth "there would be no peace for the West." The Arabs, he informed her, would "advance step by step. Millimeter by millimeter. Year after year. Decade after decade. Determined, stubborn, patient. This is our strategy. A strategy that we shall expand throughout the whole planet."
Fallaci thought he was referring simply to terrorism. Only later did she realize that he "also meant the cultural war, the demographic war, the religious war waged by stealing a country from its citizens ... In short, the war waged through immigration, fertility, presumed pluriculturalism." It is a low-level but deadly war that extends across the planet, as any newspaper reader can see."In 1974 [Algerian President] Houari Boumedienne, the man who ousted Ben Bella three years after Algerian independence, spoke before the General Assembly of the United Nations. And without circumlocutions he said: 'One day millions of men will leave the southern hemisphere of this planet to burst into the northern one. But not as friends. Because they will burst in to conquer, and they will conquer by populating it with their children. Victory will come to us from the wombs of our women.'"
Such a bald statement of purpose by a nation's president before an international forum seems incredible. Yet even in British journalist Adam LeBor's A Heart Turned East (1997), a work of profound, almost supine sympathy for the plight of Muslim immigrants in the West, a London-based mullah is quoted as saying, "We cannot conquer these people with tanks and troops, so we have got to overcome them by force of numbers."
...Briefly put, the alleged plot was an arrangement between European and Arab governments according to which the Europeans, still reeling from the first acts of PLO terrorism and eager for precious Arabian oil made significantly more precious by the 1973 OPEC crisis, agreed to accept Arab "manpower" (i.e., immigrants) along with the oil. They also agreed to disseminate propaganda about the glories of Islamic civilization, provide Arab states with weaponry, side with them against Israel and generally toe the Arab line on all matters political and cultural. Hundreds of meetings and seminars were held as part of the "Euro-Arab Dialogue," and all, according to the author, were marked by European acquiescence to Arab requests. Fallaci recounts a 1977 seminar in Venice, attended by delegates from 10 Arab nations and eight European ones, concluding with a unanimous resolution calling for "the diffusion of the Arabic language" and affirming "the superiority of Arab culture."
While the Arabs demanded that Europeans respect the religious, political and human rights of Arabs in the West, not a peep came from the Europeans about the absence of freedom in the Arab world, not to mention the abhorrent treatment of women and other minorities in countries like Saudi Arabia. No demand was made that Muslims should learn about the glories of western civilization as Europeans were and are expected to learn about the greatness of Islamic civilization. In other words, according to Fallaci, a substantial portion of Europe's cultural and political independence was sold off by a coalition of ex-communists and socialist politicians. Are we surprised? Fallaci isn't. In 1979, she notes, "the Italian or rather European Left had fallen in love with Khomeini just as now it has fallen in love with Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and Arafat."
If Iran gets the bomb, there will likely be nuclear war in the Mid-East, starting with a bomb dropped by Iran on Israel, and continuing with a nuclear bomb used directly against the U.S. by Iran. We must prevent Iran from getting the nuclear bomb.
But to achieve success we also have to remove the second prong of the two-pronged strategy: we must not permit the radical Islamists to do here, what they have done so far with so much success in Europe -- destruction of the way of life via immigration and refusal to assimilate. We must do as Robert Spencer has recommended:
We must also require assimilation of immigrants to the U.S.
The good news: when a very liberal publication like the LA Weekly prints an article like this, it means that the word is getting out to the American public about the danger presented to us by radical Islam.
Last week's Saturday Night Live opened with a skit in which Lindsay Lohan played GWB's press secretary, and told a roomful of reporters, (quoting from memory): "The public doesn't like you. They don't think you're doing a very good job."
When it gets into a Saturday Night Live skit, you know the word is starting to reach the general public.
From Christian Freedom International, via email:
In fact, in the last 100 years more Christians have been martyred for their faith than in the past 1900 years - combined.
And the persecution of Christians is getting worse; far worse....Christians face growing persecution in Indonesia, Burma, China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Iran, Iraq, Laos, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and many other countries.
Tragically, in most cases, the persecution of Christians is seldom, if ever, reported by the mainstream media.
That's why Christian Freedom International is so important for all freedom loving people.
Christian Freedom International (CFI) provides direct aid and advocacy for suffering Christians on the front lines in areas of intense persecution.
According to The Wall Street Journal, "CFI...specialize[s] in helping fellow believers in the worst places in the world-from war-torn Sudan to the repressive dictatorship of Burma. James Jacobson, a former Reagan administration official who is CFI's president, is targeted for death by the Burmese and Sudanese governments, according to local Christian leaders."
Yet our press wants to devote its attention to attacking Rumsfeld.
SIGN THIS PETITION TO SECURE AMERICA'S BORDERS.
"Iran suicide bombers 'ready to hit Britain'":
IRAN has formed battalions of suicide bombers to strike at British and American targets if the nation's nuclear sites are attacked. According to Iranian officials, 40,000 trained suicide bombers are ready for action.
The main force, named the Special Unit of Martyr Seekers in the Revolutionary Guards, was first seen last month when members marched in a military parade, dressed in olive-green uniforms with explosive packs around their waists and detonators held high.
Dr Hassan Abbasi, head of the Centre for Doctrinal Strategic Studies in the Revolutionary Guards, said in a speech that 29 western targets had been identified: "We are ready to attack American and British sensitive points if they attack Iran's nuclear facilities." He added that some of them were "quite close" to the Iranian border in Iraq.
In a tape recording heard by The Sunday Times, Abbasi warned the would-be martyrs to "pay close attention to wily England" and vowed that "Britain's demise is on our agenda".
The problem with this strategy is that suicide bombing only works when the host nation denies it had anything to do with it. Otherwise it's an act of war, and gets responded to via the old-school rules, in which a nation with an army such as Iran has, gets utterly demolished and owned by a nation such as ours.
Even the leaders of Iran aren't dumb enough to think England or the U.S. would respond to mass suicide bombings, conducted as an official state action, as if it called for action by our police.
This announcement from Iran is, in short, a bluff, intended as PR stunt, and is based on a hope that our gullible MSM will embrace it.
From Drudge (I'll copy the whole article since these Drudge "flash" links tend to go stale in a few days):
Tel Aviv bombing is part of self-defense: Hamas
Sami Abu Zuhri, a spokesman for the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), said on Monday that the Tel Aviv attack was part of the Palestinians' right of self-defense.
"Resisting Israeli aggression was rightful as long as it continues," Abu Zuhri said.
"The occupation seized money of the Palestinian people and urged the world not to assist the Palestinians, so this attack took place before those who agree with this aggressive attitude," he said.
At least six Israelis were killed and 30 others wounded, with some in serious condition, as a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up near an old bus station in the center of Tel Aviv.
Abu Zuhri was echoed by Wasfi Kabha, minister of Prisoners' Affairs in the Hamas-led cabinet.
Kabha told reporters that the attack came "in the framework of legitimate right for resistance against Israeli violations and crimes."
Coincidently, Monday was Palestinian prisoners' day. Palestinian officials said there were more than 8,000 Palestinians imprisoned in Israeli jails, detention camps and prisons.
The Islamic Jihad (Holy War) and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, linked to the Fatah movement, claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing attack.
A spokesman for Saraya al-Quds, the Islamic Jihad armed wing, told reporters on telephone that his group is responsible for the bombing attack in Tel Aviv.
The spokesman said that the attack was "natural response to daily crimes carried out by the Zionists against our people."
Notice that Hamas says they're killing Israeli civilians, specifically because Israel isn't paying them money that is only due to the Palestinians if they hold to the terms of the Oslo accords -- terms which Hamas has specifically rejected. There is no destinction between this and an act of war.
The war between Israel and Hamastan will continue until one side loses decisively.
