כּנור דוד

Kinnor David - "a most attractive blog".

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Celebrate the UN's International Day of Solidarity with the PLO Arabs!

As I stand on this rostrum, the long and proud history of my people unravels itself before my inward eye. I see the oppressors of our people over the ages as they pass one another in evil procession into oblivion. I stand here before you as the representative of a strong and flourishing people which has survived them all and which will survive this shameful exhibition and the proponents of this resolution.

The great moments of Jewish history come to mind as I face you, once again outnumbered and the would-be victim of hate, ignorance and evil. I look back on those great moments. I recall the greatness of a nation which I have the honor to represent in this forum. I am mindful at this moment of the Jewish people throughout the world wherever they may be, be it in freedom or in slavery, whose prayers and thoughts are with me at this moment.

I stand here not as a supplicant. Vote as your moral conscience dictates to you. For the issue is neither Israel nor Zionism. The issue is the continued existence of this organization, which has been dragged to its lowest point of discredit by a coalition of despots and racists.

Chaim Herzog, Ambassador of the State of Israel to the UN, on the UN's infamous "Zionism is Racism" resolution.

Caritas: Catholic Jew-Baiters?

Is the appellation "Catholic Jew-Baiters" a harsh calumny of an estimable charitable organization? Read Liz's Post and decide for yourselves.

Sunday, November 27, 2005

Israel and the Cause of Freedom

Charles Moore asks readers of the Daily Telegraph how we have forgotten that Israel’s story is the story of the West. He begins with an examination of the career of Ariel Sharon that sees the Israeli PM’s career as emblematic of the struggles of the Jewish State:

If you had followed the British media, particularly the BBC, with average attention over the past 25 years, you would have concluded that Sharon was an intransigent, murderous, semi-fascist. So you would have been perplexed by his sudden announcement this week that he is to leave the "Right-wing" (favoured Western terminology) Likud party and form a "centrist" party of his own. Suddenly, Sharon becomes visionary, peace-seeking. Little would have prepared you for it.

And that is the trouble. Little prepares the post-Christian European audience to understand Israel. By "understand", I partly mean sympathise with, and partly, just comprehend.

Sharon's career is a good place to start, because it spans the history of the Jewish state. He was 20 when it began in 1948, and had been serving in the Jewish Haganah militia since the age of 14. He fought in the War of Independence, and in 1956, and in the Six-Day War of 1967, and in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, when he crossed the Suez Canal and, effectively disobeying orders, advanced to cut the supply lines of the Egyptian Third Army. He became a popular hero.

Then Sharon entered full-time politics. As defence minister, he masterminded the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which succeeded in breaking up the PLO infrastructure there. On his watch, Lebanese Christian Falangists entered the Sabra and Chatila Palestinian refugee camps. There they massacred several hundred people: Sharon was officially condemned for this, and forced to resign.

He bounced back, however. As housing minister, he built settlements. Later he was foreign minister, then leader of Likud. In 2001, he became prime minister, swept to power by fear of the new intifada. He ordered the assassination of many Palestinian terrorists. He began the security wall that divides Israel from much of the West Bank. He also ordered Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza strip, the first unilateral withdrawal it has ever made. And soon he will contest elections as leader of a party he has just invented.

Moore thus compares Sharon to Caesar; Israel to Rome; an austere nation building itself up from next-to-nothing in the face of enemy neighbours. But, as Moore notes, there is one important difference; Israel’s wars have been about security, rather than conquest for its own sake. Israeli politics, Moore writes, “for the past dozen years has been the attempt to reconcile extrication from territory with security.”.

The story of the building, and continuing survival of the Jewish State, often against seemingly insurmountable odds is one that should appeal to the right and left alike:

In the history of the West, such a narrative used to command fascination and respect. Many could apply it to their own people. British people whose convict cousins had built Australia out of their barren exile could understand; so could Americans, who had overcome hostile terrain and hostile inhabitants, and forged a mighty nation. So could any country formed in adversity, particularly, perhaps, a Protestant one - with its idea of divinely supported national destiny and its natural sympathy for the people first chosen by God. The sympathy was made stronger by the fact that the new state was robust in its legal and political institutions, free in its press and universities - a noisy democracy.

Anti-imperialists and the Left also found much to admire. They admired people whose pioneer spirit kept them equal, who often lived communally, who fled the persecution of old societies to build simpler, better ones. If you read Bernard Donoughue's diaries, just published, of his life as an adviser to Harold Wilson in the 1970s (a much better picture of what prime ministers are like than Sir Christopher Meyer's self-regarding effort), one difference between then and now that hits you hard is Donoughue's (and Wilson's) firm belief that the cause of Israel is the cause of people who wish to be free, and that its enemies are the old, repressive establishments.

But then, almost overnight, a different narrative supervened.

Once upon a time, the word "Palestinian" had no national meaning; it was simply the description on any passport of a person living in British-mandated Palestine.

Indeed, Ariel Sharon himself used to carry a “Palestinian” passport.

During the 19 years to 1967 when Jordan governed the West Bank, the people there had no self-rule, and no real name. UN Resolution 242, which calls for Israel to leave territories it occupied in 1967, does not mention Palestinians; it speaks only of "Arab refugees". Palestinian nationality came along, as it were, after the fact, a nationality largely based on grievance…

…Israel, which was attacked, has come to be seen as the aggressor. Israel, which has elections that throw governments out and independent commissions that investigate people like Sharon and condemn him, became regarded as the oppressive monster. In a rhetoric that tried to play back upon Jews their own experience of suffering, supporters of the Palestinian cause began to call Israelis Nazis. Holocaust Memorial Day is disapproved of by many Muslims because it ignores the supposedly comparable "genocide" of the Palestinians.

I interpose that this is a depraved rhetoric, with its roots deep in hatred and contempt for the Jewish people. Why are the leaders of the Jewish State almost invariably compared to Hitler? It is not as though the 20th Century has thrown up a lack of military strongmen to whom one could more appositely compare Ariel Sharon and Yitzhak Rabin. Indeed, the fact that we are even discussing the Arab-Israeli dispute in 2005 is eloquent testimony to the historical bankruptcy of the comparison. Had it any validity, there would be no “Palestinians” for the UN and the assorted blowhards of the international community, and of the extreme right and left worldwide to wet themselves over. We should be quite clear about this; Hitler’s Final Solution called for nothing less than the extermination of every last Jew. After decades of terrorism, the Israeli State is still engaging in peace talks with a view to conceding Palestinian claims to land in the former Mandate.

Moore rightly links the fate of the Jewish State to that of western civilisation, as do many of the enemies of both:

In Iran, the new President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad makes the link. The battle over Palestine, he says, is "the prelude of the battle of Islam with the world of arrogance", the world of the West. He is busy building his country's nuclear bomb.

If the western democracies facilitated, or even just turned a blind eye to an Islamic Republic with a plan to nuke 5 million Jews off the face of the earth, would we really have any moral claim to be treated any better when the jihadis came for us?

Saturday, November 26, 2005

Canadian Liberals put the "Moon" in "Moonbat"

This story reads like an April Fools' Day hoax. In summary, a former Canadian Minister of Defence and Deputy Prime Minister under Pierre Trudeau has joined forces with three non-governmental organizations to ask the Parliament of Canada to hold public hearings on "exopolitics" - relations with advanced extra-terrestial intelligences. He's also worried that that crazy Texas neocon cowboy, George W Bush, is going to declare war on aliens. Talk about putting the "moon" in "moonbat".

Paul Hellyer, Canada’s Defence Minister from 1963-67 under Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Prime Minister Lester Pearson, publicly stated: "UFOs, are as real as the airplanes that fly over your head."

Mr. Hellyer went on to say, "I'm so concerned about what the consequences might be of starting an intergalactic war, that I just think I had to say something."

Hellyer revealed, "The secrecy involved in all matters pertaining to the Roswell incident was unparalled. The classification was, from the outset, above top secret, so the vast majority of U.S. officials and politicians, let alone a mere allied minister of defence, were never in-the-loop."

Hellyer warned, "The United States military are preparing weapons which could be used against the aliens, and they could get us into an intergalactic war without us ever having any warning. He stated, "The Bush administration has finally agreed to let the military build a forward base on the moon, which will put them in a better position to keep track of the goings and comings of the visitors from space, and to shoot at them, if they so decide."

Hellyer’s speech ended with a standing ovation. He said, "The time has come to lift the veil of secrecy, and let the truth emerge, so there can be a real and informed debate, about one of the most important problems facing our planet today."

Three Non-governmental organizations took Hellyer’s words to heart, and approached Canada’s Parliament in Ottawa, Canada’s capital, to hold public hearings on a possible ET presence, and what Canada should do. The Canadian Senate, which is an appointed body, has held objective, well-regarded hearings and issued reports on controversial issues such as same-sex marriage and medical marijuana.

Controversial issues certainly, but they are nonetheless serious matters of public policy.

On October 20, 2005, the Institute for Cooperation in Space requested Canadian Senator Colin Kenny, Senator, Chair of The Senate Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence, “schedule public hearings on the Canadian Exopolitics Initiative, so that witnesses such as the Hon. Paul Hellyer, and Canadian-connected high level military-intelligence, NORAD-connected, scientific, and governmental witnesses facilitated by the Disclosure Project and by the Toronto Exopolitics Symposium can present compelling evidence, testimony, and Public Policy recommendations.”

The Non-governmental organizations seeking Parliament hearings include Canada-based Toronto Exopolitics Symposium, which organized the University of Toronto Symposium at which Mr. Hellyer spoke.

The Disclosure Project, a U.S.– based organization that has assembled high level military-intelligence witnesses of a possible ET presence, is also one of the organizations seeking Canadian Parliament hearings.

Vancouver-based Institute for Cooperation in Space (ICIS), whose International Director headed a proposed 1977 Extraterrestrial Communication Study for the White House of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who himself has publicly reported a 1969 Close Encounter of the First Kind with a UFO, filed the original request for Canadian Parliament hearings.

The Canadian Exopolitics Initiative, presented by the organizations to a Senate Committee panel hearing in Winnipeg, Canada, on March 10, 2005, proposes that the Government of Canada undertake a Decade of Contact.

The proposed Decade of Contact is “a 10-year process of formal, funded public education, scientific research, educational curricula development and implementation, strategic planning, community activity, and public outreach concerning our terrestrial society’s full cultural, political, social, legal, and governmental communication and public interest diplomacy with advanced, ethical Off-Planet cultures now visiting Earth.”

I'm glad they have their priorities straight in the Great White North. Hellyer's speech received a standing ovation, so this isn't a story about the failure of state-run aged care or mental health systems. On the contrary, everyone knows that the real threats to Western liberal democratic civilisation is an American military determined to declare war on the Daleks, ET or the Emperor Palpatine. Seriously, this has given me an idea. Let's call a Canadian Senate inquiry into how the Mossad and George W Bush planned the World Trade Centre attacks of September 11, 2001....

Thursday, November 24, 2005

Heffer: Bring Back the Noose, or Lose Rule of Law

Thus opines Simon Heffer in Britain's Daily Telegraph. Unlike some who have graced these pages, he doesn't want to hang drug traffickers or apostates from Islam, just murderers. He writes of his attendance at a criminal justice conference:

After a few hours in the company of probation officers, criminologists, a few prototypes of what we now know as the Politically Correct Senior Policeman and various others from the rehabilitation industry, I realised I would probably feel less out of place at a Tibetan religious festival. It may be uncouth, but I always feel pronounced prickles of discomfort when in the presence of those who devote themselves to making the lives of the downright wicked as comfortable as possible.

We waltzed into a plenary session about the need to curb serious crime - murder, rape, armed robbery, drugs trafficking, all those little things that make life in our inner cities so vibrant today. When I uttered the fact - not at that stage reinforced by an expression of opinion, but simply a fact - that the murder rate had quadrupled since the abolition of capital punishment, an embarrassed silence permeated the room. It was as if my personal hygiene had suddenly taken a turn very much for the worse.

Of course, there are other factors bearing upon the massive increase in the murder rate, but all the same, the absence of capital punishment cannot simply be dismissed out of hand as irrelevant. However, the expression support for the death penalty in educated company often results in much spluttering and spilling of drinks.

When Lord Stevens, the former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, argued on Sunday that his opposition to capital punishment had been overturned by the shooting of a policewoman in Bradford last week, he was joining that usually silent band of intelligent people who feel that society affords inadequate protection to the innocent. And, predictably, he has been vilified for it by a noisy minority who, in the security of their comfortable existences, feel that anyone even suggesting the restoration of a death penalty for murder in this country must be certifiably insane or a complete pervert.

I regret that Lord Stevens did not advocate this course when he still held his high office, for his opinion then would have counted for far more. After all, plenty of police officers were murdered on his watch while trying to do their jobs, like poor WPc Beshenivsky last week. I also disagree with him on one point: why argue for restoration purely for those who murder police officers?

Heffer points out that the State has not abandoned the right to kill. On the contrary:

For, be in no doubt, although we forfeited 40 years ago the right of the state to impose the capital sentence after a fair trial in a court of law, the state still reserves to itself the right to take life. Ask, for example, the family of Jean Charles de Menezes, shot dead by agents of the state in July this year when he was mistaken for a suicide bomber.

However awful the consequences of such an error, the state must continue to have our power, as part of its duty of protecting us. Yet we have, since 1965, been in the ironic position of having outlawed execution with trial, but continuing to permit execution without trial. I suppose there is a logic there, but I can't see it.

He makes this prediction:

If, over the next few years, the supply of cheap and illegal arms from Eastern Europe and the bandit states of the former Soviet Union continues to grow at the rate it lately has, the practice of random, casual shooting will become a normal part of our lives. Our police will be armed, but that will only feed the appetite.

On the advice of their spin-doctors, the rhetoric of politicians will become more and more tabloid in its vehemence. Home secretaries, and even perhaps prime ministers, will attend funerals and utter profound words of condemnation.

Yet, in time, such murder will be so widespread that it almost ceases to be reported. And only then will some radical politician reluctantly admit that capital punishment is the alternative to scrapping the rule of law.

Although Heffer was talking about random acts of gangster-esque violence, Australians have recently come face to face with evil on this scale. Faced with such apparrently irremediable savagery, one could be forgiven for agreeing with Heffer.

Palestinian Christians Persecuted

Townhall.com has this interesting piece on a recent book by Justus Reid Weiner a human rights lawyer, dealing with the persecution of Christian Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank. The guilty parties are terrorist groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, (for applying Islamic principles of dhimmitude and the capital punishment of apostacy) and the Palestinian Authority (for assisting them, and at the very least, turning a blind eye to anti-Christian violence).

In the West Bank and Gaza Strip, both Palestinian Muslims and Christians tell visitors that there is no friction between them --that they live as equals under the P.A.

On the contrary:

Religious persecution is a widespread problem that is felt in different ways, Weiner said. "Some people are accused of collaboration with Israel. Some people are accused of moral offenses. Some people are accused of trying to spread Christianity by giving out Bibles."

Weiner gives the example of Ahmad El-Ashwal, to whom he dedicated his book, who converted from Islam to Christianity. He was arrested and detained in PA gaols for "a couple of months", was tortured, and then:

El-Ashwal was beaten; his car was firebombed; and he was forced to close his successful falafel stand when his landlord wouldn't renew his lease because of his Christian faith. He ran an underground church from his home in the refugee camp and when he didn't return to Islam, masked men knocked on his door in January 2004 and shot him dead.

The Palestinian Authority, it may surprise readers to learn, did nothing about his murder. Little wonder:

The P.A.'s constitution, which has yet to be ratified, is based on Shari'a, the strict Islamic religious law, Weiner said. (Shari'a relegates non-Muslims to an inferior status and also prohibits conversion from Islam to any other religion.).

Moreover

Compounding the problem, church leaders -- long intimidated by P.A. Chairman Yasser Arafat and now by the present P.A. leadership -- don't speak up on behalf of their communities, he said.

Weiner said he was baffled initially by the Church's silence over the mistreatment of its members."I think of Christianity as one of the largest religions in the world involving a billion adherents...and many of them being educated, affluent. Powerful leaders of many countries profess Christian identity and certainly come from Christian backgrounds," he said.

The Palestinian Authority has so intimidated the Christian leadership, that they go along with the Palestinian nationalist cause, said Weiner."They could be counted upon whenever Arafat would snap his fingers to put on their robes and vouch for the fact that the Christians and the Muslims were all Palestinians first and foremost, and they were all committed to Palestinian nationalism as their first priority," he said.

Of course, many Palestinian Christian leaders (the Latin Patriach of Jerusalem springs to mind), are quite comfortable with anti-Israel and anti-Jewish attitudes, even if they are not strapping on the suicide vests themselves. Be that as it may, supporters of the so-called "Palestinian Cause", within the churches and without, have for too long turned a blind eye to the fact that a corollary of the empowerment of Arab-Palestinian terrorist organizations (including the PA) is the persecution of non-Muslim minorities, gays and lesbians, and the brutalization of women in the name of "honour".

They should be ashamed.

Monday, November 21, 2005

JPost: Sharon to Leave Likud Today

The Jerusalem Post is reporting that Israeli PM Ariel Sharon will announce on Monday his intention to leave the Likud to form a new centrist political party, and that Knesset elections are likely to be held on or before 28 March 2006. This all has a certain inevitability about it, and will finally seal one of the most remarkable transformations in recent political history.

Prepare yourselves for an endless argument as to whether Sharon is a prescient statesman with a vision for his nation, or an unprincipled, vain, corrupt and cynical politician only out to save his own ample backside.

For my own part, I am concerned that having evacuated Gaza, and last week given up control of the Philidelphi Road (a death wish, according to most security sources in Israel), Sharon now wants to bring more of the the "disengagement" process to the West Bank. That is something up with which the Likud will not put. A unilateral peace process will not work. Unless the Arabs stop basing their "nationalism" (such that it is) on genocidal Jew-hatred, giving up more land in return for...well...nothing but continued terrorism, will only result in more bloodshed.

The "Fascist" Cheap Shot

Gregory Melleuish, showing more discernment than some of his more deranged colleagues in academe explains the basic differences between Liberalism and Fascism:

Fascists, like socialists, did not support the idea that individuals were the best judges of their own interest. Rather, individuals needed the state to organise them and to tell them what to do. Moreover the fascist state, what Mussolini called the ethical state, sought to bring every member of society under its control.

In fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, this meant bringing individuals under state domination by controlling the organisations to which they belonged. These included youth groups, leisure clubs and the organisation of industry through state-sanctioned corporations. In Germany, even cat lovers' clubs had to be Nazified.

There were two enemies. The first was liberalism and the autonomous individual who could exercise his or her conscience in deciding a proper course of action. The second was civil society, those voluntary organisations that individuals freely create to pursue their particular interests and that stand outside state supervision. In particular, fascism opposed the various churches. Fascist ideals and the worship of the state would form the core of people's religious beliefs.

Discussing the Howard government's proposed industrial relations reforms, he argues:

...there certainly is a paradox at work here. In order to sponsor legislation that increases individual autonomy, the commonwealth Government is indeed seeking to centralise more power in its hands. This is part of a wider trend of which university policy is another example. A similar criticism was made of Margaret Thatcher, who also sought to increase individualism through centralisation. Liberals recognise that this is a worrying trend. But the causes should be sought as much with the states as with the commonwealth. Their financial dependence on the commonwealth is matched by an apparent incapacity to act responsibly. One suspects that this situation would only be resolved if the states were forced to raise their own finances.

It is insulting to the memory of the victims of Fascism and Nazism that so many of the opponents of the current US administration, and of the current Australian government feel compelled to compare Messrs Howard and Bush to Hitler. If the comparison had any merit whatsoever its proponents would be dead or at the very least, being tortured behind barbed wire. In the case of the American President, it is ironic that many of the chief proponents of this ignorant, historically illiterate rhetorical device are often the first to deride George W Bush's alleged "stupidity".

Krauthammer takes on "Intelligent Design"

The ever-perceptive Charles Krauthammer identigifies "Intelligent Design" as a phony theory, and certainly not science. He argues, correctly in my view, that its proponents are foolish to pit faith against evolution:

Let's be clear. Intelligent design may be interesting as theology, but as science it is a fraud. It is a self-enclosed, tautological "theory" whose only holding is that when there are gaps in some area of scientific knowledge -- in this case, evolution -- they are to be filled by God. It is a "theory" that admits that evolution and natural selection explain such things as the development of drug resistance in bacteria and other such evolutionary changes within species but also says that every once in a while God steps into this world of constant and accumulating change and says, "I think I'll make me a lemur today." A "theory" that violates the most basic requirement of anything pretending to be science -- that it be empirically disprovable. How does one empirically disprove the proposition that God was behind the lemur, or evolution -- or behind the motion of the tides or the "strong force" that holds the atom together?

In order to justify the farce that intelligent design is science, Kansas had to corrupt the very definition of science, dropping the phrase " natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us," thus unmistakably implying -- by fiat of definition, no less -- that the supernatural is an integral part of science. This is an insult both to religion and science.

The school board thinks it is indicting evolution by branding it an "unguided process" with no "discernible direction or goal." This is as ridiculous as indicting Newtonian mechanics for positing an "unguided process" by which Earth is pulled around the sun every year without discernible purpose. What is chemistry if not an "unguided process" of molecular interactions without "purpose"? Or are we to teach children that God is behind every hydrogen atom in electrolysis?

He may be, of course. But that discussion is the province of religion, not science. The relentless attempt to confuse the two by teaching warmed-over creationism as science can only bring ridicule to religion, gratuitously discrediting a great human endeavor and our deepest source of wisdom precisely about those questions -- arguably, the most important questions in life -- that lie beyond the material.

How ridiculous to make evolution the enemy of God. What could be more elegant, more simple, more brilliant, more economical, more creative, indeed more divine than a planet with millions of life forms, distinct and yet interactive, all ultimately derived from accumulated variations in a single double-stranded molecule, pliable and fecund enough to give us mollusks and mice, Newton and Einstein? Even if it did give us the Kansas State Board of Education, too.

Of course, as Charles Johnson at LGF notes, even the Vatican agrees that whatever "Intelligent Design" might be, it is not science. Religious faith and evolution are not mutually exclusive, but it is a mark of the insecurity, and plain lack of intellectual and theological rigour and subtlety of some religious denominations that they feel the need to invent bogus science to validate their faith.

Monday, November 14, 2005

Idiot Anglicans Again

Joseph d'Hippolito at the Jerusalem Post explains, in the context of the Anglican apology to Saddam Hussein, Anglican ignorance of the fundamental opposition between Islam and the Judeo/Christian tradition:

...no concept of a covenant between God and humanity exists in Islam. Instead, Allah decrees his law "by means of a unilateral pact, in an act of sublime condescension [that] precludes any notion of imitating God as is urged in the Bible,"

Islam also rejects the Christian doctrines of original sin and the necessity of mediation between God and humanity. In the Koran, Jesus "appears... out of place and out of time, without reference to the landscape of Israel," Besancon wrote.

Most importantly, Judeo-Christian and Muslim concepts of divinity revolve around one irreconcilable difference.

"Although Muslims like to enumerate the 99 names of God, missing from the list, but central to the Jewish and even more so to the Christian conception of God, is 'Father' - i.e., a personal god capable of a reciprocal and loving relation with men," Besancon wrote. "The one God of the Koran, the God Who demands submission is a distant God; to call him 'Father' would be an anthropomorphic sacrilege."

The point?

IN THE quest for dialogue and reconciliation at any cost, liberal Christians fail to demand from Muslim leaders the same kind of scrupulous moral introspection they demand from themselves. When has any Christian leader challenged the sheikhs of Al-Azhar, Islam's most prestigious university, to issue fatwas against bin Laden, Zarqawi, al-Zawahiri, suicide bombers, Iranian theocrats, et al?


"The biggest weakness of the West right now," wrote Wolfgang Bruno, "is our inclination to blame ourselves for whatever happens, and for reaching out to 'win the hearts and minds' of people who profess to kill us and destroy our civilization."

No wonder their churches are empty.

Monday, November 07, 2005

Republic of Dunces?

For another, and perhaps more insightful (and certainly more thoughful and original) view, check out evariste's view at Discarded Lies. I found two of his points to be of particular interest. The first:

The funny thing is that the rioters have learned from the French themselves, and surpassed them-urban terrorism is a time-honored French way to blackmail the state into succumbing to a special interest group's demands. They're just taking France's lawless culture of shameless blackmail to heart. In fact, you could say they're just extraordinarily zealous in their pursuit of a special rider to the standard French social contract. The "racial" angle is too simplistic, and the "Islam" angle is also has insufficient explanatory power. The truth is that this is just business as usual in France, only more so.

The second:

France's real problem with its immigrant population isn't their unwillingness to integrate. It's France's racism and unwillingness to integrate them. These young people aren't new immigrants, most of them were born in France to immigrant parents-they just can't get jobs because of their skin color, their names, and their addresses.

That has the ring of truth, to me. These people are simply not considered "French" no matter how longstanding their connection with the country. It's worth reading the whole piece, which concludes that, for various reasons, not least the government's response to the riots, political Islam will be greatly empowered by the last few days' events.

That Oo La La Inftifada Feeling...

That's what Stephen Plaut is saying at Arutz Sheva. It's one great big "I told you so"!

The suburbs of Paris are now more dangerous than Jenin, and the French are getting their comeuppance for decades of snootiness, for anti-American and anti-Israel agitprop, for decades of cowardice, and especially for the repulsive French love of old Jerry Lewis movies.

Paris is now being targeted by violent rioting hordes. For years, the French accused American racism of having produced the race riots in the US in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the Los Angeles riots after the Rodney King business. And the French are sure that only Jewish cussedness and just plain Israeli evil lie behind the behavior of the Palestinian pogromchiki.

Plaut goes so far as to prepare a set of "peace proposals" to bring the Intifada to an end.

France has much other stolen territory to return. It took Corsica from Genoa, Nice and Savoy from Piedmont. As the successor state, Italy must get back all these lands. By similar token, territories grabbed from the Hapsburgs go back to Austria, including Franche-Comte, Artois and historic Burgundy. The Roussillon area (along the Pyrenees) must be returned to Spain, its rightful owner. And Normandy, Anjou, Aquitaine and Gascony must be returned to their rightful owners - the British royal family.

Not even this is enough for the sake of peace. Brittany and Languedoc must be granted autonomy at once, recognizing the Breton and Occitan liberation organizations as their legal rulers. This leaves the French government in control over the Ile de France (the area around Paris).

That, however, still does not solve the problem of the Holy City of Paris, sacred to artists, gourmets and adulterers. The Corsicans obviously have a historic claim to the Tomb of the Emperor Napoleon, their famed son, as well as the Invalides complex and beyond.

Droll as Plaut's proposals may seem to Israelis (and their sympathizers) tired of French politicians calling Jerusalem the capital of the Palestinian Authority, and lecturing them about returning the Golan to Syria so that the Syrians can go back to shelling the Galilee, in a way, he misses the point of these riots.

The Germans have given up on Alsace Lorraine, the British lost Calais during the reign of Mary I, and don't really want it back. However, France, like Israel has a large, disaffected minority who, if asked, would demand root-and-branch changes to the foundational structures of the State.

For the radicals in both minorities, this or that piece of land will not really cut the mustard. If the French want peace, perhaps they should introduce shari'ah law.

War in France?

Mark Steyn makes some observations on the recent riots in France:

For half a decade, French Arabs have been carrying on a low-level intifada against synagogues, kosher butchers, Jewish schools, etc. The concern of the political class has been to prevent the spread of these attacks to targets of more, ah, general interest. They seem to have lost that battle. Unlike America's Europhiles, France's Arab street correctly identified Chirac's opposition to the Iraq war for what it was: a sign of weakness.

[...]

The French have been here before, of course. Seven-thirty-two. Not 7:32 Paris time, which is when the nightly Citroen-torching begins, but 732 A.D. -- as in one and a third millennia ago. By then, the Muslims had advanced a thousand miles north of Gibraltar to control Spain and southern France up to the banks of the Loire. In October 732, the Moorish general Abd al-Rahman and his Muslim army were not exactly at the gates of Paris, but they were within 200 miles, just south of the great Frankish shrine of St. Martin of Tours. Somewhere on the road between Poitiers and Tours, they met a Frankish force and, unlike other Christian armies in Europe, this one held its ground ''like a wall . . . a firm glacial mass,'' as the Chronicle of Isidore puts it. A week later, Abd al-Rahman was dead, the Muslims were heading south, and the French general, Charles, had earned himself the surname ''Martel'' -- or ''the Hammer.''

Poitiers was the high-water point of the Muslim tide in western Europe. It was an opportunistic raid by the Moors, but if they'd won, they'd have found it hard to resist pushing on to Paris, to the Rhine and beyond.

Today, France shrinks from dealing firmly with its problems:

the French Cabinet split in two, as the ''minister for social cohesion'' (a Cabinet position I hope America never requires) and other colleagues distance themselves from the interior minister, the tough-talking Nicolas Sarkozy who dismissed the rioters as ''scum.'' President Chirac seems to have come down on the side of those who feel the scum's grievances need to be addressed. He called for ''a spirit of dialogue and respect.'' As is the way with the political class, they seem to see the riots as an excellent opportunity to scuttle Sarkozy's presidential ambitions rather than as a call to save the Republic.

The European Union (and many of its constituent states, to the extent that they still survive), wedded as it is to socialism and welfarism, unwilling or unable to assimilate hostile minorities (but rather content to pander to bigotry, violence and Arab despotism) needs a fundamental change of world-view if it is to survive.

A few weeks ago, many Western bien pensants were smugly opining that the destruction of New Orleans represented all that was wrong with America. Well, the burning of France represents all that is wrong with Rumsfeld's "Old Europe". The difference is that a few hurricanes do not have the potential to rip apart the fabric of American society.

Perhaps the Israeli government could send the "French youths" a few billion shekels to set up 'democratic political institutions' of their own! It's only fair to return the favour, after all!

Thursday, November 03, 2005

The Jihad of Abu Muslim al-Austraili / Mohammed Dawood

The media call him “David Hicks”, but that’s not the name he’s chosen for himself.

I’ll get straight to the point: I’m only sorry that the US won’t hang the bugger.

Last Monday evening ABC’s Four Corners aired a documentary full of bleeding-heart sympathy for Adelaide’s own jihadi. Four years after his incarceration, with good reason to make things up, he now says that the US Army stuck things up his butt. As Foreign Minister the Hon Alexander Downer said: “Our officials have had many meetings with him ... and on no occasion has he ever raised such a concern,”.

By way of a brief aside, how many of those who bleat about the Geneva Convention understand that to be subject to Geneva, a combatant has to have (a) a commander who is responsible for his subordinates; (b) formal recognizable military insignia; (c) weapons that are carried openly, and (d) an adherence to the laws and customs of warfare? Islamist terrorists meet none of these conditions. To apply Geneva to such people would be to give an imprimatur to child murdering, head-hacking savages. Further, as Ann Coulter recently noted:

American soldiers make do with C-rations. Dinner on an America West flight from New York to Las Vegas consists of one small bag of peanuts. Meanwhile, one recent menu for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo consisted of orange-glazed chicken, fresh fruit crepe, steamed peas and mushrooms, and rice pilaf.

Returning to Abu M's allegations of unwanted suppositories, Law Council of Australia President John North whined, “All of his claims would need to be tested very carefully indeed because why otherwise has he been held for nearly four years without a proper court process? There must be something people are trying to hide,". Of course his claims should be tested carefully. The rest of his statement is getting into “Elvis killed JFK and lives in Adelaide / the Mossad planned 9/11 to bring about Jewish world domination” territory. To that extent, North is talking out of the same orrifice that Abu Muslim claims to have had penetrated.

I cannot say it better than BYF:

The US has not held him for so long because it is afraid he will tell the world it has tortured him, because:

  • it gave him a lawyer;
  • he has told the world anyway; and
  • if the US really was the sort of country that would do this, and render people to other countries, then why would it let him talk, rather than throwing him out of a plane into the ocean?

Now, as the loony left Sydney Morning Herald report points out [again, thanks to BYF, who obviously has a strong stomach for this particular newspaper]:

“Hicks admits aiding the enemy, waging war against the west and providing material assistance to those trying to kill Australian troops. He is an active member of a movement closer in international law to piracy than anything else. Yet somehow what he did is not that bad - because he did not manage to kill anyone?”

And since we are quoting BYF, this is wonderful:

The noble Lucius Junius Brutus executed his sons for treason. Hicks's father, rather than being embarrassed at the shame that his son has brought on the family, would rather parade stories on the TV about anal intrusions, in a sad attempt to raise the schoolyard excuse, "Well, my son may be bad, but the US is worse" - so my son should be excused from responsibility for his crimes. "He did it too!"

Hicks, for those who don’t know, is trying to obtain UK citizenship, in the hope that the Blair government will spring him from Guantanamo. After the UK's July experience with their Mohammedan citizens, one would hope their government would move heaven and earth to avoid picking this one up.

I remember Hicks senior standing in a cage outside SA Liberal party meetings. His son has, on his own admission, betrayed his country and its values, and we are supposed to cry and beg for his release?

In the Hicks propaganda film The President Versus David Hicks, his father:

  • reads out excerpts of David Hicks's letters, in which Hicks says that his training in Pakistan and Afghanistan is designed to ensure "the Western-Jewish domination is finished, so we live under Muslim law again". He denounces the plots of the Jews to divide Muslims and make them think poorly of Osama bin Laden and warns his father to ignore "the Jews' propaganda war machine.". Abu Muslim’s a Jew-hater. Quelle surprise.

  • said that his son seemed unaware of the September 11 attacks when they spoke on a mobile phone a few days after the American bombing campaign in Afghanistan began. Of course, he now says that but was horrified by the September 11, 2001, attacks and could not leave Afghanistan because the border was shut by the Taliban.

He should go the way of William Joyce.