...born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad

Fitting metaphor: Roger Waters’ giant swine balloon—the one he releases at the end of his concerts, the one which, in its current incarnation, urges folks to mark their ballots for Obama—came unmoored, post-concert, and flew off to parts unknown. It is now, to paraphrase that Monty Python skit, an ex-piggy.

Not to read too much into the fate of an unfortunate inflatable, but it seems, I dunno, kind of spooky that the Bambi balloon burst around the same time Jeremiah Wright arrived back on the scene and attempted, once and for all, to burst the candidate’s presidential hopes.

Coincidence? If you say so.

The lyric currently running through my brain is from Comden and Greene’s wistful ballad “The Party’s Over”:…”They’ve burst your pretty balloon and taken the moon away.” Oh, sure, they can try and refloat another pig, but it won’t be same pig, and it won’t change the fact that karma seems to have spoken.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:59 | link | comments (1)

Cancel the celebrations: As I suspected, all the hoopla about the Canadian Islamic Congress being on the cusp of withdrawing its complaints about the "offensive" Maclean's cover story was a wee bit premature. Mo and Co. haven't moved an inch.

Feisty chick, Kathy Shaidle, was at the news conference, though, oddly enough, the man who got the ball rolling, 'Slammin' Mo, was a no-show.

It appears that the push to dhimmify Canada via the convenient smokescreen of "human rights" is still full systems go.

Update: Mo's demands are set out in this news release. Apparently, empowered by that Maoist Miss Manners, Barbara Hall, and her extra-judicial guilty "verdict" (for a hearing that never took place), he's still hoping to comandeer an issue of Maclean's, his condition for dropping his complaints with the BC HRC. In Islamic terms, he wants to force Maclean's, Canada's flagship periodical, into dhimmitde.

Sharing bed space with a bloody horse's head is easy-peasy compared to the prospect of having to face these sanctimonious thought cops. Unwittingly (at least one presumes it's unwitting) these terminally nice, confoundingly clueless bureacrats are serving as sharia's handmaidens.

Update: RightGirl, the blogger who attended the new conference with her sister-in-outrage, Kathy, adds an interesting detail. The lawyer for Elmo's sock thingys (who RightGirl says reminded her of Huggybear from Starsky and Hutch) had a letter of support from none other than confoundingly clueless Socialist, Jack Layton.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:34 | link | comments (1)

The bark and the bite: Now that Trinity United’s pastor has been, er, put out to pasture, it has looked to a new, young preacher—Reverend Otis Moss III—to pick up where Reverend Wright left off.

Here’s Reverend Moss defending his church and his predecessor from the pulpit. The sermon’s spin: the many remarkable accomplishments of both have been overlooked and unfairly reduced to a “sound bite”. (Moss starts out rather tentatively, but gains momentum as he goes on. Still, for those used to the over-the-top stylings of the previous pastor, Moss’s sermons must be something of a let-down.)

Meaning no disrespect, Reverend, but Wright's words were a lot more than sound bites. They were lengthy, leisurely, rambling fulminations in which many, many obnoxious "sound bites" were strung together to create one poisonous, repellent whole. But if you and your flock prefer to look at it as a question of "sound bites" being taken "out of context," so be it. Realize, though, that a lot of people are going to have a hard time getting past “sound bites” of an obnoxious bigot God-damning "the U.S. of K.K.K." and ranting about how the American government brought on 9/11 and infected black people with AIDS—and receiving a rapturous reception from a congregation which apparently welcomes such toxic views.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:34 | link | comments

The dhimmi dance: When America’s enemies were godless Fascists or Commies, no one worried about offending their “religious” sensibilities. Now that America’s enemy is affiliated with one of the world’s Great Religions, the government has decided it has to tap dance around that affiliation, lest it “insult” the supposedly sacrosanct.

Is that any way to win a war? Patrick Poole on the American Thinker site thinks not:

Imagine that following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, that FDR had prohibiting the use of the terms "Nazi" or "Japanese Imperialism" due to pressure brought to bear by German and Japanese-American lobbying groups. Or at the height of the Cold War that the US government had determined to ban the use of "Soviet" or "communism" for fear of offending the sensibilities of Russian-Americans or European socialists.

Yet that is precisely what has happened following the revelation last week by the Associated Press that the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security has issued guidelines banning the use of "jihad", "mujahedeen" and other Islamic terminology with reference to Islamic terrorism. This move lays bare the ideological prison house of political correctness in which our top policymaker's reside. The strictures are so ridiculous that even President Bush can't help himself in violating the guidelines.

No one can claim in defense of this move that it has been rooted in years of serious study and assessment of the issue at the highest levels of government. If so, where might these studies and assessments be found? What series of government publications outlines the strategic threat doctrine of our enemy in the War on Terror, similar to that prepared on Soviet doctrine in the early years of the Cold War? What comprehensive doctrinal assessment may our military and political leaders consult to inform themselves on the tactics and strategy of our enemy? Such does not exist, and the adoption of the government's new "lexicon" is an admission that such a strategic threat assessment of our enemy will not be done. This new effort means that in essence we have chosen to fly blind in the Global War on Terror (GWOT).

The categorical failure of our political leadership nearly seven years after 9/11 to engage in even the slightest effort to assess exactly who the enemy is and how they propose to attack and defeat us borders on treason. What could possibly represent the complete abdication of responsibility by our political leaders than deliberately avoiding addressing this pressing, and for our men and women in uniform a life-and-death, issue?

So on what basis have our public officials made this recent decision? This new effort is being driven by politics, not public safety, as demonstrated by the fact that such pandering measures adopted by the British government which the State Department guidelines appear modeled after have completely failed to abate the terrorist threat there. And it reveals that our national security policy is being determined more by public affairs officials driven by political correctness than sober reflection by our nation's intelligence, military and law enforcement personnel…

I fear it is being driven by more than political correctness. It is a function of officials remaining profoundly ignorant about a “religion” that is actually an all-encompassing political system. If followed to the letter, this system, which considers itself to be the be-all and end-all of all political systems, is arguably even more oppressive than anything dished out by the godless.

Ignorance may be bliss, but only in the short term. In reality, ignorance amounts to dhimmitude--and, ultimately, will lead to defeat..

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:57 | link | comments

The tenor of betrayal: An Irish classic, dedicated to a now-defunct relationship:

Oh Bambi boy

Rev. Wright, Rev. Wright is raving.

He’s sabotaged his youthful protégée.

For twenty years you trusted and looked up to him.

Oh Bambi boy how could he treat his “son” that way?

 

It’s all because you criticized his hatefulness.

The loopy words which made him sound quite mad.

Now see what happens when you diss a demagogue?

Oh, Bambi boy, no one can shaft you like your “dad”.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:03 | link | comments

Definitive definition: Bush says Palestinian state can be defined during his term.

With all due respect, Mr. President, it's already been "defined". Due to your "democritization" efforts, it's a genocidal terrorist entity: "Hamastan."

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:36 | link | comments

Wright’s revenge: Isn’t that what it’s really all about—a father figure getting a bit of his own back at the “son” who got too big for his britches?

If the bombastic bigot had wanted his protégée to win, he would have kept his head down until after election day. The fact that he didn’t shows that he’s more concerned about promoting himself and his own image than he is about boosting Bambi’s fortunes. He thus had no compunction about inflicting maximum damage.

A true demagogue, through and through.

Update: Bambi strikes back. Looks like the Fauxbamas and the Wrights won't be exchanging Christmas cards this year.

Update: Black Panther praises Wright's speechifying.

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:36 | link | comments (1)

CIC offer in the offing: Mo and the kids are getting set to make Maclean’s “an offer” (it can’t refuse?). Link via steynonline:

THE CANADIAN ISLAMIC CONGRESS
PRESS CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT

April 29, 2008

ISLAMIC CONGRESS AND LAW STUDENTS TO MAKE PUBLIC SETTLEMENT OFFER TO MACLEAN'S ON HUMAN RIGHTS COMPLAINTS

TORONTO - The Canadian Islamic Congress and a group of law students who recently filed human rights complaints against Maclean's magazine for publishing Islamophobic content, are planning to present a public offer to the magazine's management to settle the matter.

Details of this offer and more information regarding the background of the above-mentioned complaints will be provided to those in attendance.

When:
10:00 a.m.: Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Where:
Fairmont Royal York Hotel, The Quebec Room, 100 Front Street West, Toronto ON

Present at the media conference will be:
- Faisal Joseph: CIC legal counsel, former Federal and Provincial
   Crown Attorney, and former Chair of the Criminal Section of the Canadian
   Bar Association (Nova Scotia).

- Muneeza Sheikh, Naseem Mithoowani and Khurrum Awan: Three of the law students/graduates who were original complainants against Maclean's
   magazine.

For more information contact:
Faisal Joseph: (519) 672-4510

Let’s see: Previously, Mo and Co. “offered” to commandeer an entire issue of Maclean’s and fill it with their “truth.” When the magazine’s editor told them to take a hike, they did—all the way to several of the country’s Miss Manners’ etiquette emporia.Word is they’re prepared to back off the HRC complaints—but at what price? And is it a price that any self-respecting, freedom-loving kafir will be willing to stomach?

All will become clear tomorrow.

Posted by: scaramouche at 15:59 | link | comments (2)

Sighting the salesman: By Wesley Pruden in the Washington Times, 4/29:

Sen. Obama is actually the Willy Loman of presidential politics, the iconic salesman of the Arthur Miller play whose success on the road was fashioned with a smile and a shoeshine. Hillary Clinton, the inevitable nominee when the new year dawned, was rendered all but insensible when the Obama frenzy rolled over her after Iowa, and now Sen. Barack Obama is equally stunned as his magic begins to wane.

 

By me, 4/25:

In the early days, when Americans didn’t know who he was, he could coast on his good looks, soothing voice and piffle about “change”. (Another American salesman, Willie Loman, coasted on “a smile and a shoeshine,” until he, too, was done in by his own character flaws.)

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:20 | link | comments (3)

 The jihad’s useful idiot: Hillel Halkin on the abominable Mr. C. From the New York Sun (my bolds):

…Had Mr. Carter been minimally informed, he would have known that Hamas has for years been ready to "accept" a Palestinian state subject to certain conditions — which is what it means when it says that this state must be approved by a Palestinian "referendum" (to be torpedoed by Hamas if its conditions are not met) or a Palestinian "elected government" (ditto). These conditions, which Mr. Carter did not get Hamas to retreat from one iota, are, firstly, that Israel pull back to its 1967 lines with Jordan, including those that divided Jerusalem, and, secondly, that Israel admit all descendants of 1948 Palestinian refugees who wish to live within its borders.

What Hamas has not been ready to accept, is still not ready to accept, and has never told Mr. Carter is that it is ready to accept is the state of Israel itself. At the most it is willing to agree to a hudna, an Islamic truce, with Israel. And as any student of Islam knows, a hudna is by definition temporary. It can be for a longer time or a shorter time, but it is basically a breather separating one round of confrontation with the infidel from another.

To put it in plain language: Once Israel agrees to surrender half of Jerusalem, uproot hundreds of settlements and hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers from disputed territories beyond the 1967 lines, and grant residence rights to possibly millions of Palestinians who have never lived in it before, Hamas will call off its campaign for the Jewish state's destruction for X number of years, after which it will be free to resume hostilities.

By then, of course, there will be little left of a Jewish state to destroy, the influx of Palestinian refugees having eliminated the country's Jewish majority. These are the "concessions" that Mr. Carter, with his self-vaunted skills as a negotiator, has managed to extract from Hamas and is now trying to peddle as a significant achievement.

Mr. Carter has been taken — not for the first time in his career, it must be said — for a ride. Were he alone in the delusion that Hamas can be brought into Israeli-Palestinian peace talks as a constructive partner, this would not matter very much. In the three-ring circus of Middle Eastern diplomacy, he simply would be one more clown balancing bowling pins on his nose or pedaling a unicycle backwards.

But the delusion is more widespread. It is being voiced today from more and more quarters. Without Hamas, the argument goes, no Israeli-Palestinian process is possible; ergo, Hamas must become part of the process for it to succeed.

Now, the first half of this argument is certainly correct. Hamas is politically and militarily strong enough today, not only in the Gaza Strip, but in the West Bank as well, to thwart any agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority that it does not approve of. It is just that the "ergo" does not follow, for the simple reason that Hamas cannot and will not approve of any agreement that could possibly be acceptable to Israel. It does not have the ideological leeway or flexibility to do so, and no one can say that it has not been ideologically consistent over the years.

Does this mean that no Israeli-Palestinian peace process can succeed at the moment? Alas, this is precisely what it does mean. Some of those who, like Mr. Carter, find it impossible to live with this truth will go on making fools of themselves in order to deny it. Let's just not let them make fools of us.

Are you listening, Condi?

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:13 | link | comments

Run, Bambi, run: Obama adds to distance from pastor and opinions.

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:44 | link | comments

Pure, unadulterated evil: With its agenda of appropriating the term "anti-Semitism" and affixing it to "racism" against Muslims (because, heaven knows, "Islamophobia" isn't nearly enough to cover it), Holocaust denial, delegitimizing Israel, and ignoring outrageous violations of "human rights" in Iran and Libya--the countries in charge of pre-conference preparations--Durban II is on track to make Durban I look like a hay ride.

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:18 | link | comments

Bayefsky in Rightsland: Reading Anne Bayefsky’s account of her visit to the UN’s zaniest body, the Human Rights Council, I couldn’t help but think of Alice’s disorienting adventures in Wonderland. All that was missing was one or more of the mad malevolent members crying, “Off with the heads of those who insult Islam."

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:40 | link | comments

IHT claptrap: Daniel Pipes is only one of many pundits who has pointed out that Islamic law is making great inroads here in the West--without anyone having to set off any explosives. The International Herald Tribune, for one, is hoping Pipes will shut up, already, since according to that noted expert, John Esposito, Islam’s as sweet and benign as a boxful of kittens:

…Pipes and others reel off a list of examples: Muslim cabdrivers in Minneapolis who have refused to take passengers carrying liquor; municipal pools and a gym at Harvard that have adopted female-only hours to accommodate Muslim women; candidates for office who are suspected of supporting political Islam; and banks that are offering financial products compliant with sharia, the Islamic code of law.

The danger, Pipes says, is that the United States stands to become another England or France, a place where Muslims are balkanized and ultimately threaten to impose sharia.

"It is hard to see how violence, how terrorism will lead to the implementation of sharia," Pipes said. "It is much easier to see how, working through the system — the school system, the media, the religious organizations, the government, businesses and the like — you can promote radical Islam."

Pipes refers to this new enemy as the "lawful Islamists."

They are carrying out a "soft jihad," said Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, a trustee of the City University of New York and a vocal opponent of the Khalil Gibran school.

Muslim leaders, academics and others see the drive against the school as the latest in a series of discriminatory attacks intended to distort the truth and play on Americans' fear of terrorism. They say the campaign is also part of a wider effort to silence critics of Washington's policy on Israel and the Middle East.

"This is a political, ideological agenda," said John Esposito, a professor of international affairs and Islamic studies at Georgetown University who has been a focus of Pipes's scrutiny. "It's an agenda to paint Islam, not just extremists, as a major problem… 

Islam's the one with the political, ideological agenda, John. I believe it's called sharia.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:15 | link | comments

That's his (insane) story and he's stickin' to it: Fauxbama's pastor stands by his position that the U.S. government gave black people AIDS.

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:48 | link | comments

Dark side of the moonbat: Geriatric rocker Roger Waters capped off a concert by releasing a giant hot air piggy. The gaseous porker was Roger’s way of bashing America and demonstrating his support for his guy, Fauxbama. From NME (my bolds):

Roger Waters closed out the final night of the Coachella Festival (April 27) by performing Pink Floyd's landmark 1973 album 'Dark Side Of The Moon' and unleashing a giant inflatable pig into the sky.

The legendary performer drew a massive crowd for his main stage headlining set, which featured two parts.

The first half of Waters' nearly three-hour set featured solo and early Pink Floyd material, while the second half saw him performing 'Dark Side Of The Moon' in its entirety as well as Pink Floyd hits from 1979's 'The Wall'.

A large inflatable pig emerged onto the stage as he played 'Pigs' from 1977's 'Animals'. Graffiti scrawled on the pig said, "Don't be led to the slaughter" and "Obama" with checked ballot box next to it. It also contained illustrations of Uncle Sam holding a cleaver.

The pig was released into the night sky at the end of Waters' first set…

Didn’t we see that in Spinal Tap?

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:17 | link | comments

Arrogant, malicious, Jew-hating nincompoop: None other than Jimminy "Ain't My Nobel Peace Prize Purty" Carter.

Update: The unctuous one sings a song from--what else?--Grease:

Look at me I’m Jimmy C.

Lousy with sanc-tim-ony.

Wear my Nobel prize

As a brilliant disguise.

It works for Jimmy C.

 

I was the prez when Khomeini came

And things have never been the same.

Don’t say, “Oy gevalt!”

‘Cause it wasn’t my fault.

Not me, not Jimmy C.

 

I’m fair (hah!)

And true (ho!)

Unless you’re a Jew (ew!)

Get ill from that there “apartheid”.

“Peace” is my mission

So go to perdition

If you think that I’d ever takes sides.

 

As for the concept of “jihad”

It really isn’t all that bad.

Just bow and submit.

See--it don’t hurt a bit.

Say I, says Jimmy C.

 

Hugged a thug--

A loving start.

I’ve only lusted in my heart.

Won’t leave the scene

Till I’m pushin’ up green.

Hey, piss off! I’m Jimmy C.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:09 | link | comments

 CHRC’s dizzying spin: If I were to tell you that there were “courts” in Canada where there is no presumption of innocence, the usual rules of evidence don’t apply, and only one side, the “defendant,” is on the hook for legal costs, would you think that was a good thing or a bad thing? Well, chillingly, such “courts” do indeed exist, and it should be obvious to all Canadian that it’s a very bad thing. Here’s how the granddaddy of our kangaroo courts, the Canadian Human Rights Commission, tries to justify this outrage, attempting (and failing) to spin the dross into gold. It comes from the CHRC brochure, “Tribunal Hearings,” which outlines the two-part complaint process—the CHRC fields the complaints; the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal hears them (my bolds):

What does the Tribunal do?

The Tribunal is much like a court. It conducts public hearings into complaints of discrimination filed with the Commission. However, because it is an administrative tribunal, it has more flexibility than regular courts. As a result, people who appear before it can explain their case more fully, without having to follow strict rules of evidence.

I must have missed something in all the happy talk about “flexibility” because I thought the presumption of innocence and “strict rules of evidence” were the foundation of Western jurisprudence.

Silly moi.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:41 | link | comments (2)

Popular Shias: You know those efforts to "isolate" Iran? Don't seem to be working out too well.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:15 | link | comments

Pro-active supression: Starting at the end of June, the Ontario thought cops are going to take a more “pro-active” approach to gathering “hate” complaints. They plan to fan out into the community, and, operating like our very own virtue/vice committee, will keep their ears to the ground for the least little hint that someone is thinking impure, socially unacceptable thoughts.

Hey, if it works in Saudi Arabia, there’s no reason it can’t work here, right?

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:06 | link | comments

Wright still wrong: Fauxbama’s pastor doesn’t know what all the fuss is about. See, as a member of a group that, historically, has been on the receiving end of egregious racism, he’s allowed to spew racism from his pulpit and not have it be considered racist: Victimhood does have its privileges. The ranting rev explained his position to a receptive crowd at an NAACP dinner where he was the keynote speaker: From the Beeb (my bolds):

…Speaking at the fund-raising dinner, Mr Wright suggested critics had taken his remarks out of context to embarrass him and Mr Obama.

 

"We just do it differently, and some of our haters can't get their heads around that. I come from a religious tradition where we shout in the sanctuary and we march on the picket lines," Mr Wright said.

 

"The African-American tradition is different. We do it in a different way."

 

He added: "I am not one of the most divisive black spiritual leaders... the word is descriptive."…

 

Sorry, rev. Racism is racism, no matter how “differently” it’s done. It’s the content, not the packaging, that makes it racist.

 

The good folks of the NAACP, of all people, should be able to see that (and should never have invited you in the first place).

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:49 | link | comments

Washington grovels: Terrorism expert Steve Emerson on the U.S. government’s pathetic capitulation to sharia. From JWR:

This is a memo to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas (Islamic Resistance Movement), Hizballah (the Party of G-d), the Islamic State of Iraq, Egyptian Islamic Jihad and others:

Please consider changing your names to something a tad less religious sounding. Where you infuse your theological thought into radical politics and violence, things might get a little awkward for us. You see, if we point out that you identify yourselves with a religion, we might offend someone. That's the new policy of the U.S. government. It advises agencies to avoid using some of the same words that make up your very names.

All we're asking is that you meet us half way.

The Associated Press confirms what Robert Spencer reported Tuesday on Jihad Watch, that federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. embassies say words including "jihadists," and "mujahedeen" are off limits. In addition, references to Islam and Muslims are frowned upon, too:

The reason: Such words may actually boost support for radicals among Arab and Muslim audiences by giving them a veneer of religious credibility or by causing offense to moderates.

For example, while Americans may understand "jihad" to mean "holy war," it is in fact a broader Islamic concept of the struggle to do good, says the guidance prepared for diplomats and other officials tasked with explaining the war on terror to the public. Similarly, "mujahedeen," which means those engaged in jihad, must be seen in its broader context.

U.S. officials may be "unintentionally portraying terrorists, who lack moral and religious legitimacy, as brave fighters, legitimate soldiers or spokesmen for ordinary Muslims," says a Homeland Security report. It's entitled "Terminology to Define the Terrorists: Recommendations from American Muslims."

Apparently the report does not say which American Muslims offered the recommendations. But it is virtually identical to a long campaign by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and other Islamist groups (Check out the examples we cited in our series on CAIR, then go back and read the AP report). So the U.S. government is taking its cues from a group that emanated from a secret Muslim Brotherhood operation in America, one with a stated goal of being "a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and "sabotaging" its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions."

According to the AP, the government report says "even if it is accurate to reference the term, it may not be strategic because it glamorizes terrorism, imbues terrorists with religious authority they do not have and damages relations with Muslims around the world."…

In other words, the U.S. government has officially submitted and made dhimmitude its modus operendi. In which case, why even bother trying to implant “democracy” in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:11 | link | comments

The apostate and the refusenik: The Sunday New York Times had a piece examining the different approaches of—and gaping divide between—Ayaan Ali Hirsi and Irshad Manji:

…“The most important explanation for the mental and material backlog we Muslims find ourselves in,” Ms. Hirsi Ali has said, “should probably be sought in the sexual morality that we were force-fed from birth.” Her first book, a collection of essays, was entitled “The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam.” In the Netherlands, she devoted herself to helping Muslim women, in her words, “develop the vocabulary of resistance,” and she continues the fight from the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, where she is a resident fellow.

Ms. Manji, too, sees feminism as the linchpin for Islamic reform. “Empowering women,” she says, “is the way to awaken the Muslim world.” But she is not only a committed feminist (bad enough in the eyes of Muslim conservatives). She is also an open lesbian — a rebel twice over. The difference between them “really is between those outside of a faith and those still within it,” says Ms. Manji’s friend the writer Andrew Sullivan. “Hirsi Ali has abandoned faith for atheism. Irshad has taken the harder path, I believe.”

The two women have known each other for four years, since Ms. Hirsi Ali interviewed Ms. Manji for a Dutch newspaper, and they discussed their continuing relationship in e-mail interviews. They immediately bonded — understandably enough. “I could not believe she was not an atheist,” Ms. Hirsi Ali says, “and she could not believe that I had become one.” When Time magazine named Ms. Hirsi Ali one of its “100 most influential people” for 2005, it was Ms. Manji who wrote the comment on her. Ms. Manji admires Ms. Hirsi Ali’s determination to speak truth to power, saying that “Ayaan’s defiant distrust of Muslim authorities can help generate debates that move us closer to honesty.”

But, inevitably, the differences between them create tensions since, in their eyes, what is at stake is nothing less than the future of Islam. Ms. Hirsi Ali says, “Irshad is the most admirable person I know who is trying to achieve change from within,” but she agrees with Mr. Hitchens that “from an intellectual, logical perspective,” Ms. Manji’s religious faith and her own secularism can’t be reconciled. Mr. Hitchens himself believes that it’s a self-defeating exercise for a declared lesbian to try to bring about an Islamic Reformation.

Ms. Manji detects a certain incoherence in Ms. Hirsi Ali’s views: “She wants Muslims to reform, but she also seems to believe that Islam is inherently retrograde.” Ms. Manji says her own position “is that Muslims can reform while remaining faithful precisely because the Koran has the raw materials to be thoughtful and humane. It’s we Muslims who must develop the courage to change.”

For her part, Ms. Hirsi Ali replies, “I make a distinction between Islam and Muslims.” That is, “I picture the defeat of Islam as large swaths of Muslims crossing the line and accepting the value system of secular humanism. This is not a matter of one religion defeating another, it’s a matter of value systems which cannot coexist.”…

Manji detects a certain incoherence? Is there anything less coherent than the attempt to “reform” a religion which considers its scripture and prophet to be perfect, and which invariably “reforms” by looking backward?

It is Manji who is incoherent and whose efforts, at the end of the day, are futile and, even worse, counter-productive. Hirsi Ali is the one who “gets it,” the one whose ideas must be understood and assimilated if we hope to stop the creep and gallop of sharia.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:44 | link | comments

Acceptable and unacceptable polygamy: If you’re a foreign-born immigrant with a “harem” of wives, Canada has no problemo with your polygamy: heck, if you can’t support your “lifestyle,” the state will even offer you a helping hand. If, however, you’re an FLDS polygamist with a passel of wives who have the fashion sense of Holly Hobby, well, sir, you’re just plum out of luck.

Only one thing left for those Mormons to do: “revert”.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:23 | link | comments

I resemble that comment: I try to resist the temptation to pick up a copy of NOW magazine—Toronto’s hard left freebie rag that considers itself cutting edge on matters cultural and political. It’s not that I have a hard time taking seriously a publication that stays afloat by accepting a plethora of ads from the sex trade. It’s just that I know that when I pick it up, there’s a good chance there’s going to be another article/snippet/off the cuff comment bashing Israel (for being a brutal colonialist, imperialist, racist interloper—occupying the sacred land of those saintly victims, the Palestinians). And, whadya know? After months of ignoring it, I happen to open it up and find this "charming" piece: “Extremist JDL resurfaces in Bathurst synagogue with Likud pol in tow.”

The “pol” in question is Moshe Feiglin, a Likudnik who thinks the Palestinians can be bribed into leaving the West Bank and Gaza. (In its own way, as cockamamie an idea as following a road map to “peace”, since both fail to consider that the real impediment to a “two state solution. I’ll give you a hint. It starts with “I” and ends with “slam”.)

I won’t go into the details of the article; suffice it to say that it is offensive on many levels. I feel compelled, though, to mention this closing bit:

Michael Neumann, a Trent University philosophy professor and the author of The Case Against Israel, also warns against getting diverted by fears of JDL ultranationalism.

“Hell, if I’m going to be concerned about violent or extremist Jews, I’ll be concerned about the Israel Defense Forces. By far the greatest threat to peace are the lobbying efforts of impeccably well-behaved, well-connected Zionists and the decent but fence-sitting Jews who allow these lobbyists to speak in their name.”

Speaking as an impeccably well-behaved, well-connect Zionist, I take great umbrage at that remark. The greatest threat to peace was, is, and will always be the inability of Israel’s Arab/Muslim neighbours to come to terms with the concept of Jewish sovereignty. That’s the reason, by the way, why there is an IDF: Had the surrounding nations not been so intent on obliterating the Jewish state instead of living with it, there would have been no need for a Jewish army.

As for those decent but fence-sitting Jews, I suggest they get off the fence and speak up—now—if they want to see Israel reach its next milestone birthday. We impeccably well-behaved Zionists need all the help we can get if we want to put the brakes on the effort to delegitimize and destroy Israel—an effort which is being helped in no small measure by useful idiots in academe and the media.

Michael Neumann is in the front ranks of the idiotic, waving his pom poms and cheering maniacally for Israel's demise. Honest Reporting quotes him as having written the following:

My sole concern is indeed to help the Palestinians, and I try to play for keeps. I am not interested in the truth, or justice, or understanding, or anything else, except so far as it serves that purpose...I would use anything, including lies, injustice and obfuscation, to do so. If an effective strategy means that some truths about the Jews don't come to light, I don't care. If an effective strategy means encouraging reasonable anti-Semitism or reasonable hostility to Jews, I don't care. If it means encouraging vicious racist anti-Semitism, or the destruction of the State of Israel, I still don't care.

So nice of the NOW magazine hack to go out of his way to quote the likes of this rabidly self-loathing, traitorous Jew. What, Ilan Pappe was busy that day?

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:53 | link | comments

Wishful thinking: Bambi Fauxbama, the guys who worships at a church committed to black liberation theology and whose mentor pals around with NOI scallywag, Louis Farakhan, says race is not an issue in the U.S. election.

Dream on, Fauxbama.

Posted by: scaramouche at 15:52 | link | comments

“They” are the problem: Victor Davis Hanson skewers Bambi and the missus for blaming all the bad stuff on an amorphous “they”. Who are “they”? That depends entirely on who Bambi or Mrs. Bambi happen to be speaking to at the time. From NRO:

Recently Barack Obama got into trouble by explaining to an affluent San Francisco audience why the cash-strapped, mostly white, working classes in Pennsylvania and the Midwest do not logically vote for his brand of economic populism, but instead cling to issues that sophisticates can see are extraneous to their economic plight.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

That sentence has been analyzed to death. But a single word struck me — who are Obama’s distant they?

Are they basically decent people, without a lot of education, who turn to religious and national superstitions like guns and church, or to primordial passions like racism and xenophobia, in lieu of Obama’s nostrum of “hope” and “change”? “They,” then, turn out to be the nice, but deluded folk — and yet sometimes dangerous people when riled by immigrants and other races that don’t look like them?

But the bitter, they can’t be the same they that Obama also said are jacking up the cost of his condiments in the store?

“Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula? I mean, they’re charging a lot of money for this stuff.”

Perhaps this nebulous and ever changing they evokes the same forces that Michelle Obama says are now thwarting her husband’s phenomenally successful campaign. Sometime they seem to be politicos, or media pundits, or hostile rule keepers who do all they can to sabotage the Obamas: “They tell you to raise money, you raise money. “They tell you to build an organization, and you build an organization.”

But at other times they for Michelle Obama can apparently also mean faceless government officials who likewise conspire against the American public as soon as it makes any progress — perhaps like achieving the Obama’s 2007 $4 million annual income, or $1.6 million home: “We live in a nation where they set the bar and you try to get over the bar and they move the bar.”

On rarer occasions, Michelle Obama becomes somewhat more specific with her they, and so names them as “folks.” But who and where these folks are, we are never told: “Folks set the bar, and then you work hard and you reach the bar — sometimes you surpass the bar — and then they move the bar!”

The multifarious use of they tells us a great deal about the Obamas. In one of the many manifestations of they, there is a sort of resentment here, the evocation of someone or something to blame when it is time to buy high-priced arugula or send the kids to summer camp or explain why you will lose Pennsylvania. This whiny they serves a psychological need, and relieves them of any introspection like, “Buy lettuce at Safeway instead of arugula at Whole Foods.” Or “Try harder to appeal to the working classes of Iowa and Pennsylvania by spending more time out of, rather than in, Whole Foods and San Francisco mansions.”…

One thing Bambi and Michi know for sure: whoever “they” are, “they” suck.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:42 | link | comments

A new edition of the inquisition: A news release from earlier this month trumpets the bold new changes on tap for the Ontario Human Rights Commission (my bolds):

QUOTES

"Ontario has been a national leader on human rights since its creation of the first human rights code in Canada in 1962," said Attorney General Chris Bentley. "By creating a new, stronger human rights system, we are continuing our national leadership on this issue. The new system will address the underlying causes of discrimination and ensure the speedy resolution of human rights cases."

"This funding is an important part of ensuring the long term success of Ontario's new human rights system," said Michael Gottheil, Chair of the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario.  "It will help us construct new, state-of-the-art, accessible facilities, including human rights hearing and mediation rooms.  In addition, by developing a new case management system, we'll be able to process cases in a timely way, and monitor and report on the performance of the new system."

"We're building towards an enhanced new mandate for the Commission, with a focus on proactive systemic work that seeks to address the underlying causes of discrimination," said Barbara Hall, Chief Commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Commission.  "These new resources will allow us to begin that exciting change on June 30th."

QUICK FACTS

·         Ontario has increased funding for human rights every year since 2003.

·         There are an average of 2,500 discrimination cases filed every year in Ontario.

·         Right now, it can take four to five years for a human rights complaint to be resolved. Under the new system, a direct access and streamlined complaints process will be created.

So as I understand it, the eloquent Babs Halls (“a focus on proactive systemic work…”—why, it’s positively Churchillian) was kvetching that Ontarians weren’t being nearly hateful enough (a mere 2,500 cases, sniffed Ms. High Commish—an embarrassment for a province as “diverse” as ours), when her commission wasn’t even capable of handling those complaints in a timely fashion.

I predict that the new system won’t “streamline” anything. It will result in lots more complaints being filed (since the OHRC is going to be “pro-active” and go out into the community to drum up business), and people will end up having to wait more or less the same time as before to have their cases “resolved.” Thus the changes won’t benefit the “people” at all. They will, however, be a boon to intrusive Commissars, who will have vastly expanded power to poke around in our lives.

Thanks for nada, Dalton.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:36 | link | comments

The hellaciousness of good intentions: To review: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring puts the kibosh on the use of DDT. The result: the mosquito population in Africa skyrockets, and thousands die needlessly from malaria. More recently, eco-hysterics get governments to turn away from food production so that what used to be food can now become fuel. The result: there’s not enough food to go around, and mass starvation looms. And don’t get me started on the bio-degradable plastics…From the Guardian:

The worldwide effort by supermarkets and industry to replace conventional oil-based plastic with eco-friendly "bioplastics" made from plants is causing environmental problems and consumer confusion, according to a Guardian study.

The substitutes can increase emissions of greenhouse gases on landfill sites, some need high temperatures to decompose and others cannot be recycled in Britain.

Many of the bioplastics are also contributing to the global food crisis by taking over large areas of land previously used to grow crops for human consumption.

The market for bioplastics, which are made from maize, sugarcane, wheat and other crops, is growing by 20-30% a year.

The industry, which uses words such as "sustainable", "biodegradeable", "compostable" and "recyclable" to describe its products, says bioplastics make carbon savings of 30-80% compared with conventional oil-based plastics and can extend the shelf-life of food.

Concern centres on corn-based packaging made with polylactic acid (Pla). Made from GM crops, it looks identical to conventional polyethylene terephthalate (Pet) plastic and is produced by US company NatureWorks. The company is jointly owned by Cargill, the world's second largest biofuel producer, and Teijin, one of the world's largest plastic manufacturers.

Pla is used by some of the biggest supermarkets and food companies, including Wal-Mart, McDonald's and Del Monte. It is used by Marks & Spencer to package organic foods, salads, snacks, desserts, and fruit and vegetables.

It is also used to bottle Belu mineral water, which is endorsed by environmentalists because the brand's owners invest all profits in water projects in poor countries. Wal-Mart has said it plans to use 114m Pla containers over the course of a year.

While Pla is said to offer more disposal options, the Guardian has found that it will barely break down on landfill sites, and can only be composted in the handful of anaerobic digesters which exist in Britain, but which do not take any packaging. In addition, if Pla is sent to UK recycling works in large quantities, it can contaminate the waste stream, reportedly making other recycled plastics unsaleable.

Last year Innocent drinks stopped using Pla because commercial composting was "not yet a mainstream option" in the UK.

Anson, one of Britain's largest suppliers of plastic food packaging, switched back to conventional plastic after testing Pla

in sandwich packs. Sainsbury's has decided not to use it, saying Pla is made with GM corn. "No local authority is collecting compostable packaging at the moment. Composters do not want it," a spokesman said.

Britain's supermarkets compete to claim the greatest commitment to the environment with plant-based products. The bioplastics industry expects rising oil prices to help it compete with conventional plastics, with Europe using about 50,000 tonnes of bioplastics a year.

Concern is mounting because the new generation of biodegradable plastics ends up on landfill sites, where they degrade without oxygen, releasing methane, a greenhouse gas 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. This week the US national oceanic and atmospheric administration reported a sharp increase in global methane emissions last year.

"It is just not possible to capture all the methane from landfill sites," said Michael Warhurt, resources campaigner at Friends of the Earth. "A significant percentage leaks to the atmosphere."

"Just because it's biodegradable does not mean it's good. If it goes to landfill it breaks down to methane. Only a percentage is captured," said Peter Skelton of Wrap, the UK government-funded Waste and Resources Action Programme. "In theory bioplastics are good. But in practice there are lots of barriers."…

Well, isn’t that the problem in a nutshell? In theory, it’s always a good idea, but since no one has bothered to think it through, in practice, it turns out to be a disaster.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:49 | link | comments

Activist queen: Jordan’s babelicious queen wants to “empower” Muslim women. Oh, not by giving them any power per se—that would contravene basic principles of sharia. No, Rania wants chicks to become technically adept at using the ‘Net, so they can log on and tell everyone how “liberated” and educated they are. That will help dispel unfortunate stereotypes about Muslim women being unliberated and uneducated. And if need be, Rania is quite prepared to grovel to the oily Royals who force chicks to wear black pup tents in public and who won't allow women to drive. From Arab News:

JEDDAH, 27 April 2008 — Jordan’s Queen Rania yesterday called for a global dialogue to dismantle stereotypes of Muslims on the one hand and of the suppression of women in the Arab world on the other.

“It is through a global dialogue that such stereotypes of Muslims can be dismantled, and it is through women’s sustained education and progress that such misconceptions can be removed,” the queen said in her keynote address at the sixth annual symposium of Effat College on learning and technology at the Jeddah Hilton.

She termed “Cyber Citizenship: Vistas and Visions” as the apt theme for the two-day symposium at a time when the World Wide Web and the Internet are progressing by the day.

Makkah Gov. Prince Khaled Al-Faisal, who is also a member of the Effat College board of trustees, in his opening address, said that in today’s world of technology (cyber world) there is a huge lot of information and knowledge that is easily available.

“It is our responsibility to make maximum use of it and see that progress is achieved coupled with human development,” he said, adding that the Kingdom is committed to achieve its goals with all possible means and tools.

Princess Loulwah Al-Faisal, vice chairman of the board of trustees and general superviser of Effat College, in her welcome remarks said, “It is a great honor to me and to Effat College to see Queen Rania here.”

Education in Saudi Arabia has received constant support from all of its kings, she said, adding that Saudi women were competent and able learners.

Queen Rania said, “Stereotypes like women are being suppressed and that they are not educated should be answered by Arab and Muslim women themselves with the help of the Web and the Internet. Efforts are already being made by women to dismantle such misconceptions and much more needs to be done through a sustained campaign.”

She added, “Effat College, which has a rich history of 50 years in educating girls, is one of the examples of how women are graduating in large numbers. I wish they (the West) see what is happening in Effat College... It is not only happening in Effat College but all over the Kingdom. Historically, Arab countries realized that women needed to be educated. After all, they (women) are the pillars of any society and its development.”

Emphasizing that technology was important in today’s world, she said, “But this era is not of technology alone. Our era is one of vision, wisdom and innovation...When I talk of empowering women, it does not mean giving up our traditions and culture, and emulate the West. Our faith has honored women from the Prophet’s time. It is also our belief that when you educate one woman you educate an entire society.”

You just know the Saudis want to stick her in a burqa and make her shut up.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:29 | link | comments

Nuts!: State moves to ban fake testicles on vehicles.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:01 | link | comments

Same old blame game: How many gazillions of shekels have been squandered on the money pit known as "Palestine"? And what have "investors" received for their moolah? Zilch.Squat. Nada. And just whom to you suppose the money men blame for this state of affairs? Yasser Arafat, the con man/kleptocrat who helped himself to a lion's share of the investment? 'Tis to laugh. Hamas, the genocidal terror arm of the Muslim Brotherhood? Of course not. The Arabs and their lackies on the international scene, intent on using the Palestinians as a battering ram to destroy the Jewish state--an effort historian Bat Ye-or has dubbed "Palestinianism"? Don't be silly. Those responsible for the Palestinian economy's stasis are--I hope you're sitting down--the Jews.

Wow. We are powerful.

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:34 | link | comments

Can the jihadis win?: Yes they can, says Lee Harris, author of The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam’s Threat to the West. Bruce Thornton reviews the book on the private papers site, and outlines the four factors that Lee says could well put the jihadis on top:

The first is the demographic explosion of Muslims in Europe, all the while Europeans do not reproduce even at replacement levels. Thus a potential jihadist fifth column is spreading in the heart of the West. Second is the naïve idealization of democracy, the spread of which in Muslim countries will not create cultures of “rational actors” but “will end by empowering those who are most opposed to the very modernization that the West wishes to bring about in Islamic culture.” Third, the West has abandoned the idea of “cultural protectionism,” instead seeing pride in one’s own culture and its superiority as a species of benighted intolerance rather than as a necessary defense mechanism. This self-loathing has been institutionalized in multiculturalism, which encourages Westerners “to feel ashamed of their own cultural traditions” as racist, exploitative, and intolerant, not to mention inhibiting the individual’s desire to pursue his own happiness according to his own desires.

Finally, Western cultural decadence weakens our defenses and gives traction to the jihadist hatred of the West. Living off the accumulated cultural capital of our more hardy, realistic, and brutal ancestors, we moderns are “intensely individualist, absorbed in the present moment, hostile to all forms of traditional religion and authority, champions of materialism, consumerism, and hedonism.” As such, we believe nothing is worth killing and dying for, leaving us weak in the face of a fanatic enemy, for “an intolerant ethical code will always end by trumping a carpe diem ethical code.” Given that we in the West have demonized “high-testosterone alpha males” and have institutionalized contempt for Western civilization, the West is obviously vulnerable to radical Muslims who “encourage their alpha boys to be tough, aggressive, and ruthless,” and who teach their children “to be willing to die to keep their traditions alive.”

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:23 | link | comments

In the nick of time:  Speeding into the type of action for which he's famous, Mo ElBaradei and his ever-vigilant IAEA watchdogs are going to put on their Inspector Clouseau costumes and try to determine whether there's any truth to the rumour that Syria was building a nuclear installation.

I believe the Jews have already dealt with that "minkey," Inspector.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:03 | link | comments (1)

By George, it's sharia: In the course of doing some research, I came across a pronouncement made by the Organization of the Islamic Conference. To wit: "defamation of religions and prophets is inconsistent with the right to freedom of expression"

Got that? Speaking freely and the right to speak freely are inconsistent (well, that’s the way it works under the terms of sharia, anyway—ed).

Yikes! Who writes their Orwellian material— Barbara Hall?

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:53 | link | comments (2)

Hug a tree; starve a peasant: Mark Steyn on the biofuels debacle. From NRO: 

…So what happened?

Well, Western governments listened to the eco-warriors, and introduced some of the “wartime measures” they’ve been urging. The EU decreed that 5.75 percent of petrol and diesel must come from “biofuels” by 2010, rising to 10 percent by 2020. The U.S. added to its 51 cents-per-gallon ethanol subsidy by mandating a five-fold increase in “biofuels” production by 2022.

The result is that big government accomplished at a stroke what the free market could never have done: They turned the food supply into a subsidiary of the energy industry. When you divert 28 percent of U.S. grain into fuel production, and when you artificially make its value as fuel higher than its value as food, why be surprised that you’ve suddenly got less to eat? Or, to be more precise, it’s not “you” who’s got less to eat but those starving peasants in distant lands you claim to care so much about.

Heigh-ho. In the greater scheme of things, a few dead natives keeled over with distended bellies is a small price to pay for saving the planet, right? Except that turning food into fuel does nothing for the planet in the first place. That tree the U.S. Marines are raising on Iwo Jima [on TIME magazine's cover last week] was most likely cut down to make way for an ethanol-producing corn field: Researchers at Princeton calculate that to date the “carbon debt” created by the biofuels arboricide will take 167 years to reverse.

The biofuels debacle is global warm-mongering in a nutshell: The first victims of poseur environmentalism will always be developing countries. In order for you to put biofuel in your Prius and feel good about yourself for no reason, real actual people in faraway places have to starve to death…

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:06 | link | comments

Waiting game: At the moment, writes Melanie Phillips, everything is more or less on hold pending a decision to do something about Iran:

Everyone is waiting. In Israel, they are waiting for the 60th-anniversary celebrations to be over and for President Bush to have visited and returned home. Then, they say, the IDF will make its long-anticipated major incursion into Gaza. Then at last the problem of the ever-intensifying attacks by Hamas will be dealt with.

Across the world, everyone is waiting for the interminable US presidential election to be over. Then, many believe, the paralysis over Iran will end. Then, they think, the prospect of a military strike on Tehran will either swiftly be realised or permanently be laid to rest (depending on who actually wins).

And meanwhile the hallucinatory Middle East appeasement process meanders ever onwards, accompanied by dark rumblings about a secret backstairs sell-out Israel deal being cooked up between Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas and enlivened by the Israel-phobic Jimmy Carter, fresh from paying homage at the tomb of Yasser Arafat, announcing the prospect of peace in our time with Hamas.

But waiting comes with a heavy price tag. It provides alibis for putting off what needs to be done quickly; it results in the slaughter of yet more innocents; and it gives the advantage to the player for whom time is crucial. That player is Iran.

The reason Israel hasn’t done what it needs to do in Gaza is not because of anniversaries or official visits. It is because of Gilad Shalit, the IDF soldier who is now in his twenty-second month of captivity by Hamas.

Israel will not invade Gaza because of fears that Shalit will then be killed. Shalit is being used by Hamas as a hostage to prevent Israel from wiping it out. The result is that other Israelis are being relentlessly attacked and murdered. And the puppeteer pulling Hamas’s strings is Iran.

The West tends to put the various Middle East conflicts into boxes marked ‘Israel-Palestinian dispute’, ‘Iraq’, ‘Lebanon’, ‘Hamas’, ‘al Qaida’ and ‘Iranian nuclear threat’. The fact is, however, that all roads lead to Iran.

Iran is simply the centre of strategic gravity in the region and in the war against the free world. It has encircled Israel through Hamas in Gaza and through Hizbollah in Lebanon, where it has also all but snuffed out the Lebanese democracy.

In Iraq, Iran is the central player. The Petraeus surge may have been successful. And the Iraqis recently surprised many by deciding to fight the Iranian-backed supporters of Moqtada al Sadr in Basra, causing Iran to beat a strategic retreat. But the fact is that, in Iraq, Iran has suborned government, insurgent and religious leaders.

As for al Qaida, the idea that Shi’ite Iran would never ally with Sunni terrorists is a lethal illusion. Iran has had working arrangements with al Qaida for years, as it has with other Sunni terror groups in their common cause against the West.

And although the West may not realise it, Iran has spread there too. In Britain and Europe, it has a sleeping army composed of Hizbollah cells and Iranian intelligence which uses western Iranian embassies as explosives stores. If Iran is attacked, Tehran will respond by unleashing Iranian terror in the West.

The prerequisite for stabilising all these hotspots — including ‘Israel/Palestine’ — and dealing with global Islamic terror is regime change in Tehran. The question is how…

I have some suggestions:

·         Serve the mullahs cyanide-laced backlava;

·         Put arsenic in the fabric softener they use to keep their robes fluffy soft;

·         Whoopy cushions under their prayer mats—make ‘em sound ridiculous and inspire an uprising;

·         Use “fauxtography” to fabricate shots of the Ayatollahs in a variety of compromising homosexual positions, and let sharia take its course.

And last but certainly least

·         Send Bambi Obama to Tehran so everyone can hug and “talk it over”.

 

On second thought, scratch that last one.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:54 | link | comments

A brave man: Salim Mansur tackles an issue that is virtually unmentionable in our multicultist Trudeaupia—whether unlimited immigration is a good idea. To even raise the possibility that it isn’t contravenes our most basic assumptions, and will likely get you branded a “racist” or “Islamophobe”. That’s why Mansur’s raising it is an act of defiance and courage. From the Toronto Sun:

…During the past 40 years British society and others in the West have changed greatly due to immigrants arriving from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America.

In Canada, for instance, the numbers of foreign-born residents in Toronto -- including some suburban areas such as Markham -- are now more than half of the population.

As the profiles of western societies are altered by immigration, the concern or fear expressed by Powell has become more real in the post-Sept. 11, 2001 world of Islamist terrorism.

Immigration in general is a touchy subject given the West's history of overseas colonies and empires, and any discussion of the linkage between immigration and terrorism is surely of an explosive nature that politicians will avoid.

The politics of multiculturalism is also unhelpful by penalizing those politicians -- Powell being the most notable -- willing to probe the negative effects of immigration.

But the link between immigration and terrorism needs examining and public discussion, not denial. Immigration policy that gets to be viewed as undermining security will lose public support.

Since 9/11, however, discussion of immigration policy merely in terms of the demographic needs of the West -- with an aging population and a shriveled birthrate -- without addressing concerns of public security is increasingly untenable.

Migration of people from their native homes to foreign lands is an old phenomenon. Its contributions have been mostly positive in the making of our hugely vibrant world.

There is nevertheless a negative side to migration when movements of people have adversely affected politics, worsened conflicts, inflamed bigotry, magnified fears of aliens and increased cultural tensions among ethnic communities…

Someone get Salim some purple Kool-Aid—pronto. The voodoo isn’t working. Drink some down quickly, Salim, so you’ll be able to think those happy thought about every ethnic community being equally wonderful, with each having something equally fantabulous to add to our vast, multicultural tableau.

It is a small world, after all, and here in Canada, we embrace it—the whole kit, caboodle and sharia.

Update: A cautionary tale from the U.K.

Update: A cautionary tale from our own backyard.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:10 | link | comments

Three of a kind: Is Reverend Jeremiah Wright's word view--i.e. that America is run by "rich white people" who are inherently racist by virtue of their being white--really any different from the mindset of Canada's human rights commissions and their blather about powerful, inherently racist white "hegemons"?

For that matter, aren't Bambi's ideas about white folks--his white granny is "racist" because she's a "typical white person"--in line with this type of thinking; thinking which, in making sweeping judgements about one particular race, is, in effect, racist?

Or am I taking things "out of context"?

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:26 | link | comments

Supernatural sabotage:R. Emmett Tyrell, Jr. in the New York Sun has an explanation for why Bambi’s campaign seems to be running into trouble--it’s the fault of pranksome spirits:

Anyone who has followed politics studiously over the years is aware that there are gifted politicians who, for whatever reason, eventually find their campaigns haunted. I do not mean haunted by accidental events or by a clod or two at campaign headquarters. I mean haunted. I mean visited by the weird, by supernatural pranksters, by what our Islamic friends call djinni.

Clearly, after months of suave upward mobility, Senator Obama is now in this unfortunate condition. The bizarre is his companion. The paranormal is a constant possibility. Though the members of the press are too stuffy to mention it, recent setbacks to his campaign are not normal.

The gifted young senator appears in San Francisco amongst his fellow moral and intellectual colossi. For an instant he lets down his guard. In this closed meeting he blurts out what he really thinks, and somehow his remarks are taped.

A “friendly” Web site posts his remarks, and all hell breaks loose. All of a sudden every politically alert American knows that in San Francisco (of all places) Mr. Obama explained that religion is the opiate of the gun nuts, who have been out of work and living angrily in jerkwater for “twenty-five years.”

How did that tape ever get out, and why would Mr. Obama’s friends at that Web site not recognize its potential for ruin?

Or consider a more recent and even more bizarre interlude. Senator Obama is having breakfast in Scranton, Penn. A reporter asks for his reaction to President Carter’s meeting with the thugs of Hamas, and Mr. Obama waffles.

Perhaps, that is not so surprising, for he has waffled along the campaign trail. But now comes the paranormal part. The wretch waffled while actually eating a waffle — reportedly a Belgian one.

Weirder still, Mr. Obama acknowledged his waffle, exclaiming to the reporter: “Why can’t I just eat my waffle?” and “Just let me eat my waffle.”

Now, after the Pennsylvania primary, I suspect Mr. Obama’s odd occurrences will multiply. There will be freakish moments as there have been with other ill-starred leaders, reminiscent of Jimmy Carter being attacked by an amphibious rabbit in 1979 or Richard Nixon photographed while strolling along a sandy beach wearing wing-tip shoes before impeachment was even contemplated…

I have another explanation for the "gotchas": Bambi's character flaws.

That and plenty of bad karma, of course.

Update: Jimmy Carter and the "killer bunny"--a story I had completely forgotten about.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:56 | link | comments

Bad for the Jews: The Coen brothers are teaming up with anti-Zionist novelist Michael Chabon to bring his book, The Secret Policeman's Union, to the screen. The novel posits the non-existence of Israel and the existence of a crummy Jewish entity in Alaska.

In other words, the same kind of arrangement Ahmadinejad has called for.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:30 | link | comments

Many unhappy returns: The cover of the current issue of the Atlantic poses the timely question: “IS ISRAEL FINISHED?”

By the same token, the cover of this week’s Maclean’s promises to explain “WHY ISRAEL IS FINISHED”.

Is it just me, or do you sense a trend developing for coverage of Israel’s 60th?

Posted by: scaramouche at 22:02 | link | comments (1)

How's this for lunacy?: The eco-fiends have assuaged their consciences about climate change by driving cars that use fuel made from corn. As a direct result, the Earth is now facing mass starvation.

Talk about your unintended consequences. Why not find a way to run cars on fuels of which there's an inexhaustible supply--like, say, poopy, or liberal guilt?

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:30 | link | comments (2)

No direction Homi: Confession-time. I loathe, despise and abominate the lingo of academe—that high-falutin’ and impenetrable writing that is an insult to clarity and the magnificence of the English tongue. Roger Kimball has an acerbic post about one such academic language-mangler, a most esteemed “perfesser”:

Many of my readers, being sensible souls, will be innocent of the name Homi K. Bhabha. The former Chester D. Tripp Professor of the Humanities at the University of Chicago is now the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities and Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard as well as Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities at University College, London. Pretty impressive, eh? Professor Bhabha made his name as an exponent of “post-colonial studies,” i.e., a reader-proof species of anti-Western multicultural claptrap that even now makes many graduate students salivate. In case you believe that “reader-proof” is unkind, allow me to introduce you to this snippet from his much-admired essay “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse”:

 

Within that conflictual economy of colonial discourse which Edward Said describes as the tension between the synchronic panoptical vision of domination—the demand for identity, stasis—and the counter-pressure of the diachrony of history—change, difference—mimicry represents an ironic compromise. If I may adapt Samuel Weber’s formulation of the marginalizing vision of castration, …

Well, let’s draw a veil over Mr. Weber’s “marginalizing vision.” You get the drift. And the amazing thing is that Professor Bhahba can keep it up over the long haul. The whole essay is just like that. Here, for example, are his concluding observations

 

In the ambivalent world of the “not quite/not white,” on the margins of metropolitan desire, the founding objects of the Western world become the erratic, eccentric, accidental objets trouvés of the colonial discourse—the part-objects of presence. It is then that the body and the book loose [sic] their representational authority. Black skin splits under the racist gaze, displaced into signs of bestiality, genitalia, grotesquerie, which reveal the phobic myth of the undifferentiated whole white body.

I first read those words back in the 1980s and knew instantly that its author was destined for academic stardom. And so it has come to pass. Homi K. Bhabaha has it all: exotic name, correct ethnic background, impeccable left-wing political opinions, and a prose style that you’d need dynamite to penetrate. Professor Bhabha spends most of his time emitting anti-Western and especially anti-American sentiments for his admiring colleagues and students. What better place to dispense wisdom about the depredations of the West than Harvard University, that great friend of the wretched of the earth?...

What better place? Well, there’s always a spot next to Bambi. He seems to be highly receptive to that sort of blather.

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:07 | link | comments

Not meaning to toot my own horn or anything but...:  I won.

Well, maybe a little toot.

Posted by: scaramouche at 15:47 | link | comments (2)

Bambi the Vampire Slayer: Today's unintentionally amusing headline comes from the Los Angeles Times: Barack Obama to meet unconditionally with dreaded 'Fox News Sunday.'

Scary! He'd better take some garlic and a wooden stake, just to be safe.

Posted by: scaramouche at 15:09 | link | comments

The Wizard of Ob: Charles Krauthammer has a deliciously caustic piece about how Bambi has been the architect of his own misfortune. In the early days, when Americans didn’t know who he was, he could coast on his good looks, soothing voice and piffle about “change”. (Another American salesman, Willie Loman, coasted on “a smile and a shoeshine,” until he, too, was done in by his own character flaws.) As the days went by, though, voters gained a clearer understanding of who Bambi was—and there was a gaping chasm being the image and the reality. He was not, as he claimed, someone who transcended matters of race; his 20-year long mentorship by that that acist rogue, Jeremiah Wright, proved that that was a bunch of hogwash. He was not a “new” kind of politician; he was merely new on the scene, and thus very inexperienced. He was not the great “unifier”; being of the hard left, someone who contemptuously dismisses the great unwashed as being “bitter” (because they don’t think like him), he is probably the most divisive of the three candidates. It also didn’t help that he hangs out with the likes of Bill Ayers. In his former life, Ayers was a rich, Weatherman who displayed his loathing for America by bombing American; currently, he’s a rich university professor who displays his loathing for America by poisoning the impressionable minds of its youth: a lateral move which seems to have troubled the Bambino not in the least.

As Krauthammer notes, Bambi dubbed all these unpleasant revelations, each one seemingly another nail in the coffin of his presidential hopes, “distractions”. But as Krauthammer makes clear, they weren’t “distractions.” They were the main event.

I’d compare Bambi to the Wizard of Oz. At first, when we didn’t know him, he was like “the great and powerful Oz”—mysterious, awesome, compelling. With every “distraction,” though, the true nature of the “Wizard” became clearer, until we found out that he is not the commanding presence we thought he was and that he pretended to be. He is actually a funny little man standing behind a curtain, frantically pulling some levers in a futile bid to maintain the illusion. But it's too late. The mask has slipped. And without the benefit of the special effects, it turns out he really isn’t impressive at all.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:54 | link | comments

Rick’s Procrustean effort: The Globe and Mail’s resident aging hippy-dippy Socialist, Rick Salutin, weighs in on the matter of free speech:

Free speech, if you can afford it

Case 1: The Ontario Human Rights Commission has declined to rule on a complaint brought by Arab and Muslim groups against Maclean's and writer Mark Steyn. The OHRC said its mandate doesn't cover such things but added, like a consolation prize: "Freedom of expression should be exercised through responsible reporting." This is clearly wrong. Freedom of expression is exercised through irresponsible reporting - or what some people see that way. That's when the need to protect it arises.

The interesting part of the case is that the complainers asked not for an apology or correction - but for the right to reply, unedited, in Maclean's. Maclean's refused. I think this clarifies the stakes on both sides. For Maclean's owner Ted Rogers, what counts is not his right to free expression but his right to distribute massively what he chooses (through those he hires) to express. It's the reverse of the freedom to sleep under a bridge, which is available to rich and poor alike. The other guys are free to publish magazines, too. But the complainers demanded the right to express themselves with the same reach that Ted Rogers provides to Mark Steyn. Call it the right to equal amplification of free expression. That doesn't sound unreasonable, but it turns a legal issue into an economic one. How you respond to that in a society where money controls media, I have no idea…

With Rick, that old Marxist, it’s always about the money—even when it isn’t. And he’s determined to make everything fit into the frame of “economics” no matter what.

My letter:

Rick Salutin makes it sound as though those who complained to the Ontario Human Rights Commission about a Mark Steyn cover story in Maclean’s were at an “economic” disadvantage because the magazine is owned by Ted Rogers. In fact, the three law students and the Canadian Islamic Congress had the definite advantage here. They didn’t have to pay a single penny to have their complaints considered the human rights commissions (and they complained to several, with only Ontario’s being dealt with so far). Those on the receiving end of the complaints are mostly private individuals like Ezra Levant, who have to foot their own onerous legal bills. And when found “guilty”, as is inevitable in such “hate speech” cases, they will also have to pay a sizeable fine.

As for the supposed “unfairness” of the law students and the CIC not being able to reach as wide an audience as Maclean’s, their comment pieces and letters to the editor were published in many newspapers across the country. As such, they can hardly complain that they didn’t have a chance to air their views.

Finally, Mr. Salutin, as is his wont, frames this as a matter of “economics”—rich Mr. Rogers vs. the poor “little guy.” It should be clear, though, that this isn’t about money, it’s about freedom—the right of people in a free society to say things that others may find insulting or offensive. And in this battle, with the HRCs on their side, it’s the "little guy" who is calling the shots.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:58 | link | comments

For Pete's sake: One reason I am the way I am is because one of my formative influences was the folkie protest song. Yes, it's true: lefties like Pete Seeger made me. One of Pete's most stirring numbers was an English-language version of a German song, Die Gedanken Sind Frei--"Thoughts are Free." And you know what? It holds up very well in the age of human rights commissions and "submit you kafirs, or else."

To give you a taste, here's Pete (with Arlo Guthrie on backup) performing a short version of the song circa 1978.

And here are the lyrics--still stirring, still inspriring:

Die Gednaken sind frei

My thoughts freely flower

Die Gendanken sind frei

My thoughts give me power

No scholar can map them

No hunter can trap them

 

No man can deny

Die Gedanken sind frei

 

I think as I please

And this gives me pleasure

My conscience decrees

This right I must treasure

My thoughts will not cater

To duke or dictator

No man can deny

Die Gedanken sind frei

 

Tyrants can take me

And throw me in prison

My thoughts will burst forth

Like blossoms in season

Foundations may crumble

And structures may tumble

But free men shall cry

Die Gendanken sind frei

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:06 | link | comments

Just shoot me: Bush assures Abbas Palestinian statehood a "high priority."

Update: A selection from the Andrew Lloyd Weber songbook that was not featured on American Idol this week (from the beloved ALW musical "Dubya and the Amazing Oxymoronic Sharia-Democracy"):

I closed my eyes to the Jew-hatred,

Said it was fated:

Not one state but two.

So what if one

Is genocidal

And Jews’ll bridle?

Any “peace” will do.

 

My legacy on “peace” is riding.

My time I’m biding; Condi Rice is, too.

The NIE has tied my hands now.

It understands now

Any “peace” will do.

 

A mushroom cloud, a sound so loud.

The mullahs’ nukes make them so proud.

The Jewish state reduced to ashes

In a flash of light.

 

May I return to 9/11?

Folks sent to heaven

By a crazy few.

I told the world

You’re with or ‘gin us.

Now I’m the menace--

Any “peace” will do.

(Any “peace,” any “peace” will,

Any “peace,” any “peace” will do.)

Posted by: scaramouche at 22:50 | link | comments

The U.K., then and now: In the 1960s, it was the “mods” vs. the “rockers”. Today, it’s the “mods” (i.e. moderate Muslims) vs. the “fans” (the religious fanatics). Yasmin Alibhai-Brown—a “mod”— surveys the current scene. From This Is London:

[Glamazon, “revert” to Islam] Jemima Khan was born into boundless wealth, handed exquisite looks, glides in and out of parties in gorgeous dresses, is resented (and yes, envied) by ageing social democrats like me. We have nothing at all in common - except we do, as it turns out.

A connection unexpectedly came to light on Tuesday at the British Museum at the launch of an enlightened new Muslim think-tank - the Quilliam Foundation, set up by Ed Husain, who wrote a best-selling book, The Islamist, about his journey to and back from Islamicist jihadism. Khan spoke from her heart about her respect for Islam and also her worries about hardliners and young Muslims - her sons included.

It was moving and personal. Millions of us live that complexity, traversing between worlds, refusing to be owned by authoritarian " leaders". She also said she had received death threats for expressing her views. Such intimidation is par for the course when you challenge Islamic Stalinists - Muslims may flock to vote, but many have yet to grasp the meaning of intelligent argument.

This is why some of us are launching British Muslims for Secular Democracy (BMSD) at the Royal Society of Arts on 1 May. We are starting with a debate on the compatibility of secular democracy and Islam.

Sparks will fly, no doubt. We want younger Muslims to make choices for themselves. For far too long British Muslims have lived in a democracy but have not matured into autonomous democrats. The expectation is that communities take direction from community leaders and deliver block votes to political parties as if they are cash-and-carry sacks of rice. Some Muslim leaders have, for example, ordered their flocks to vote for Ken. Disgraceful, yes, but this is how it is on the Indian subcontinent and in Arab lands.

A Muslim child is taught never to question and to follow instructions from adults, fathers, grandparents, teachers, mullahs and political manipulators. Respect for elders is admirable, but this excessive culture of obedience is stunting the development of Islamic communities.

Khan, Husain and BMSD reveal to Muslims their entitlement to be liberated and enlightened. And suddenly many more seem to be listening. Tuesday felt full of hope. But my fear is that fanatics see that and may yet blow it away.

Um, isn’t a sense of “entitlement” part of the problem? Also, I’m pretty sure that, according to the lexicons of both the National Counterterrorism Centre and the EU, the phrases “Islamicist jihadism” and “Islamic Stalinists” are strictly verboten.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:06 | link | comments

Watch your tongue: The National Counterterrorism Centre, which describes itself as “the primary organization in the United States Government (USG) for integrating and analyzing all intelligence pertaining to terrorism and counterterrorism,"  has issued some guidelines for discussing the war on terror. They boil down to this: you can say the word “terrorist”; you can talk about totalitarianism; but whatever you do, don’t you dare mention anything to do with Islam. From AP:

• Don't use the term "jihadist," which has broader religious meanings beyond war, or "mujahedeen," which refers to holy warriors.

• Do say "violent extremist" or "terrorist."

• Don't use the term "al-Qaida movement," because this makes al-Qaida seem like a legitimate political movement.

• Don't use "Islamo-fascism" and other terms that could cause religious offense.

• Do use the term "totalitarian."

• Don't label groups simply as "Muslim."

• Do use descriptive terms to define how a group fits into society. For example: South Asian youth and Arab opinion leaders.

• Don't use "caliphate" when explaining al-Qaida's goals, as this has positive implications.

• Don't use "salafi," "Wahhabist," "sufi," "ummah" and other words from Islamic theology unless you are able to discuss their varied meanings. Particularly avoid using "ummah" to mean the Muslim world, as it is a theological term.

Using “caliphate” has “positive implications”? Maybe for “salafis,” Wahhabists,” "the al-Qaida movement" and other “Muslim groups” who make up the “ummah,” but surely not for the U.S.

That being said, the above lexicon should find favour with two key sectors: those (clueless, politically correct dhimmis) looking to be “sensitive” to the feelings of others; and those looking to ensure that public discourse is sharia-compliant.  As someone who belongs to neither sector, I think it's like something out of Orwell--or a ruling by one of Canada's exquisitely sensitive human rights commissions.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:31 | link | comments

Satire update: The remarks by Libya's UN ambassador (see post below) inspired me to update a cheeky WW2-era ditty:

Ahmadinejad has only one left ball.

Nasrallah has two but they are small.

Arafat--hung like a gnat.

And poor old Mashaal

Has no baalls at all.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:08 | link | comments

They blow up so fast: Court sees 7/7 bomber grooming baby daughter for terror. 

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:41 | link | comments

Axis of evil outreach project: The North Korean pipsqueak with the boring wardrobe and the Elvis 'do was helping Syria's chinless Baathist eye doctor go nuclear.

Until the Jews went and spoiled the fun, of course.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:32 | link | comments

Dhimmis draw the line: Usually the dhimmi diplomats at the UN are quite content to fall in line with their Arab/Muslim overlords. On rare occasions, though, an Arab will go too far, and the dhimmis will muster the wherewithal to object. That’s what happened Wednesday, when Libya’s UN ambassador compared Israel to the Nazis. From the Jerusalem Post:

The United States, Britain, France and other members walked out of a closed meeting of the UN Security Council late Wednesday after Libya compared the situation in Gaza to Nazi concentration camps in World War II, council diplomats said.

The walkout was a rare protest by diplomats on the UN's most powerful body against one of their own members. Libya is the only Arab representative on the council.

Council members were meeting privately late in the afternoon to discuss the possibility of issuing a press statement following a briefing on the situation in the Middle East. Assistant Secretary-General Angela Kane had reported on the escalation in violence and growing humanitarian plight in Gaza as well as rocket attacks against Israel.

According to several diplomats, Libya's deputy UN Ambassador Ibrahim Dabbashi ended a long speech about the plight of the Palestinians by comparing the situation in Gaza to the concentration camps set up by Nazi Germany to exterminate Jews. Some 6 million Jews and between 220,000 and 500,000 Gypsies were killed during the Nazi Holocaust.

Immediately after Dabbashi mentioned the concentration camps, diplomats said, French Ambassador Jean-Maurice Ripert, US deputy ambassador Alejandro Wolff, Britain's deputy ambassador Karen Pierce, Belgian Ambassador Johan Verbeke and Costa Rica's deputy ambassador walked out of the council's consultation room.

South Africa's UN Ambassador Dumisani Kumalo, the current council president, then ended the meeting.

"We support the South African presidency's decision to close the meeting," Britain's Pierce said in a statement. "A number of council members were dismayed by the approach taken by Libya and do not believe that such language helps advance the peace process."…

“Dismayed,” were you? That’s why you’re a diplomat and I’m not. The word I would have used is “sickened”.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:23 | link | comments (1)

Buddhists? Wiccans? Seventh Day Adventists?: Some unknown arsonist has torched a Chabad synagogue in Miami.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:04 | link | comments

The 600-lb. gorilla in the war room: It's Iran, a nation that is waging a war on the U.S in Iraq, whether or not the U.S. is prepared to admit it.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:52 | link | comments

Fairy tales: Here’s a heart-warming story about a cultural exchange involving kiddies and drawfs, from mullah mouthpiece the Tehran Times:

TEHRAN -- A play based on the Brothers Grimm classic fairy tale “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” was staged by a group of German and Iranian schoolchildren at Naqsh-e Jahan Square in Isfahan on April 22.

They also took part in a workshop on the tale, which was turned into an animated film by Walt Disney in 1937.

Iranian children also entertained the German group with a theatrical adaptation of the Iranian folk tale “Mah-Pishuni”.

The three girls and seven boys from Germany and a number of their teachers were invited to Iran by the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults.

They will be visiting a number of monuments in Isfahan as well as handicrafts, carpet-weaving, and pottery workshops.

Officials will try to familiarize the German children with some aspects of the people’s culture during their three-day sojourn in the city which has been dubbed “half the world”.

The teachers said that Iran is the first non-European country the German students have ever visited.

Isn’t that precious? I wonder if the kids had time to take in that other “entertainment” in Mullahville: stringing up homosexuals. It’s a regular Cirque de Dead-Gay.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:43 | link | comments

Monumental demise: John Podhoretz visits Washington's "Newseum"--a massive tomb for the daily press--and pens an elegy for a dying medium.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:23 | link | comments

Why "peace in our time" is fated to fail: I can name the reason in four words--because Arabs hate Jews.

P. David Hornik on the FrontPage site uses a few more than that to arrive at the same conclusion.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:06 | link | comments (2)

Solitary epiphanies: Melanie Phillips comments on a provocative article that appeared in the Guardian:

I am following with no little fascination the controversy over David Edgar’s article in the Guardian last Saturday, which has upset certain left-wing folk by suggesting that writers such as Christopher Hitchens, David Aaronovitch, Nick Cohen, Andrew Antony, Martin Bright, David Mamet and Ed Husain are but the latest to have deserted the left and moved to the right. Oh -- and me…

Phillips' words reminded me of one of my favourite quotes. It was made in the mid-19^th Century by Charles Mackay, author of a book with one of my favourite titles—Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. The quote:

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one!

Too true. The problem being that if Western civ. hopes to survive the 21^st Century, we’re going to have to find some way to hasten the wake-up process.

Posted by: scaramouche at 22:43 | link | comments

Oddly enough: Here's a rather macabre news item obviously intended to elicit a few yucks, courtesy those wacky Wahhabis over at Arab News:

RIYADH, 23 April 2008 — Two men who prepare dead bodies for burial got involved in a fight in front of the Death Affairs Office here, the Al-Riyadh daily reported. A man, whose relative had just died, approached the two men asking them which one would like the job of washing the dead body. The two began to fight over who would wash the body and each one began pulling the man toward his side. In the tussle, they somehow managed to rip the official burial papers. The man expressed his disgust at the two people saying that they did not put into consideration his feelings on losing a relative and were only concerned with making money. Lucky for him, there were police officers nearby who came and arrested both of men.

Oh ho, such a slapping on the knees! (Wasn't that a Beastie Boys song: "You Gotta Fight for Your Right to Bury"?) The Reuters story about the stolen penises was much funnier, though.

Posted by: scaramouche at 22:06 | link | comments (1)

Jew-hatred, unpacked: Hillel Halkin explains that, paradoxically, the hatred has nothing to do with and everything to us. From the New York Sun:

…The first explanation [for Jew-hatred] holds that political anti-Semitism has little to do with who Jews are in themselves. Anti-democratic political movements, it is said, need scapegoats and Jews have always been handy targets, in part because they are a small and politically vulnerable people, in part because long centuries of Christian and Muslim prejudice against them have made it easy to stir up feelings against them. If it weren’t the Jews, it would be someone else — but it often is the Jews, because no one else is as convenient.

The second explanation holds that anti-Semitism has a great deal to do with who Jews are in themselves. There is, it is said, something about them that rubs certain kinds of people the wrong way. Although what this “something” is, is debatable — it has been variously defined as Jewish non-conformism, Jewish innovativeness, Jewish curiosity, Jewish clannishness, Jewish aloofness, Jewish stubbornness, Jewish skepticism, Jewish cosmopolitanism, Jewish intelligence, Jewish commercial skills, Jewish competitiveness, and Jewish proteanism, to name but a few qualities that have been associated with Jews — it has invariably been perceived as a threat by all those who believe in closed, regimented societies that seek to impose monolithic standards of thought and behavior on their members.

Which of these explanations is the right one? Probably, both. They are not, after all, mutually exclusive. Jews are easy to scapegoat and Jews have had, historically, qualities that many people find annoying. What Jews can take comfort in is the thought that, for the most part, the people most annoyed by them are those who tend to be most rigidly opposed to anyone who doesn’t think or act the way they do. Jews have always been a good litmus test of a society’s tolerance for difference.

It is no fun having enemies, especially if they are the kind given to proclaiming their intention to destroy you and if they may be capable one day of acting on their intentions. But it is nothing to be ashamed of, either. “Tell me who your friends are and I’ll tell you who you are,” is an old adage. Enemies are every bit as good an indicator.

As a Jew, I wouldn’t count too much on God’s promises. We’ve been let down by them before. But a sober gaiety in the face of our enemies is perhaps not such a bad attitude. We’ve had to deal with Ahmenidjads and Nasrallahs in the past and we’ll presumably have to deal with them again in the future. Whether through no fault of our own or through some feature of our being, they’re attracted to us. The thought of us gives them no peace. We should take it as the honor that it is.

I’m very “honoured”. Now please knock it off.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:25 | link | comments

Can't wait to try the Moqtada al-Sadr amazing flying carpet ride: Disneyland comes to Baghdad.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:43 | link | comments

She said/he said: She (Condi) says she told him not to meet with Hamas. He (Jimminy) says she did no such thing.

Someone's fibbing.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:37 | link | comments

Today's nutty alarmist headline: Penis theft panic hits city.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:33 | link | comments

A: Libya, Iran, Cuba, Russia and Pakistan: Q: Who’s going to be organizing the 2009 anti-Fiesta of antisemitism in Durban? Claudia Rosett has more on the preparations:

 They all have seats on the 20-member preparatory committee which has just begun a two-week meeting in Geneva to plan for this Durban II pow-wow —which now looms as a reprise of the anti-democratic, anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, anti-American 2001 conference that was Durban I. This round, Libya is chairing the preparations. Cuba gets to send not one, but two officials to the planning party; one to plan and the other to act as rapporteur.

 

From a number of democracies, including Canada, the U.S. and Israel, there has been enough protest over this farce so that even UN Human Rights Commissioner Louise Arbour has interrupted her grieving over the 2007 execution of Saddam Hussein to note that there are concerns surrounding Durban II “which if not squarely confronted and resolved, may ultimately jeopardize a successful outcome of the process.”

 

Give us a break, Louise. The “process” here has patently nothing - zip, zero, nada — to do with fighting racism. It has everything to do with assorted thug states draping themselves in the mantle of the UN and abusing the vocabulary of genuine human rights, the better to attack democratic societies — starting with Israel and proceeding to the rest of the hit list maintained by the thugocracies of Libya, Iran, Cuba & Co. Thanks to UN sponsorship, their perverted “process” is thriving. Durban II is a gross insult to anyone genuinely fighting racism. In the propaganda wars of the UN, this conference is a coup for the club of thugs.

 

Would it be too much to ask that as plans roll ahead for the “Durban Review Conference” — as it is called —the U.S. State Department land a counter-punch on the side of truth, human dignity and genuine human rights? How about America introducing a resolution at the UN to give this conference and its preparatory committee an honest name — say, “Thugs R Us” —?...

 

Personally, I prefer Judenhassapalooza. But “Thugs R Us” would be my second choice.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:11 | link | comments

The audacity of opacity: The IAEA says that Iran has promised to "to clarify" its nuclear intentions.

In other words, to further muddy the waters so the watchkittens'll back off again.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:39 | link | comments

Calling all kafirs: It's the dhimmitude, stupid.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:16 | link | comments

CIJA's slap: Groucho Marx once said that he wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have him as a member. That’s something the Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy might want to consider as it makes its pitch to be allowed into the UN’s Fiesta of Judenhass, Durban II. The umbrella for Canada’s Jewish advocacy groups, including the Canadian Jewish Congress and B’nai Brith, CIJA is begging Iran, of all countries, for permission to join the club (and thus the Jews' clubbing)—an action that amounts to a slap in the face of the Harper government, which has refused to show up at this odious event.

Oh, well. It wouldn’t be the first time the Jews were their own worst enemy.

Here’s Olivia Ward’s article in the Toronto Star about CIJA’s “battle”.

And here’s the letter expressing my disbelief at the pointless bravado:

I’m not entirely sure why the Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy wants to attend the upcoming Durban II conference on “racism”. Canada has already sent its regrets, since that event is likely to be a reprise of Durban I—an excuse for the Arab and Muslim states to unleash a torrent of abuse on the one nation they have unfairly branded as being the most “racist”—Israel. Why participate in—and thereby validate—such a farce? And why beseech Iran, the nation that has vowed to wipe Israel off the map, to be “allowed” to attend?

The Israel-bashers are going to have their little hate-fest no matter what. It makes far more sense to stay home and jeer at it from a safe distance.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:25 | link | comments

Well, shut yo' mouth: The mullahs' hairy sock-thingy promises to "slap the mouth" of anyone who has negative words about the nuclear Mahdi-summoning project.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:09 | link | comments

Softening the blow: CAIR-CAN founder Sheema Khan is up to her old tricks, trying to persuade the Globe and Mail’s gullible readers that the Koran doesn’t say what it clearly does say. Today she wants us to know that, despite what we may have heard, the holy book does not, I repeat, does not, sanction wife-beating:

…Finally, there needs to be an honest examination of the Koranic passage - Chapter 4, Verse 34 - that supposedly sanctions wife-beating. The verb in question, "dharaba," is invariably translated as "to beat," even though it also means "to leave." The Prophet Mohammed - who is the example for all Muslims to follow - never struck any of his wives. He admonished those who did.

Yet, many translations and classical Koranic commentaries counsel striking one's wife. Mawlana Mawdudi, an influential figure from South Asia, wrote that some women were actually in need of a beating. Some scholars temper this approach by saying the beating should be administered with something as "light" as a twig. With so many religious authorities advocating beating in one form or another, is it any surprise that Muslim men - and women - also believe it to be true?

Thankfully, there are exceptions. During a recent Friday sermon, Imam Abdurrahman Alhejazy of Ottawa spoke forcefully against domestic abuse, reminding congregants of the Prophet's example. Egypt's Grand Mufti, Sheik Ali Gomaa, has said "hitting one's wife is totally inappropriate." More voices are speaking out.

Not everyone agrees with this approach. Last year, the Canadian office of the Islamic Society of North America threatened to ban a new English translation of the Koran that advocated a man "leave," rather than "beat," his wife. It was overruled by Ingrid Mattson, the Canadian head of ISNA.

But there is a larger question for Muslims to consider. Are women inferior, or worthy of the same treatment as men?

Good question, Sheema, but, first things first, let’s see what the Koran and Hadith have to say about wife-beating.

Now, getting back to your question, according to your Prophet, who, after all, was merely taking dictation via an angel from the Big Kahuna himself, the answer would have to be yes, women are inferior to men.

My letter:

I can understand why Sheema Khan would want to “soften the blow” of the passage in the Koran (4:34) which calls on men to “beat” their uncooperative wives: The words may have played very well to a 7^th Century audience in the Arabian subcontinent, but these days they are decidedly antiquated. Nonetheless, for untold numbers of women around the world, the passage validates the harsh treatment meted out every day by spouses who believe that such behaviour is good and proper.

If that is to change, this passage and others teachings pertaining to women must be confronted head on. To pretend that they don’t exist or have been “mistranslated” will serve only to perpetuate the suffering.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:01 | link | comments

Camp Chubby Jihadi?: You send your kid to summer camp to lose a few, and he ends up being trained for the jihad.

Don’t you hate when that happens?

From the Toronto Star:

So was it simply a fat camp for Muslim boys?

Or was it a jihadist training camp where attendees were encouraged to wage war on Canada because of its military presence in Afghanistan?

Those are some of the questions that remain after a video was played in a Brampton court yesterday, in which a police officer questions a youth charged with belonging to a homegrown terror cell.

"These guys were like religious people who just wanted to practise, y'know, their faith," the then-18-year-old is seen telling RCMP Sgt. John Tost, the day after a police swoop resulted in the arrests of the so-called Toronto 18. "I don't think they were planning to do something towards Canada or anything.

"Basically we were just chilling, reading the Qu'ran," the teenager recalled of the activities at the 12-day camp that took place in December 2005 near the town of Washago, Ont. "Some guys are lazy, y'know, they're gaining weight. For two weeks we just kind of worked out."

The workouts, he said, included playing around in the snow, chopping down trees, playing with paintball guns and jogging. He also admitted to shooting a gun, which he said was primarily handled by someone whom the officer reveals to be an informant.

The young man, who was charged as a youth and cannot be identified by law, goes on to explain that some in attendance were "very intelligent" so why would they "ruin their lives trying to attack something?"

During the 75-minute interview, Tost points out to the teenager that hundreds of officers would not have been part of a multi-million dollar investigation spread over thousands of hours if the group was simply on a winter camping trip.

In the video, the officer describes the teen as "respectful," "well-raised" and "a nice young guy" who was reeled in by an adult co-accused who is "manipulative" and "gets other people to do his dirty work for him."

"You got caught up and led into a situation," Tost tells him. "It might have been exciting, but it's overtaken things and right now it's a very, very serious matter. We've seized bomb-making chemicals. We've got people here under arrest we believe were going to commit attacks against buildings and people here in Canada."

The teen disputes being manipulated and appears surprised by the alleged seizure, saying: "Hold on, hold on, before you go on, bomb-making, we, we?"

Tost portrays the camp to him as a breeding ground where one of the alleged ringleaders "planted the seeds" to commit violent acts.

"It all got its start at the camp in Washago ... but then it took on a life of its own and just got worse and worse and worse. And nobody put the brakes on," the RCMP officer tells him…

From the sounds of it, more like a death of its own:

Hello Mummy, hello Daddy,

Here I am at Camp Jihadi.

Camp is full of flabby chappies

But we’re trying to work it off by gettin’ scrappy….

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:55 | link | comments

"Culture" in "Palestine": Here's what passes for "entertainment" in Hamastan--the Hamas "culture minister" (tee hee) appears on Hamas TV and reads excerpts of that riveting fabrication, Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

With or without the puppets?

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:55 | link | comments (1)

God-law on the march: At both the local level—through our self-righteous thought cops—and the international level—through the UN’s Human Rights Council (a supposedly reconstituted “commission” but actually same old, same old)—“human rights” is the smokescreen the enemies of freedom are using to systematically spread sharia. Here’s the great Ibn Warraq on how it’s being done at the UN. From New English Review:

The central issue, of which we should not lose sight, of the Fitna Affair is not whether the film by Wilders is good, bad, blasphemous, or offensive to Muslims, but rather freedom of expression. Human Rights begin with freedom of thought, and expression; democracy depends on it. Sixty years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, a noble document whose articles 18 and 19 guarantee freedom of thought, conscience and religion, and freedom of opinion and expression, Islamic countries on 28 March, 2008 managed to kill it.

The 57 Islamic States with support from China, Russia and Cuba succeeded in forcing through an amendment to a resolution on Freedom of Expression. The UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression will now be required to report on the “abuse” of this freedom. Theo van Gogh, the Danish cartoonists and Geert Wilders, and anyone criticising Islam, or the Sharia will now be deemed to have "abused" the freedom of expression. In other words, instead of protecting freedom of expression, the amendment will now be limiting freedom of expression.

The nations that created the United Nations, and promulgated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 were committed to the concepts of equality, individual freedom and the rule of law. In the last fifteen years, the UN has been taken over by the Islamic States, whose record on human rights is abysmal, and who have a very shaky notion of what constitutes democracy, and whose allegiance is to a seventh-century worldview defined exclusively in terms of man’s duties towards Allah. The Islamic States have been supported by those nations with a hatred of the United States of America, and those countries who see their future economic and political interests as being best served by their alliances with the Islamic States.

The Human Rights Council [HRC] replaced the old Commission on Human Rights in June 2006 following criticism that the latter was too selective and too politicised. However, the HRC is equally selective and politicised as it has failed to condemn human rights abuse in the Sudan, Byelorussia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and China, for example, while constantly reprimanding Israel and Israel alone. The HRC is now dominated by countries that think that you should be killed for changing your religion, a clear violation of article 18 of the 1948 Declaration; quite clearly it is incapable of fulfilling its central role, that of promoting and protecting human rights. And yet, the western delegates instead of voting against the amendment abstained. The West blithely, complicitly, slides to its self-immolation...

Burn now; pay later.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:25 | link | comments

Shilling for Bambi: John Kerry’s brother encourages the Jews to vote O: (Warning: reading the following may cause your head to explode.) From JTA:

BOSTON (JTA) -- As I traveled the country for my brother John Kerry, speaking with Jewish groups and other communities in 2004, I learned that the most powerful way to show you have listened and understood is to bring the stories you have heard to wider audiences. As one African-American woman in Seattle put it, "I want to hear you call my name."

When Barack Obama delivered his remarkable speech on race in Philadelphia, I felt as a member of the Jewish community that he was calling my name. Speaking with moral clarity about Rev. Jeremiah Wright, he said a view "that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam," is "profoundly distorted."

Sen. Obama was calling my name in Ramallah in 2006 when, under tough questioning from students at Bir Zeit University, he told them flat out that the United States will always stand by its commitment to Israel's survival.

He was calling my name from the pulpit of Martin Luther King Jr.'s church earlier this year when he challenged anti-Semitism among African Americans. Contrary to "King's vision of a beloved community," he said, "the scourge of anti-Semitism has, at times, revealed itself in our community." He was saying the same things even before he entered politics, telling an interviewer in1995 that "anti-Semitic and anti-Asian statements are not going to lift us up."

These words speak like actions, because they represent moral choices to stand up for Israel and against anti-Semitism when silence would have been easy.

As Obama's candid acknowledgement "of our old racial wounds" recognizes, the sometimes uneasy alliance of Jews and African Americans has been strained in recent decades. But at times this alliance, born in the common narrative of slavery to freedom and the common enemies of oppression and bigotry, has been a powerful force for social change.

Early in the 20th Century, W.E.B. Dubois co-founded the NAACP with Jews, and Jack Greenberg succeeded Thurgood Marshall as legal director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Inc. And the Anti-Defamation League was founded in response to the lynching in Georgia of Leo Frank; in addition to fighting anti-Semitism, it also aims "to secure justice and fair treatment of all citizens."

The alliance had its apotheosis with King and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marching arm-in-arm in Selma, Alabama. For me as a young man, the picture of them across the front page of the newspaper imprinted a powerful image of Jewish commitment to social justice that undoubtedly influenced my later decision to become a Jew by choice.

In today's world, we need African Americans who will stand arm-in-arm with the Jewish community in advocating for Israel and standing up to anti-Semitism -- not only within the black community but also among Africans, Europeans and Muslims across the world. Jews everywhere have good reason to worry when anti-Semitism is widely accepted in much of the world and Israel faces an existential threat such as it has not seen since the early days of independence.

Barack Obama has shown -- by speaking out rather than staying silent -- that he will be such an advocate. His words bear witness to what he called this week his "kinship" with the Jewish community. And he has shown by the power of his words how forceful an advocate he can be…

Yo, Kerry bro’: never mind the “power of his words”. What about the “power” of his kinship with his nearest and dearest—Big Daddy Jeremiah Wright and good bud’ Rashid Khalidi?

Nice try, though.

Posted by: scaramouche at 15:50 | link | comments (1)

Polygamy style watch: Unibrows, frumpy granny dresses and hair-dos that look like challahs.

Eat your heart out, Tinsel Town.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:19 | link | comments

The fixer of broken souls: Caroline Glick warns Americans about Bambi’s fascist proclivities. From RealClear Politics:

Speaking in February of the man she knows better than anyone else does, Michelle Obama said that her husband, Illinois Senator and candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination Barack Obama, is the only candidate for president who understands that before America can solve its problems, Americans have to fix their "broken souls."

She also said that her husband's unique understanding of the state of souls of the American people makes him uniquely qualified to be President. Obama can do what his opponent in the Democratic race Senator Hillary Clinton, and Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, cannot do. He can heal his countrymen's broken souls. He will redeem them.

But then, saving souls is hard work, and Mrs. Obama won't place the whole burden on her husband. He'll make the Americans work for him. As she put it, "Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zone. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed."

At base, Mrs. Obama's statement is nothing less than a renunciation of democracy and an embrace of fascism. The basic idea of liberty is that people have a natural right to live their lives as usual and to be uninvolved and uninformed. And they certainly have a right to expect that their government will butt out of their souls.

IN CONTRAST, fascist societies, as Jonah Goldberg notes in the latest issue of National Review, are all about the notions of "unity" and "change" and melding our broken souls into a fixed, united will for change that Obama has made the core theme of his campaign. Goldberg compared "unity" with "patriotism," and explained that while the latter connotes the willingness to defend the moral values of a society, unity is bereft of any moral content. "The only value of unity is strength, strength in numbers - and... that is a fascist value. That's the symbolism of the fasces, the bundle of sticks that in combination are invincible."…

Another thing fascist societies have in common: fascist leaders.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:00 | link | comments

Muslim endeavors to turn back time: Literally.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:13 | link | comments

 "My, what big teeth you have, Hamas." "The better to eat you with, Mr. Carter":

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:07 | link | comments

Hillary not pilloried: Hillary Clinton told ABC’s Good Morning America that if Iran considers nuking Israel while she’s president, the U.S. would have no recourse but to “attack Iran” and “totally obliterate” it.

She's allowed to say such things, of course, because she's a Democrat. Were a Republican contender to talk that tough, we'd never hear the end of it.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:49 | link | comments (1)

Ask Ayman: The zealot with the unsightly prayer icky (a.k.a. the Islamic stigmata) is taking questions again. From CNN:

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- Al Qaeda still has plans to target Western countries involved in the Iraq war, Osama bin Laden's chief deputy warns in an audiotape released Tuesday to answer questions posed by followers.

The voice in the lengthy file posted on an Islamic Web site could not be immediately confirmed as al Qaeda No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahiri's. But it sounded like past audiotapes from the terror leader, and the posting bore the logo of As-Sahab, al Qaeda's official media arm

The two-hour message is billed as the second installment of al-Zawahiri's answers to more than 900 questions submitted on extremist Internet sites by al Qaeda supporters, critics and journalists in December.

Responding to a question of whether the terror group had plans to attack Western countries that participated in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and subsequent war, al-Zawahiri said, "My answer is, yes. We think that any country that joined aggression on Muslims must be deterred."

In a question signed by the Japanese news agency Kyodo asking if Japan remains a target because it once had troops in Iraq, al-Zawahiri said Japan provided help "under the banner of the crusader coalition" and "therefore it participated in the crusader campaign against the lands of Islam."

"Our Islamic faith urged us to resist the injustice and aggression even if they were the most powerful on Earth. Should Japan take a lesson from this?" he said. ..

The zealot also wanted to clear up that rumour, beloved of troofers, that the Jews were behind 9/11:

Al-Zawahiri also denied a conspiracy theory that Israel carried out the September 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S., and he blamed Iran and Shiite Hezbollah for spreading the idea to discredit the Sunni al Qaeda's achievement.

Al-Zawahiri accused Hezbollah's al-Manar television of starting the rumor.

"The purpose of this lie is clear -- (to suggest) that there are no heroes among the Sunnis who can hurt America as no else did in history. Iranian media snapped up this lie and repeated it," he said.

"Iran's aim here is also clear -- to cover up its involvement with America in invading the homes of Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq," he added.

Iran cooperated with the United States in the 2001 U.S. assault on Afghanistan that toppled the Taliban, an al Qaeda ally.

The comments reflected al-Zawahiri's increasing criticism of Iran, which al-Zawahiri has accused in recent messages of seeking to extend its power in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq and through its Hezbollah allies in Lebanon. Until recent months, he had not often mentioned the Islamic republic.

Al Qaeda has previously claimed responsibility for the 9/11 attacks...

Looks like that longstanding squabble between the Arabs and the Persians is heating up again. Which would be a good thing save for the fact that one or both sides may soon get them hands on some nukes.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:31 | link | comments

A tale of two butchers: Only one of them deals in meat.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:05 | link | comments

The difference between Pakistan and Canada: In Pakistan, they riot over Danish 'toons and other "insults" to Islam. In Canada, they riot over...hockey.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:00 | link | comments

Funny, it's had that effect on me for a long time: BBC news relaunch leaves viewers 'feeling sick".

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:41 | link | comments (1)

Busy little devils: U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates says Iran is "hell-bent" on acquiring nukes.

"Hell" being the operative word here.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:35 | link | comments

Pompous gasbag’s “breakthrough”: Oh frabjous day! Hamas is ready to deal with Israel, says Carter (the headline in the Globe and Mail).

Consider me dubious:

Freelance busybody, former president Carter,

Neglected to read the Hamas Charter.

Its reason to be:

Push Jews into the sea.

Which kind of makes any “peace” a non-starter.

 

The Toronto Star's headline is essentially the same: Hamas open to peace with Israel, Carter says.

 

My letter, begging to differ:

 

Jimmy Carter’s hearing must be failing. Hamas never said it would be “open to peace” with its despised enemy, Israel. How could it be, when it remains committed to a charter calling for Israel’s destruction? What Hamas said was that, under certain unrealizable conditions--including a withdrawal to borders which would fatally weaken Israel--it might be prepared to discuss the possibility of a ten year “truce”.

Some breakthough.

I suggest Carter consult an audiologist as soon as possible. Ideally, at some locale far removed from the Middle East, where the freelance busybody’s “good intentions” threaten to make a bad situation even worse.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:29 | link | comments

New-fangled Amis: Pre-9/11, novelist Martin Amis was a die-hard lefty, as inclined as any of that ilk to champion the Palestinians and kvetch about Israel. Since then he’s made a remarkable volte face—i.e. gotten a clue or two. His conversion is documented in his new book about the impact of Islamic terrorism. Quel surprise, the chattering classes on both sides of the Atlantic—who are not Islamophilic so much as they are hyper-sensitive to charges of Islamophobia—believe the book signals that something is seriously amiss with Amis: well, they would, wouldn’t they? Here’s a bit of City Journal’s review:

..His initial response to September 11, Amis acknowledges, suffered from naive rationalism, a need for an explanation, a justification. He even came close to embracing the confused doctrine of moral equivalence that so many on the left have signed on to. America must have deserved it, must have had it coming for killing people in the Gulf War or for ignoring the sufferings of distant peoples. How else to explain Islamic rage?

But as the War on Terror proceeded, Amis—like his friend Christopher Hitchens and French thinkers André Glucksmann and Bernard-Henri Lévy, but unlike most other left-leaning writers—took the measure of what free societies were up against. “The most extreme Sunni Islamists want to kill everyone on earth except the most extreme Sunni Islamists; but every rank-and-file jihadi sees the need for eliminating all non-Muslims, either by conversion or execution,” he writes.

Enough with moral equivalence, Amis concluded. Whatever the relative sins of the West, the paranoid, irrational, death-loving, freedom-hating Islamic ideology—“horrorism,” he dubs it—was pure totalitarian evil, a “maximum malevolence,” and had to be called such and resisted. He now bristles at the charge (often directed at him) of Islamophobia. A phobia, after all, is an irrational fear, and it’s not irrational to fear something that seeks to exterminate you.

Along with the human bombs and the severed heads, the post-9/11 world has also brought with it numbing tedium. Not just a normal, everyday boredom, but a “superboredom, rounding out and complementing the superterror” of what Amis calls the “suicide-mass murderer.” Long airport lines and random knapsack searches are only the surface reflection of this monotony, a future in which riding a city bus could become “like flying El Al.” On a deeper level, the boredom reflects “the nullity of the non-conversation we are having with the dependent mind.” Just contemplate the Islamic utopia for a moment, Amis says—a bleak world, absent variety and women, “where the sole entertainment is the public execution.”

Engaging with this dead zone of the human spirit appears to be our fate for a long time to come, which certainly doesn’t inspire the intelligence or the heart. The Left’s victimology now sickens Amis. “Naturally one would be reluctant to question the cloudless piety of the Palestinian mother who, having raised one suicide-mass murderer, expressed the wish that his younger brother would become a suicide-mass murderer too,” he writes, sarcasm dripping. “But the time has come to cease to respect the quality of her ‘rage’—to cease to marvel at the unhinging rigor of Israeli oppression—and to start to marvel at the power of an entrenched and emulous ideology.” It’s painful to stop believing in the pure spirit of the underdog, Amis admits. And it’s painful, too, “to start believing in a cult of death, and in an enemy that wants its war to last for ever.” But intellectual and moral responsibility requires just such a conversion.

Amis opposed the Iraq War, seeing it as a wrong move in the global struggle against Islamic fanaticism, but he sympathizes with Tony Blair, who as British prime minister had to shoulder the burdens of that war. And he is withering toward those (again, mostly on the left) who want America and its allies to lose in Iraq. “There are vast pluralities all over the West that are thirsting for American failure in Iraq, thirsting for regional conflagration, for a Fertile Crescent bridle-deep in gore—because they hate George Bush,” Amis observes. “Perhaps they don’t realize that they are co-synchronously thirsting for an Islamist victory that will dramatically worsen the lives of their children.”…

Actually, I believe they do realize it, but don’t care because they think the West is so wicked it deserves such a fate.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:50 | link | comments

CSM query: Will Carter's Hamas foray bear fruit?

Yes, bitter, rancid, putrid ones.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:35 | link | comments

First and foremost: Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms is a Johnny-come-lately in the rights game. According to the Islamic  Supreme Council of Canada (a name that, tee hee, always brings a smile to my face) there’s an ur-Charter of Rights and Freedoms, one that predates our Trudeaupian document by many, many centuries.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:29 | link | comments

Rest in peace: Peace monger/mischief maker Jimminy Carter says Hamas and Syria are open to peace.

Well, of course they are. Unfortuntately for the Jews it's the kind of "peace" that comes when Islam's in the driver's seat.

The Jews want peace, not dhimmitude; the Arabs want dhimmitude and/or death for the Jews--part and parcel of the Islamic vision of "peace".

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:37 | link | comments

Unlikely pundit: British P.M. Gordon Brown is going to ask that well known pedagogical expert, gyrating Colombian pop tart Shakira, to advise him on the best way to teach school kids a vital “lesson”. From the times online:

Fresh from authorising a £50 billion debt swap to shore up the British banking system, Gordon Brown was preparing today to discuss Third World education issues with Shakira, the Colombian pop star.

The Prime Minister is due to hold telephone talks this evening with the sultry Latin singer, whose hits include Hips Don’t Lie.

When he was setting out his stall for the premiership last year, Mr Brown famously said: "I don't believe politics is about celebrity."

But he appears to have changed his tune since then, inviting George Clooney to Downing Street earlier this month to mull over the Darfur crisis, before appearing on the American Idol talent show to pledge Britain's support for the eradication of malaria.

Tonight’s event is one of a series organised by the Global Campaign for Education (GCE), to highlight a pledge by world leaders that every child will have access to quality primary education by 2015. Some 72 million children are still missing out, according to the coalition of charities and teaching unions.

Shakira, who has sold more than 50 million albums worldwide, has her own educational foundation in Colombia and is also a Unicef goodwill ambassador.

On Wednesday, hundreds of schools around the UK are set to take part in the World’s Biggest Lesson, which will see pupils from 120 countries taught the same subject simultaneously.

Oh, well. If she’s a Unicef goodwill ambassador, I guess she must have a handle on things. It’s not like the UN chooses its goodwill ambassadors solely on the basis of their good looks, right?

What next? Soliciting Lindsay Lohan's advice on teaching kids about the perils of sluttishness and substance abuse?

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:11 | link | comments

Shudder!: President Obama and a nuclear Iran.

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:30 | link | comments

Come again?: Hamas won't recognize Israel but will accept its right to exist.

That's a new one on me--"I accept your right to be, but refuse to recognize it." Makes sense in nutty Hamastan, I guess.

Posted by: scaramouche at 15:55 | link | comments

UN Catch-22—or is it?: Speaking in front of General Assembly, Pope Benedict decried how power at the UN is concentrated in the hands of, ahem, “a small number,” but went on to say that the “world's problems call for collective interventions by the international community”—which is all but impossible when power is concentrated in the hands of a small number.

Given the gridlock, isn’t it pointless to look to the UN to be a force for good in the world since it is in the pocket of the “small number” (actually, quite a substantial number—57 to be exact, the largest block in the joint) who put their own interests well ahead of the international community's?

Or is this the Pope’s subtle way of suggesting it’s time to strip the “small number” of their power?

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:54 | link | comments (1)

“Rights” amok: Melanie Phillips describes the lunacy of “human rights”—you are obliged to put your own safety at serious risk in order to preserve the “human rights” of those who are actively trying to kill you:

How al Qaeda must be gloating. What would any sane country do if it discovered that living among it was Osama Bin Laden’s right-hand man, who was wanted by his own country on terrorism charges? It’s a fair bet that it would deport him to that country as fast as it could.

What does Britain do in those circumstances? Declare that extradition would be a breach of his human rights and prepare to release him from jail under indefinite house arrest, courtesy of the British taxpayer, to the tune of some £1,000 per month in welfare benefits.

This is the surreal situation following the Appeal Court judgment this week on Abu Qatada, who is currently in jail fighting deportation to his native Jordan where he was convicted in his absence on terrorist charges in both 1999 and 2000.

The judgment, which overturned a ruling by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission that Abu Qatada should be deported, ruled instead that he could stay because, if Jordan prosecuted him, the evidence against him might have been obtained through torture and thus be in breach of human rights law.

In a separate but simultaneous judgment, the court cleared two Libyan terrorist suspects to remain in Britain for the rest of their lives because it did not believe assurances by Libya that it would not torture them if they returned.

One of these men had been found with a map marked with the flightpath to Birmingham Airport. The other was said to be involved with an Italian terror cell which was poised to launch a terrorist attack in Europe.

As a result of this second ruling, the Home Office has been forced to abandon deportation cases against a further ten Libyan suspects.

Between them, these judgments have left the Government’s anti-terrorism strategy in ruins. Despite Tony Blair’s declaration after the 2005 London bombings that ‘the rules of the game have changed’ and that terrorist suspects would henceforth be thrown out of the country, not one such suspect has been deported.

In the case of Abu Qatada, this notorious godfather of terrorism who turned Britain into the European hub of al Qaeda — causing foreign security services to dub it ‘Londonistan’ — has now made a monkey of us yet again.

How on earth have we got ourselves into such an insane position?

The reason is the way the judges have interpreted the European Convention on Human Rights. In cases in 1989 and 1996, the European Court of Human Rights extended the scope of the Convention’s prohibition against torture, making it impossible to deport suspected terrorists to any country thought to be abusing human rights.

And the English courts applied this ruling far more zealously than those in any other country.

This meant that, even if people turning up at immigration control presented a clear danger to this country, Britain let them all in if they claimed they would be ill-treated if they were sent back home. And by the same absurd reasoning, once they were in the courts wouldn’t allow them to be sent back.

This is precisely what happened with Abu Qatada. He turned up in 1993 and successfully claimed leave to remain on the basis he had been tortured by the Jordanians.

Maybe this was true. But Britain accordingly decided he should be allowed to live here even though — as it was repeatedly warned — he was a threat to the entire Western world.

Of course torture is a terrible thing, and it is right that Britain should not be involved in its practice. But this fine principle has been progressively stretched to ever more ludicrous lengths.

It is simply perverse in the extreme to require a country ever to put its own security at risk. Indeed, the Geneva Convention gives countries an explicit right to return any refugee who can reasonably be regarded as a danger to society.

Yet the English courts have laid down that Britain must accommodate people posing just such a risk — if there is a possibility that torture might be employed not in Britain but in another country altogether…

In the words of English historian Arnold Toynbee,“Civilizations die through suicide, not murder.” And it should be clear by now that "human rights" is our poison pill.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:02 | link | comments

Another UN gangbang: Can’t hardly wait for the next round of the UN’s favourite pastime—shtupping the Jews at the behest of the Muslims. From JTA:

The upcoming U.N. World Conference Against Racism in Geneva is likely to single out Israel for criticism.

Observers expect next week's forum, strongly influenced by Islamic countries, to once again gang up on Israel, the latest effort to isolate the country on the international stage.

“Demonization and de-legitimization of Israel happens daily at the U.N. Human Rights Council, so I can't see how this will be any different,” one Jewish analyst said this week.

This two-week event, chaired by Libya, is actually a “preparatory conference” for a global gathering that will take place in 2009. The last such event, in 2001 in Durban, South Africa, became so politicized while singling out Israel for the worst violations of international law, that both the American and Israeli delegations walked out.

This time around, while the Jewish state will almost surely receive disproportionate attention, the 57-member Organization of Islamic Conference is expected to renew its campaign to curtail freedom of speech and expression in order to counter “Islamophobia” and “blasphemy” – as epitomized by a series of Danish cartoons in 2005 and a Dutch film earlier this year, which were both seen as defaming Islam itself.

Blasphemy “would turn the clock back a few hundred years, so we’re obviously opposed to that,” said Ronald Eissens, of the Dutch watchdog ICARE/Internet Center Anti-Racism Europe. “This conference could be interesting or boring, depending on if the African countries go along with the OIC, and if the Europeans show their teeth”.

Among the Jewish groups likely represented at the Geneva event will be UN Watch, the European Union of Jewish Students, B’nai Brith, Hadassah, and others.

Which begs the question: why? Why are these groups bothering to show up at this farce? It's like missionaries willingly showing up at the cannibal cook-out. Wouldn’t it be far more effective to slip 'em the bird and skip this UN Wannsee Conference, making sure to issue a statement explaining why they were refusing to participate, as Canada did when it spurned Durban II? In any event, I don’t know why the UN even bothers to maintain the pretence that such conferences are “against racism” when everyone knows they’re really an excuse to eff-you-see-kay Israel. Do the Muslims and their UN lackeys think we’re stupid or something?

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:50 | link | comments (2)

The meaning of the hijab: Here in North America we are often told that wearing the hijab is a feminist statement and a question of "human rights". Over in Egypt, though, an Egyptian author has a much different interpretation. She says it often symbolizes men’s fear of and contempt for a woman’s intelligence. From MEMRI:

There are women who wear the hijab whom I appreciate, and there are women who do not wear the hijab whom I do not appreciate. It depends on their character. But I am against the hijab in the sense that... What does it mean for a woman to wear the hijab? What does it mean to consider women's hair to be 'aura [body parts that are forbidden to expose]? What does it mean to cover the head? The head is the most important part of the human being. The head contains the brain. When the brain stops working, our life comes to an end. When our brain works, we do great things. Human beings use their brains to create everything we see - airplanes, missiles, medications, books, plays, and films. All these great things are produced by the brain.

So why do they cover the head? Because it is a symbol. It symbolizes the assumption that women have no brain, no head, and that the man, her husband, is her head, her brain. I oppose this symbol, which, in my opinion, is against women and is inappropriate."

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:59 | link | comments

Et tu, India?: I had expected better from the world’s largest democracy. From Arab News:

NEW DELHI, 21 April 2008 — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will visit India toward the end of this month. The announcement was made yesterday by National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan during a discussion at International Institute of Strategic Studies-Citi India Global Forum. Ahmadinejad will visit India on his way to Sri Lanka.

The visit will take place at a time when Iran is facing UN sanctions and isolation from several countries. India has always advocated diplomacy toward Iran. “In dealing with Iran, we are better poised and better placed than anyone else, but we do not necessarily have to be part of a compact of certain countries,” Narayanan said.

Citing caution exercised by India in not getting involved into “conflict diplomacy,” Narayanan appealed to the international community: “Please do not treat Iran like any other nation. It is a big country, it is a major country with tremendous influence. You need to deal with it diplomatically.”

Ahmadinejad’s two-day state visit to Colombo begins April 28. He is expected to be in Delhi in the last weekend of April. While in Colombo, the Iranian president will launch a hydropower project in Wellawaya in Monaragala district and sign an agreement for modernizing the Sapugaskanda oil refinery.

This would be Ahmadinejad’s first visit to India. The last Iranian president to visit India was Mohammad Khatami when he was the chief guest at the Republic Day parade in 2003. The last Indian prime minister to visit Teheran was Atal Behari Vajpayee in 2001.

While Indian External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee visited Teheran last year in February, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Mehdi Safari was here in September and Iranian Minister of Economy and Finance Davoud Danesh Ja’fari came here in January.

India has diverged from the US-led move to impose sanctions on Iran as in Delhi’s opinion Iran has the right to develop peaceful uses of nuclear energy, while fulfilling its international obligations. India favors an institutionalized dialogue with Iran on the issue.

“Sanctions or military action is not a lasting solution. They will only exacerbate the situation. We need to evolve something that involves Iran,” according to Indian Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon.

Clarifying India’s stand on Iran’s nuclear policy, Menon said: “Ultimately it is whether or not it (Iran) is implementing the obligations it undertook. It depends on technical assessments which are best done by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).”

Drawing attention to the need for a change in how the world looks at nonproliferation, Menon favored a new international consensus on the issue. As sanctions and military action will only “exacerbate” the situation, “we need to have in place a system to which Iran is party,” Menon said.

Notwithstanding the reservations voiced in various international circles against Iran’s nuclear policy, Indo-Iran ties have continued to progress. Railroad officials of the two countries recently signed a memorandum of understanding. One of its aims is to increase cooperation with International Union of Railways and start work on an India-Iran-Russia railroad.

To give the two countries an insight into each other’s rich heritage and civilization, an Iran Cultural Week will be held here in late April, while an Indian cultural event in Iran has been planned for late May. Organized by Iran’s Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism Organization, the Iran week will run from April 29 through May 6.

Iran’s strategy: keep the Hindus focused on handicrafts and other tchotchkes while the mullahs proliferate like mad.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:40 | link | comments

By their Passover greetings shall ye know them: NYT token right winger William Kristol decodes the not-so-hidden meaning of the candidates’ holiday wishes:

Every presidential campaign has to produce a stream of appropriate statements for religious holidays, patriotic commemorations, and the like. Campaigns don’t expect to win votes with these messages. They produce them because there’s a risk of giving offense to some group or other if they don’t.

And candidates do it because it looks presidential. After all, a substantial portion of any White House’s output consists of official messages recognizing various national milestones, group anniversaries and dignitaries’ birthdays.

So, last week, in the midst of the excitement over the pope’s visit, the Clinton, Obama and McCain campaigns found time to issue Passover greetings. They were of course staff-produced, and somewhat formulaic. Still, differences among formulaic statements can be revealing.

The Clinton statement is the most personal of the three. She claims she has “always been inspired by the enduring words of the Haggadah: ‘In every generation, each of us must see ourselves as if we personally came out of Egypt.’ ” Indeed, she affirms, “I am deeply moved by this timeless cry to stand up to oppression, tyranny and discrimination — wherever they are found.”

Now let’s grant that as first lady and senator from New York, Hillary Clinton has probably experienced more Seders than your typical non-Jewish politician. It may therefore be true that she has been inspired by those words of the Haggadah.

The trouble is that, as so often in her campaign, her greater experience hasn’t given her anything interesting or distinctive to say. The lesson she draws from the story of Exodus is that “it’s through remembering the past that we become strong and effective advocates for all who suffer the indignity and pain of servitude and injustice.”

The sentiments are conventional. But Clinton does manage to convey the impression that she’ll “stand up” and “advocate” in a “strong and effective” way — unlike, presumably, her allegedly all-talk-but-no-action rival, Barack Obama.

Sure enough, the Obama statement is talkier than Clinton’s. For Obama, Passover is a learning experience: “The Seder, with all its rich traditions, has much to teach us all.” Indeed, “its emphasis on teaching children, and letting them demonstrate their knowledge through the traditional asking of questions, embodies the great Jewish traditions of family and education.”

Now, there’s truth to Obama’s emphasis on the Seder as a teaching moment for those involved. But he’s not satisfied with that. The whole country has to listen up.

After all, as Obama says, “American Jews have always played a vital role in our national conversation.” So, Obama urges, “let us continue to engage in dialogue, and to ask ourselves and each other how the Passover story challenges us to question the world as it is, and to seek a future that is more just and more peaceful for all.”

Hillary Clinton’s statement sounds as if it were written by a serious and slightly old-fashioned Reform rabbi, full of the spirit of earnest liberal advocacy. Obama’s message has the feel of a slightly New Age, somewhat hip, multicultural, dialogue-friendly, college-town pulpit.

Not John McCain. He understands Passover as a time for reflection about sacrifice: “As families gather together for Seders, members of the Jewish faith reflect upon the painful sacrifices made by their ancestors, the joys of freedom, and the triumph of inherent goodness over evil.”

Sacrifices for the sake of freedom, the triumph of good over evil — if John McCain was at a Seder this past weekend, he surely would have liked this passage: “In all ages they rise up against us to destroy us; and the Holy One, blessed be He, rescues us from their hands.”

McCain’s statement is also the only one to mention current assaults on Jews. He asks us to reflect on three young Israelis — Gilad Shalit, Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser — who were kidnapped in the summer of 2006 by Hamas and Hezbollah, and “who will celebrate this occasion, once again, in captivity.” McCain recalls his meetings with the families of two of these men in December 2006, reiterates his commitment to seek their swift release, and urges others to do the same.

So if Clinton’s Passover message is liberal, and Obama’s is multicultural, one might call McCain’s Zionist. There’s a clear choice of worldviews here — and not just for Jews, but for all Americans…

I’d feel much better about McCain if he hadn’t vowed to take a “hands-on” approach to “solving” the Israel-Palestinian problem. The best approach would be the opposite of the current one—“hands off” the peace mongering and "hands on" the mullahs in order to halt the Mahdi-summoning project that may shortly reduce both Israel and “Palestine” to a smoking pile of cinders.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:06 | link | comments

Crunching the numbers: Maclean’s caught heck for featuring a portion of Mark Steyn’s book about the baby boom/bust in Europe that is transforming the nature of that continent. A pundit on the FrontPage Magazine site has calculated the “critical mass” required to precipitate the change—and, go figure, only a tiny minority of extremists is required (my bolds): 

Islam is not a religion nor is it a cult. It is a complete system.

Islam has religious, legal, political, economic and military components. The religious component is a beard for all the other components.

Islamization occurs when there are sufficient Muslims in a country to agitate for their so-called 'religious rights.'

When politically correct and culturally diverse societies agree to 'the reasonable' Muslim demands for their 'religious rights,' they also get the other components under the table. Here's how it works (percentages source CIA: The World Fact Book (2007)).

As long as the Muslim population remains around 1% of any given country they will be regarded as a peace-loving minority and not as a threat to anyone. In fact, they may be featured in articles and films, stereotyped for their colorful uniqueness:

United States -- Muslim 1.0%
Australia -- Muslim 1.5%
Canada -- Muslim 1.9%
China -- Muslim 1%-2%
Italy -- Muslim 1.5%
Norway -- Muslim 1.8%

At 2% and 3% they begin to proselytize from other ethnic minorities and disaffected groups with major recruiting from the jails and among street gangs:

Denmark -- Muslim 2%
Germany -- Muslim 3.7%
United Kingdom -- Muslim 2.7%
Spain -- Muslim 4%
Thailand -- Muslim 4.6%

From 5% on they exercise an inordinate influence in proportion to their percentage of the population.

They will push for the introduction of halal (clean by Islamic standards) food, thereby securing food preparation jobs for Muslims. They will increase pressure on supermarket chains to feature it on their shelves -- along with threats for failure to comply. ( United States ).

France -- Muslim 8%
Philippines -- Muslim 5%
Sweden -- Muslim 5%
Switzerland -- Muslim 4.3%
The Netherlands -- Muslim 5.5%
Trinidad &Tobago -- Muslim 5.8%

At this point, they will work to get the ruling government to allow them to rule themselves under Sharia, the Islamic Law. The ultimate goal of Islam is not to convert the world but to establish Sharia law over the entire world.

When Muslims reach 10% of the population, they will increase lawlessness as a means of complaint about their conditions ( Paris --car-burnings). Any non-Muslim action that offends Islam will result in uprisings and threats ( Amsterdam - Mohammed cartoons).

Guyana -- Muslim 10%
India -- Muslim 13.4%
Israel -- Muslim 16%
Kenya -- Muslim 10%
Russia -- Muslim 10-15%

After reaching 20% expect hair-trigger rioting, jihad militia formations, sporadic killings and church and synagogue burning:
Ethiopia -- Muslim 32.8%

At 40% you will find widespread massacres, chronic terror attacks and ongoing militia warfare:

Bosnia -- Muslim 40%
Chad -- Muslim 53.1%
Lebanon -- Muslim 59.7%

From 60% you may expect unfettered persecution of non-believers and other religions, sporadic ethnic cleansing (genocide), use of Sharia Law as a weapon and Jizya, the tax placed on infidels:

Albania -- Muslim 70%
Malaysia -- Muslim 60.4%
Qatar -- Muslim 77.5%
Sudan -- Muslim 70%

After 80% expect State run ethnic cleansing and genocide:

Bangladesh -- Muslim 83%
Egypt -- Muslim 90%
Gaza -- Muslim 98.7%
Indonesia -- Muslim 86.1%
Iran -- Muslim 98%
Iraq -- Muslim 97%
Jordan -- Muslim 92%
Morocco -- Muslim 98.7%
Pakistan -- Muslim 97%
Palestine -- Muslim 99%
Syria -- Muslim 90%
Tajikistan -- Muslim 90%
Turkey -- Muslim 99.8%
United Arab Emirates -- Muslim 96%

100% will usher in the peace of 'Dar-es-Salaam' -- the Islamic House of Peace -- there's supposed to be peace because everybody is a Muslim:

Afghanistan -- Muslim 100%
Saudi Arabia -- Muslim 100%
Somalia -- Muslim 100%
Yemen -- Muslim 99.9%

Of course, that's not the case. To satisfy their blood lust, Muslims then start killing each other for a variety of reasons...

No, no, you don’t understand. It’s not “blood lust.” They’re just really upset about Israel and the great injustice that’s being done to their beloved Palestinian brothers. If we get rid of the Zionist entity, they will fall instantly into a group hug (until the jubilation wears off shortly thereafter, of course).

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:30 | link | comments (1)

Today’s essay question: Jimminy Carter—stupid, insane, or just plain malevolent? Discuss. From CNN:

JERUSALEM (CNN) -- Former President Jimmy Carter said Monday that Hamas is prepared to accept peace with Israel if the Palestinians approve any agreement negotiated with Israel.

Carter's comments came after controversial meetings Friday and Saturday in Damascus, Syria, with exiled militant Hamas leader Khalid Meshaal.

"If President (Mahmoud) Abbas of the Palestinians and Prime Minister (Ehud) Olmert reach an agreement for peace, and if it is submitted to the Palestinians and the Palestinians approve it... Hamas will accept it," Carter said in a Monday interview with CNN.

Carter's series of meetings with top Hamas officials this past week have drawn condemnation from the U.S. and Israeli governments for engaging in diplomacy with a group they consider a terrorist organization.

Carter's tour of the Middle East has also included a meeting in Cairo with two senior Hamas politicians before his meetings with Meshaal.

"I'm not a negotiator, I'm just trying to understand different opinions and communicate, provide communications between people that won't communicate with each other," Carter said Tuesday at the beginning of his trip.

Most Israeli officials have refused to meet Carter during his trip, angry over his insistence that Israel should talk to Hamas. Many Israelis dislike Carter's observations about Israeli policies toward Palestinians in his recent book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid."

U.S. and Israeli officials believe Carter's meetings with Hamas will achieve little, and could actually harm the Middle East peace process.

"Regrettably, Hamas will try to take political advantage of this," Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs David Welch told CNN on Friday. However, he added, "I think President Carter's sincere, this man worked hard on peace."

Later Friday, at a State Department briefing in Washington, spokesman Sean McCormack said, "I don't think people are going to confuse the efforts of a private citizen ... with the very clear policies of the United States government."

"We think it is not useful for people to be running to Hamas at this point and having meetings with Hamas," said U.S. National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley.

For the Israelis, a military solution is an elusive one -- but reaching out to Hamas, Israel insists, will not bring peace.

"Hamas is conducting war against the citizens of Israel," said Ron Prosor, Israel's ambassador to Britain. "What do you say to people who say: 'Why don't you talk, try and talk, and not to shoot'? It sounds very good but the question is, at what stage do you do that?"

And McCormack said Friday: "We find it very odd that one would encourage to have a conversation between the Israeli government and Hamas, which doesn't even recognize the right of the Israeli government to exist. So how can you have -- is that really the basis of a conversation?"

Carter, the man who helped broker the historic peace agreement between Egypt and Israel in the late 1970s, has said he's simply on a "study mission" to support peace, democracy, and human rights in the region.

"It's my dream and my hope, that someday in my lifetime, hopefully this year, we'll see a major breakthrough," Carter said…

It is my dream and my hope that this clueless old gasbag (the word “taqiyah” ring a bell, Jim?) will make like an old soldier and just fade away. Hopefully this year. Now that would be a major breakthrough.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:06 | link | comments

"Hate" in Ontario: According to Barbara Hall, queen bee of the OHRC, Ontarians lodged a mere 2,500 complaints with her organization last year, and she thinks we can do much better (worse?) than that. Now that her organization’s mandate has been expanded, and OHRC busybodies will soon be able to go out into the community and look for people to complain about, instead of sitting back and waiting for the complaints to come to them, I’m sure she’s right. (Hey, that pro-active thing seems to work really for the Saudis and their Preventing Vice/Promoting Virtue HRC.)

Meantime, you can get your high dudgeon in gear next month at an event organized by the Canadian Arab Federation and bought and paid for by you and moi under the auspices of our provincial Attorney General. It’s called “The Hate Crimes Victims Provincial Support Network Workshop” and is intended to “build awareness of challenges facing Canadian Arabs in Ontario, stemming from negative stereotypes,  racism and hate crimes.”

Be there or be rhomboid.

Posted by: scaramouche at 15:35 | link | comments (2)

Hot under the blue collar: Hillary leads in Pennsylvania, including among bowlers, gun owners.

Heh.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:42 | link | comments

Today’s scary excerpt: Things are pretty much under control, seder-preperation-wise, so I thought I'd post this--the Ontario Human Rights Commission's definition of “racism”:

“The Ontario Human Rights Commission describes communities facing racism as “racialized.” This is because society artificially constructs the idea of “race” based on geographic, historical, political, economic, social and cultural factors, as well as physical traits, that have no justification for notions of racial superiority or racial prejudice.

Racism is a broader experience and practice than racial discrimination. It is an ideology that either directly or indirectly asserts that one group is inherently superior to others. Racism can be openly displayed in racial jokes and slurs or hate crimes, but can also be more deeply rooted in attitudes, values and stereotypical beliefs. In some cases, these are unconsciously held and have evolved over time, becoming embedded in systems and institutions, and also associated with the dominant group’s power and privilege.” 

Yikes. Reading this lefty tripe I am instantly transported back to university, where I am listening to some dishevelled sociology prof whinge about “blaming the victim” and the hegemony of whites.  

So racism is an “ideology,” is it? Does that include an “ideology” that clefts the world in two and that is itching to install a caliph in order to “racialize” (i.e. dhimmify) one part of the planet and dominate the whole enchilada by virtue of the powers and privileges embedded in its inflexible, inequitable system of God-law?

No? I thought not. Allow me to hang my head in shame and offer profuse apologies in advance lest I be convicted of a Maclean’s-type though crime.  

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:34 | link | comments

One Mo before I go: Israel's 60th is looming and you know what that means--time to spoil the party. Here's Mo Elmasry--one of the foremost champions of human rights, or at least, of Human Rights Commissions--in Canada explaining to the CIC website's faithful readers that Zionism is riddled with hatred for Palestinians.

Wrong again, oh Sock Puppet-master. True, over the years, the Palestinians and other Arabs haven't done a lot to endear themselves to the Jews of Israel--it's kind of hard to feel warm and fuzzy about people who rig up their kids in plastics explosives to blow you up--but it's clear that, as always, Mo is suffering from a bad case of projection.

To add insult to injury, just below Mo's sage insights, the CIC features the words of noted crackpot academic, Ilan Pappe (whose surname, I've been told, is pronounced as though there's an accent at the end as in: Ilan Pappé is full of crappé).

Mo and Ilan: a toxic twofer just in time for Pesach.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:27 | link | comments (1)

Passover break: There's a slab of raw beef and sundry other uncooked comestibles beckoning me to come and transform them into something delectable, so I'm signing off until Monday. For those of the tribe, Chag sameach. For everyone else, weekend sameach.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:10 | link | comments (1)

There are none so blind…: Ezra Levant reports that even die-hard HRC booster, Dr. Dawg, has seen the light. Sort of. Alas, Bernie Farber of the Canadian Jewish Congress still lingers in the dark. Here’s Bernie’s letter in the Toronto Star:

Alan Borovoy has set up a straw man in his arguments against the Canadian Jewish Congress. Citing excerpts from Mark Steyn's book, as reprinted in Maclean's magazine, Borovoy states, "Whatever a tribunal or a court might ultimately decide, how can the congress fault those human rights commissions for taking up such complaints? After all, the Steyn article falls squarely within the Jewish group's view of the commissions' mandate."

Our position is, in fact, the opposite: Steyn's observations are not actionable under the law and the complaints against them fall outside the mandate of human rights commissions. Borovoy ignores the salient passages of the Supreme Court of Canada's 1990 decision in the John Ross Taylor case, which upheld the constitutionality of the Canadian Human Rights Act's anti-hate provisions. In so doing, the court established guidelines for hate-based complaints to the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

Most relevant, the court noted that "hatred or contempt" refers "only to unusually strong and deep-felt emotions of detestation, calumny and vilification."

The commission's investigation of Steyn shows it has lost sight of the legislation's original purpose and the narrow fence it establishes against truly discriminatory speech. Such speech violates core Canadian values and has been upheld as a reasonable limitation of free expression precisely because of that incompatibility.

So by all means, let's tweak the law to eliminate some of its discretionary elements. Amendments could call for an ombudsperson to adjudicate objectively if the complaints meet the high threshold for action, or cost consequences for applicants who bring frivolous complaints.

But the Canadian Jewish Congress supports the act as it was originally intended: to protect minorities in Canada from speech that truly vilifies or discriminates.

Funny thing about HRCs supposedly protecting the Jews from “vilification”—apparently, the Jew-haters didn’t get that memo. Perhaps because HRCs afford only an illusion of protection and not the real McCoy? And it seems Bernie, poor chap, didn't get the memo about the thought cops becoming way passé. (Bernie's heart's in the right place; wish I could say the same for his head.)

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:03 | link | comments

The latest word: Dr. F. Icky is up to his old tricks, trying to stir up trouble for Great Satan. In his latest communiqué, al Qaeda’s Number 2 is urging the faithful to turn Iraq, now somewhat confusingly incarnated as a sharia democracy, into a “fortress of Islam.”

Like there aren’t enough of those in the world.

At the same time, Dr. Icky is somewhat confused about the United Nations and its role on the global scene. He complains that the UN “is an enemy of Islam and Muslims: it is the one which codified and legitimised the setting up of the state of Israel and its taking over of the Muslims' lands,” whereas everyone knows that with it’s overwhelming 57-member voting block, Muslims are calling the shots at the UN. Sure, the UN may have had a momentary lapse 60 years ago—the result, no doubt, of lingering guilt over the murder of 6 million European Jews—but it’s been striving mightily to undo “damage” of Jewish sovereignty ever since.

Do the UN’s HRC, UNRWA and the Israel delegitimizing conferences on “racism” in Durban mean nothing to him?

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:57 | link | comments

They’re everywhere: Youssef Ibramim on the current crop of Islam’s useful idiots. From Pajamas Media:

…Today’s Islamist Lawrences are being cultivated among a broad swath of political analysts, scholars, anthropologists, pundits, missionaries, and even spies dissecting militant Islam and Islamofascism. While most carry out illuminating and necessary work, the fish they bait ends up ensnaring many.

A few recent catches: the archbishop of Canterbury urging the introduction of Sharia law in Britain; Harvard University, a bastion of secular scholarship, shutting its gym to men to accommodate Muslim women; authorities at Minneapolis’s international airport negotiating for months with 700 Somali Muslim taxi drivers who refused to pick up passengers carrying liquor or depending on guide dogs.

Then there was President George Bush launching his Muslim initiative last June from the Islamic Center of Washington, a Saudi institution distributing educational material instructing Muslims to segregate themselves from other Americans.

Among other things, the Saudi-funded publications admonish Muslims in America “to dissociate from infidels, hate them for their religion, never to rely on them for support, and always oppose them in every way according to Islamic law.” The question: how was it that among the estimated five million Muslim Americans with hugely varied institutions, the president’s advisors picked a Saudi Islamofascist ghetto as a venue?

This cluelessness is spreading into the academy and the arts too.

Witness the Guggenheim Museum of New York and the Louvre of Paris, along with Carnegie Mellon, Texas A&M, and multiple U.S. institutions, rushing to open branches in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, where laws institutionalize bigotry against women, Sharia bans images, and the government condones grievous violations of human rights for millions of expatriates of other religions.

Imagine the contortions of folks at Yale, Stanford, or Oxford when they have to explain founding campuses in Riyadh where women are not allowed or can participate only via closed circuit TV.

Useful idiocy reaches a higher plane among Western pundits who propagate the Saudi view of reverse progress, namely that Islamic societies have “particular requirements” and are evolving as “different models,” of which we should not be “‘judgmental.”

Fundamentalist creep is engulfing bastions of respectability in Western media too. At the start of Turkey’s slide away from secularism last May, the Wall Street Journal glossed over Prime Minister Erdogan’s aggressive Islamization, criticizing his secular opponents instead. The Economist argued his policy is tolerable, “even if it means enduring a bad, ineffective, corrupt, or mildly Islamist government.”

Last April a major New York Times Magazine article by James Traub argued fervently on behalf of “Islamic democrats” singing the praises of a reborn Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. This was followed by a major essay in Foreign Affairs, a weighty establishment publication, by Robert Leiken and Steven Brooke titled “The Moderate Muslim Brotherhood.” The piece declared the fundamentalist group acceptable, among other things, as some of its leaders were interviewed in English, appeared reasonable, listened to classical music, and knew of Shakespeare. The article was so lacking in inquisitiveness it merited being posted on the Muslim Brotherhood website — ikhwanonline.com — as part of their propaganda.

The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century, a recent book authored by respected Mideast analyst of the New Yorker Steve Coll, presents the human side of Osama bin Laden, who adopted modern technology in his terror and whose wealthy contracting father employed Christians and other infidels in his business.

We should come back to reality.

Mild Islamism is an oxymoron. Sharia law, which sanctions beating of wives and stoning for adultery, is irreconcilable with human rights. The Muslim Brotherhood founded Hamas, calls suicide bombings a good thing, and is the 21st-century version of the organized fascism of Hitler and Mussolini in the last century.

If “mild Islamism” is an oxymoron, then so, too, is the sharia-“democracy” of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:28 | link | comments

Ken Livingstone's "Jewish problem": The mayor of Londonistan's animus goes waaay back.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:14 | link | comments (1)

Hamas for Obama: The genocidal jihadis obviously know a good thing when they see it.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:09 | link | comments

Omar's sentence: "Self-styled" cleric Omar Brooks (as he was described by a letter-writer critical of Mark Steyn in yesterday's Globe and Mail), the acolyte of "self-styled" cleric Hooky Hamza who last year told an audience in Dublin that Muslims "drink the blood" of their enemies, has been sentenced to a good long stretch in a British hoosegow, and may never see the light of day again.

Update: So much for "self-styled". The Guardian describes him as "high-profile".

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:05 | link | comments (1)

Battered but unbowed: Jonathan Tobin urges us to include a prayer for the children of Sderot—the Israeli town that’s become a symbol of the nation's resilience—during our Passover seders. From JWR:

…(I)n spite of the failure to halt the attacks, the town is beginning to take on the aspect of a symbol of Israel's resilience as more visitors come to to express solidarity. Sderot is becoming, perhaps in spite of itself, Israel's Verdun. And like the World War I French fortress town that the Germans could not conquer, perhaps the Palestinians have started a process that they also cannot control here.

Rabbi Dovid Fendel, the head of a Hesder yeshiva in the town where students mix army service with Torah study, says young religious couples are moving there out of Zionist sentiment to show the Palestinians that they cannot succeed in making the place a "ghost town."

"For every kassam, we will build," the American-born Fendel pledges. "They should see we are not afraid."

But that bravado notwithstanding, the children of Sderot are still preparing for a Passover celebration which they know may be disrupted by the kassams.

This weekend, take a moment at your own seder. Look at the children around your table and imagine what you would feel like if they faced what the children of Sderot must live with every day.

As you do, say a prayer for the children of Sderot. Pray, as they do, for quiet. That no kassams will fall. That no "Tzeva Adom" will be heard in the town. Pray that there be peace for all of Israel and let those prayers be heard around the world. Amen.

Will do, Jonathan.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:51 | link | comments

Hill goes in for the kill: Who can blame her, since the revelations about Bambi’s dubious associations just keep on coming? From the New York Sun:

Hillary Clinton is adding fuel to the firestorm about Senator Obama's links to his former pastor and to a member of the Weather Underground, suggesting last night that they would present easy targets for Republicans to exploit in the fall.

In a 90-minute debate in Philadelphia, Mrs. Clinton carefully but assertively sought to fan the flames that have nipped at Mr. Obama for weeks, citing her work representing New York to take fresh offense at statements by his former pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, blaming America for the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. She also questioned his ties to a former member of the radical Vietnam-era group the Weather Underground, William Ayers, who was quoted on September 11 as defending the group's bombing of the Pentagon and the Capitol in the 1970s.

"It is clear that, as leaders, we have a choice who we associate with and who we apparently give some kind of seal of approval to," Mrs. Clinton said, after earlier pointing to what she called Mr. Wright's "intolerable" comments after the terrorist attacks, when he said: "America's chickens are coming home to roost." She added: "You know, these are problems. And they raise questions in people's minds."…

Enquiring minds want to know, Bambi—whassup with your being such a chronically poor judge of character?

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:42 | link | comments

Take a hike, Jimminy:  Better old off on that second Nobel Peace Prize--the old gasbag has called off his visit to Gaza.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:36 | link | comments

A snapshot of mass psychosis: Those Arabs—they’re nuts.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:20 | link | comments (2)

Bambi’s lapse: The Toronto Sun’s Lorrie Goldstein comments on Obama’s off-the-cuff remark:

…Obama, one of the most liberal senators in America, was simply expressing, accurately, the condescending and patronizing liberal world view toward anyone they consider unenlightened.