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From the official Al-Qaeda statement on the death of their leader Zarqawi:
The death of our leaders is life for us. It will only increase our persistence in continuing holy war so that the word of God will be supreme.
Not "until all the Jews are dead and Israel is ours." Not "until Iraq becomes a terrorist state once again." No, their goal is to wage "holy war so that the word of God will be supreme." In other words, until those of all other religions are subjugated. This reiterates the words of Zarqawi, quoted here last January:
...[Zarqawii] then laid down two conditions for giving up the jihad.
"First, chase out the invaders from our territory in Palestine, in Iraq and everywhere in Islamic land.
"Second, install sharia (Islamic law) on the entire Earth and spread Islamic justice there (...). The attacks will not cease until after the victory of Islam and the setting up of sharia," he swore.
This Islamofascism must not be coddled. It must not be tolerated. Its goal is to destroy all of us, and it must be eliminated from the face of the Earth.
What a week this has been in the global fight against Islamofascism. Last Sunday the arrest of 17 home-grown Canadian terrorists brought home to the world that many mosques are terrorist incubators. Items such as this (via LGF):
...made MSM efforts to turn a blind eye to the fact, appear absurd.
Then today comes news that terrorist leader Zarqawi has been killed in Iraq. This has a devastating effect on terrorists in Iraq.
And today we also see a poll showing that 63% of Dutch adults say Islam is incompatible with Europe.
With every passing day, the world sees more and more, that 99% of the terrorists on Earth are Islamic, and that Islam breeds terrorists. Mosques that are incubating terrorists must be identified and dismantled. They need be tolerated no more than a school that taught Nazism would be tolerated. Mosques must teach, and imams must loudly declare, that terrorists who kill in the name of Islam, are lost to Islam, and lost to their religion. And even that's not enough. Does Islam teach love, the way the Judeo-Christian tradition does? What does Islam teach, besides that Islam is supposed to destroy all other religions?
From Doctor Zin:
My sources have just told me that Zarqawi is dead and the announcement will come within the hour.
I was told that special forces have his body. Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki is expected to make the announcement.
Update: ABC News has just confirmed the report. Fox News is reporting that he was killed in a bombing attack. MSNBC is also confirming. Reuters. BBC News.
Last week I posted an article titled Liberalism and Evolution: Liberalism Explained. It's an innovative approach - few others had analyzed Liberalism in these terms.
Well, according to this review, Ann Coulter's new book, "Godless," also discusses Liberalism and evolution. If I had waited just one week to post that, it would have seemed like just a commentary on Ann's book.
I'm glad to be in such good company. At the same time, my take on the subject is very different. If the review is correct, Ann is rejecting Darwinism:
Coulter illustrates why evolution is so important to the church of liberalism, "Liberals' creation myth is Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, which is about one notch above Scientology in scientific rigor. It's a make-believe story, based on a theory that is a tautology, with no proof in the scientist's laboratory or the fossil record -- and that's after 150 years of very determined looking. We wouldn't still be talking about it but for the fact that liberals' think evolution disproves God."
...Liberals weren't the first to use Darwinism to justify a political movement. After reading "The Origin of Species," Karl Marx wrote, "This is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our views." Coulter writes, "While Marx saw the 'struggle' as among classes, Hitler conceived of the struggle as among the races. 'Mein Kampf' means 'My Struggle,' which Hitler described in unmistakably Darwinian terms."
My approach accepts Darwinism and argues that Liberals take a position which conflicts with Darwinism, resulting in policies that actually stop society from evolving and improving.
Last week I posted regarding comments made by Nobel prize winner, Prof. Aumann:
It appears probable that the decision by the Israeli government to expel Israelis from their own homes in Gaza, and to give Gaza to the terrorists, is in large part responsible for this new loss of interest among Israelis in fighting for the state. If their own government is bent on giving away large portions of the country to their enemies, why should the average Israeli citizen fight for the state?
There is some hope that a further pull-out would give Israel more defensible borders. But this reluctance to fight back is killing Israel. They don't do terrorism and they don't wage war - all they do is get killed. The policy of targeting terrorists and picking them off whenever they can isn't working, because the Palestinian people constantly generate more of them. As the election of Hamas has shown, Israel is not at war with some small subgroup of Palestinians, it's at war with the Palestinians as a people.
Israel's policy of targeting terrorists and picking them off whenever they can, is like a policy of fighting a war by picking off a few soldiers at a time, and leaving the rest of the enemy army untouched.
Olah Chadasha, of the excellent Greetings from the French Hill weblog, responds:
Dr Auman is a brilliant brilliant man and a professor at my University, but I completely disagree on his assessment of the current air of feeling toward the "Convergence", "Realignment", "Withdrawal", whatever you want to call it. His game theory is absolutely priceless when it comes to certain subjects, but it has actually been proven completely ineffective when it comes to military strategy. Just because Olmert was voted in, doesn't mean that the country agrees with his policies or supports his "plan" (I can't really call it a real plan since absolutely nobody, and I suspect including him, knows anything about the details of what this new withdrawal entails), and I can say this for a number of reasons. First of all, he did not win a clear majority. He won by the skin of his teeth. This does not a mandate create. Actually, more right wing seats took votes away from Kadima than in any other election in the country's history. Right wing seats out number left wing seats, and that makes more of a difference than Olmert's win. Secondly, His coalition is piddling, and there is already an increasing number of "rebels" within the faction. I suspect, and with good reason, that this government will not last more than a 1, give or take 6 months.
Olmert does not have clear cut support, and it shows more and more every day. I believe that there is a growing number of people within the population and military who are disenfranchised with Olmert's way of thinking. His statements about this "plan" have been half-assed and enigmatic, at best. The military is fighting and is gearing to fight more, without going into too much detail that I'm not at liberty to discuss. I think his pessimism is as ill advised as Olmert's.
Militarily speaking, I also disagree with his and some of your assessments. Targeted assassinations have been proven to work, and you must understand and be able to distinguish between who they take out. They do not take out lower level workers. In that, you are right. Those are manufactured every day. They take out top level management and CEOs. In that way, it doesn't matter how many people you can recruit, you have no one to run the business, they're dead in the water with nothing to do. Hamas has not kept to their hudna as many people would like to imagine. They have been repeatedly trying to carry out high level attacks against Israel. One of the key reasons they haven't been successful is due to targeted killing. They just don't have the brains to carry out missions like they used to. Another reason is because when you're worrying that your next car ride might be your last, you're more concerned with your own well being than carrying out an attack. Then, you concern yourself with fighting Fatah than with fighting Israel. At least when you're fighting Fatah, you have better odds of surviving the day. Those are very simple reasons why targeted killings have been extremely successful. I could go into more depth, but it would be way too long.
Also, unlike Dr Auman's assessment, and I assume by his age that he is no longer in the military or if he ever was since I don't know how old he was when he immigrated to Israel, the military have been carrying out heavy and extremely successful offensives against the terrorists, and, again without going into much detail, there is more in the works that will soon come to fruition. Now, I completely disagree with Olmert's "plan" on many fronts and won't go into them here, but the Disengagement has freed up thousands of troops and has allowed them to be on the offensive instead of on the defensive as they were when they were in the Strip guarding Settlements 24/7/365. Any person with an once of military knowledge will tell you that being on the offensive is the only way to win battles and that being constrained to defensive positions is suicide. Disengagement was the only effective military option. What the government has done since then to promulgate failures has nothing to do with the military and everything to do with their political garbage. People here are proud to do their miluim (reserve duty), and any remarks to the contrary are just plain wrong.
In essence, while Dr Aumann is very correct in his assessment of the lethality of Olmert's "plan", he is incorrect in his gauge of the atmosphere of the Israeli people and its military. Most of us do not support the "plan", and this includes many in the military. WE are ready to fight Olmert, tooth and nail, against expelling 60-70,000 people from their homes. I wish Dr Aumann had more optimism. Olmert might be a defeatist and "tired of winning", but the rest of are not.
I find all of this very encouraging.
This quote from a Canadian imam raises questions he'd likely rather not answer:
Imam: Canada Suspects Didn't Seek Violence
MISSISSAUGA, Ontario
Several members of a suspected terrorist ring prayed daily at a storefront mosque in a middle-class city west of Toronto but never spoke of hurting others, one of their prayer leaders said.
"I will say that they were steadfast, religious people. There's no doubt about it. But here we always preach peace and moderation," Qamrul Khanson, an imam at the one-room Al-Rahman Islamic Center for Islamic Education, said Sunday.
The imam says they're "steadfast, religious people" BUT he told them not to blow stuff up. Why does he have to say "but"? Paraphrase: They're religious people, but he told them not to kill people anyway. Even though they're religious, at HIS mosque they preach non-violence.
Even though they're "steadfast, religious people," he made a special effort to preach "peace and moderation." "Peace and moderation?" What's that? The imam didn't even say "non-violence." He didn't even say, "not to kill non-Muslims." Peace, in Islam, means submission to the will of Muslims. "Moderation?" That's not non-violence. That might just be moderated violence.
The suspects had acquired three tons of ammonium nitrate - the same ingredient used in the Oklahoma City bombing. So this imam's description of the ones he knew as "steadfast, religious people" appears to say a lot about their "religion."
If it's such a peaceful religion, why don't imams stand up and loudly declare that terrorists who kill in the name of Islam, are lost to Islam and lost to their religion? You never hear that. But you hear tons and tons of imams preaching that Muslims should kill.
Do they ever preach anything else?
From Glenn Reynolds:
It all goes down to what Peter Beinart said in our interview the other day (beginning about 12:00 in):
The way we show the world that we mean what we say about democracy and human rights is by acting well. That means on a thing like Haditha by not trying to cover up, by being absolutely open and saying 'We are capable of being barbaric like other peoples are, under conditions of extreme stress and without legal restraint. But what makes us different from them is the way re respond to that.' We use it as an opportunity to show that we're different from our enemies because we bring our own people to justice.
That's right, and I note that it has been the pattern of the U.S. military in this war. Compare this to the record of, say, the United Nations where troop misbehavior is concerned.
Reynolds is noting that the Liberal MSM slams the U.S. for things such as are alleged to have occurred at Haditha, while giving the United Nations a pass on the same behavior on a massively larger scale. This is a perfect example of what I've discussed in my post on Liberalism Explained. In a nutshell, Liberals punish successful behavior, and reward unsuccessful behavior. In this example, we see Libs punishing the successful U.S. troops, and rewarding the failed troops of the United Nations.
From Ramirez:
(This is an updated version of this post. The earlier version is here.)
Conservatives often feel puzzled as to the intentions of Liberals.
We wonder, what can they be thinking?
Many Liberals seem to debate by trying to keep the other person from talking, and by using personal insults. They have yet to support any policy that would defend this nation from future 911s, and they oppose most policies instituted to prevent such attacks. How can they pursue such suicidal behavior?
What causes Liberals in the U.S. to attack our own government and to turn a blind eye to the evils of the cultures that brutally oppress their own citizens?
We wonder, what causes nations in Europe to devote themselves to socialist policies that are destroying them?
What's driving them?
What are they thinking?
•
Today it's all but forgotten (due to what I have called The Memento Syndrome), that in its beginnings, Liberalism included an opposition to the theory of evolution. From the Wikipedia article, "Evolutionary theory and the political left:"
Some on the political left, especially Marxists and communists, have been critical of aspects of the theory of evolution by natural selection (Darwinism). Some of this opposition appears for ideological reasons; the concepts of "survival of the fittest", and "nature red in tooth and claw" appear not to fit with economic or social ideals.
... Scientific theories of evolution developed at approximately the same time as left-wing political theories.
Today we can't remember what a revolutionary thing the discovery of evolution was. But survival of the fittest was interpreted by some as meaning that "might makes right". It was used by some to justify any sort of war as part of a sequence of natural selection; to justify any sort of conquest and destruction by one people of another, as part of the natural sequence of evolution.
There is no doubt that in the Darwinian competition for survival, the less capable are by definition at a disadvantage.
Evolution is seen by Liberals as unfair to the less successful. Liberalism seeks to champion the weak, who are at such a disadvantage.
Championing the weak is understandable, and gives good use to our emotions of love, compassion, understanding, sympathy, and empathy.
•
Liberalism almost immediately developed into the statecraft of attempting to unite the less successful into a political party. The tactics of Liberalism were an attempt, hopeless from the start, to help the less successful, by means of punishing the more successful. The result was a Liberalism that in effect seeks to halt evolution, as something that is unfair to the weak.
Liberals, of course, would say that they don't oppose evolution; they would say that they believe the less successful are made so primarily by the oppression of the more successful. But this Liberal view is in fact, whether Libs like it or not, in opposition to Darwinism.
Darwinism tells us that the less successful are made so because they are less well-adapted to their environment, and not necessarily (and in many cases, not at all) due to oppression by members of their own or other species. The Liberal view disregards all this in favor of a view that in humans, there is only oppression of the less successful by the more successful. It's a nice view, but it's got no scientific basis. It's a pseudo-science.
•
And the halting of evolution - at least that of society - is the practical result of Liberal policies.
In Communism, the less successful were called "workers," and the more successful were called, "exploiters of workers." And the Communists did succeed in halting evolution. Very little in Communist Russia improved. Everything stagnated. And everyone suffered.
They support higher taxes to punish the more successful and to transfer money to the less successful.
They promote a welfare state in which money is given to broken families, but not to whole ones - again rewarding the less successful, and punishing those who succeed. This harms the very people it is promoted as helping, leading one author to recently quote a student who told her, "marriage is for white people."
Today's Liberals turn a blind eye to the failings of less successful cultures, for example, to the failings of the Sharia culture, which oppresses women, performs honor killings of women, performs female mutilation, enforces second-class citizenship on non-Muslims prior to killing them or expelling them, and which produces terrorists who cut off heads on video. At the same time, Liberals devote all their energies to attacking the more successful culture in the United States.
In short, in every case, today's Liberals reward the lack of success, and punish the successful; this is all done in a mistaken attempt to help the weak, based on a pre-Darwinian view that the less successful are made so primarily by the oppression of the more successful. This view has never been subjected to scientific scrutiny, primarily because it has been outdated since the time of Darwin.
•
As seen in Communist Russia, and in Socialist Europe, the absence of rewards for the more successful, does not produce a fair world for all; it produces an unfair world for all. When success is punished, everything stagnates, and everyone suffers.
Rewarding success produces a better world for everyone, including the less capable. As seen in the U.S., in which the more successful are powerfully rewarded, the results are better technology, more wealth, better living conditions, and longer life for all, including the less successful, as documented in tremendous detail in Gregg Easterbrook's book "The Progress Paradox."
•
The difficulties many Liberals have in maintaining a polite, civil, logical argument, stem from the contradictions inherent in basing their policies on a view that has no scientific basis, is opposed to Darwinism, and is explicitly opposed to the interests of one-half of society, namely the more successful (i.e. "the oppressors." ).
•
Liberalism today is flawed because it is based on an outdated view of evolution, and through that view, on the mistaken assumption that harming the more successful in society will help the less successful. The premise itself is flawed, and leads to devastation for the whole of society, including the less successful.
Liberalism must itself evolve into a means of helping the less successful, while recognizing and welcoming the achievements of the more successful.
A Liberalism that was updated so as to be based on Darwinism, would be very powerful. A Liberalism that sought out those who are less successful, and who through hard work are headed in the right direction (for example, lower-income homes with children and with both the mother and father present) - and used the power of the state to reward them - would massively accelerate the evolution and improvement of the nation.
Update 6-10-06: Additional articles on, and examples of, Liberalism Explained, can be found here.
