Jewel's Gem

Below is an introduction to some elegant and intelligent writing by our friend Jewel, writing about the difference between a half-naked creep celebrating his nihilistic personal urge to destroy, and the making of a high-precision, high-intelligence piece of work in the form of a musical instrument. This is one of the nicest pieces of short prose I've read in a long time. The link at the bottom will take you to the original.

Is the young anarchist in the photograph proud of himself? Is he? He is all but naked, he is holding in his teeth a pair of very expensive sunglasses, and though frozen for a moment forever, you can make out the swagger of a man who believes he has accomplished something very important with his wanton act of vandalism. He has made a statement, of course.

Death to the police! The law be damned.

But I am not interested in him...he's a piece of wondrous crapmanship, all right. No. It is the trumpet that has caught my eye.

The trumpet was made according to very strict guidelines. The combination of copper and nickel and other metals was exact, the precise width and bend of the pipes were carefully hammered out, and it was passed on to someone else who buffed and cleaned and polished and buffed again and again and again.

http://tastyinfidelicacies.blogspot.com/2010/06/if-trumpet-could-speak.html

Love for sale

50 percent off!

Search for Gnosis, at the local library

So I'm at the local library trying to get some work done and I'm distracted because I'm sitting next to the "Teen" paperback racks and I can't help but wonder at what the book marketplace is producing... Can the culture that can imagine anything, imagine something?

France: Chinese Clash With "French Youth" And Police In Belleville

Cries of "Stop The Violence" and "Security For All" rang through the streets of Belleville, on the outskirts of Paris France last Sunday, as over 8,000 fed up and frustrated Chinese residents, belonging to as many as 40 separate business and community organizations, marched in united protest against France's lax attitude towards its feral "french youth". The Chinese community of Belleville are tired of being preyed upon by their city's vandals and thugs, and a crowd that police estimated reached 8,500 people demanded committed and coordinated actions by authorities to bring security to their afflicted neighborhoods.

Violent crime is on the increase in the 20th arrondissement of Belleville, one of the two primarily Chinese communities in the Paris region. The ferocity of the spiraling crime wave, combined with the devaluation of the Euro and Europe's overall economic crisis, is leading the hardworking community to bankruptcy, says local business spokesman Wang Jiaqing, in a Chinese media site originating in France.

The People's Daily also reports that one individual crime proved one crime too many for the besieged Chinese community: the massive Sunday protest was the result of an attack on a Chinese wedding at the Hotel Belleville back on June 1st. A group of "youths" burst in to the hotel's restaurant, barred the doors and tried to rob those attending a marriage ceremony at the hotel. (An alternative account says that the assaults took place outside the building, on the street in front of the party) One of the guests was armed, and he shot and wounded one of the would-be robbers. When police arrived, they made one arrest: the armed guest.

While the French media is well-known for its contorted tapdancing and side-stepping around the demographics of its "french youth" generation of vandals, the protesters stared reality square in the face of French journalism's preferred shadows and fog. One example: Radio France International's interview of a young female Chinese protester on her motives for joining the march:

"There are too many people attacked by Arabs. They steal purses [off you] in the street, they break [shop] windows, we don't feel safe".

As if to underscore the whole point of the gathering, a purse snatching actually took place that day, over on the margins of the protest. The thief was seen, caught through the quick initiative of the marchers, who held him until the police came. Once he was handed over to the police, however, they promptly let the thief go!

"We're not violent, but that was too much", said a witness to the escape and the resulting battle that raged for the next two hours between the summoned riot squad and outraged Chinese protesters. As French paper Le Figaro's describes the reaction:

Terror Works, until you laugh in its hysterical face

More good stuff from LatmaTV, creators of "We Con the World":

Putting Choices In Perspective

"You have nobody to blame but yourself". In this day and age, is that advice still considered wise counsel?

A small confession. I possess a bad habit that I particularly regret, yet it's a bad habit that I've never been able to shake: I tend to talk over people after I've asked them a question, stepping on their answer instead of being patient and polite enough to wait my turn to listen and learn.

It's a natural problem I have. As frustrating as it is to admit, it seems to be in my nature to behave this way.

An admission that leads to this observation: just because something comes naturally, that does not make it welcome, that does ennoble it as "good". Shouldn't it be a sign of maturity, that we can grow to recognize how much the ability to do something is in itself not the justification for actually doing it..? Just because we can do something doesn't mean we should... even if it's something that comes naturally to us.

If we're truly committed to survival through self-improvement, shouldn't we search for when and where it makes sense to place ourselves at odds with our own nature? Could we not say, that the most worthwhile self-improvement can most readily come to us when we are at war with nature?

What is the true result of our natural behavior; for any individual aspiring to a more righteous life, this would be one of the hardest answers to perceive, requiring as it does a full measure of honesty, humility, and patience... qualities that tend to come rather unnaturally to the human species.

Looking back over a mis-spent life, I can see now, with painful clarity, how so many of my natural habits have hurt me. Was this an insight that needed so much time to come into focus?

The honest answer is no. But for too many years, I was at war with reality instead of being at war with nature. The real reason for my finding myself in my present situation can be found... in my mirror: in the accumulation of habits I've nurtured, and in the ones I've denied myself.

Can this be one of the dividing lines between the conflicting worldviews imperfectly labeled "left" and "right"? Does being "on the right" mean that I am now at war with nature, as when I used to be "on the left" meant that I was at war with reality?

When someone allows themselves the false belief that bad habits should produce good results, what happens when reality contradicts them? They either look inward, towards the history of their behavior, to perceive which of their chosen reactions, which of their natural habits, deserves the blame. Through this insight we can come to see the need for a second nature, a renewal of ourselves through the adoption of more fruitful behavior.

Or: they may deflect their gaze outward, where the only conclusion remaining in sight is to look to fix the blame upon the habits and behaviors of others. They are then looking for a scapegoat, an excuse that will enable them to engage in a false conflict, rather than the necessary one to be waged against their own inner nature.

So much for honesty. So much for humility. So much for reality.

As we review our reactions to the circumstances that life has dealt us, as we trace a line to connect the results that have arisen from our choices, which direction does the search lead us, where do we find ourselves looking: to a destination within, or without?

When we find ourselves soaking wet, can it really be someone else's fault that we chose to take a long walk off a short pier..?

First they come for the Pamela Gellers

Then they come for you (and Israeli comedians).  Pamela stands up for the kind of people - Rifqa Bary - whom the speech censors going after Pamela would see quietly die as victims to their code of silence on Islam.

Paypal Cuts Off Atlas: Truth is the New Hate Speech - Atlas Shrugs

Support Atlas, tell Paypal (founded by Peter Thiel, a student of Rene Girard, who should know better) that writing cheques or supporting competitors isn't that hard after all... (HT Blazing Cat Fur)


Liveleak still has "We Con the World"

There is no Israel-Palestinian problem

American Thinker: Eternal Islamic Enmity toward the Jews

In their latest book, Al-Yahud: Eternal Islamic Enmity & the Jews, authors Elias Al-Maqdisi, an expert on Islamic teachings, and Sam Solomon, a former professor of shari'ah law and Christian convert, examine the historical and doctrinal sources of Muslim enmity and the continuing jihad against the Jews and Israel. The work follows their previous book, Modern Day Trojan Horse: The Islamic Doctrine of Immigration, in which they explain how the hijra (migration) and jihad function today to further worldwide Islamic conquest.

Their important new book exposes the story behind the Palestinian "crisis," giving readers new insights into the perceptions and actions of the Arab-Muslim world vis-à-vis Israel, popularly maligned as the "Zionist entity." Al-Maqdisi and Solomon, both raised as Muslims, reveal the truth about the doctrinal foundation of a conflict engineered for Muslim dominance.

The authors detail how, five times daily, observant Muslims worldwide condemn all non-believers in ritual prayers, singling out Jews and Christians. Muslim students readily identify Jews and Christians respectively as "those against whom there is wrath" and "those who are astray," phrases found in the Koran's opening Sura (chapter). This veiled cursing of non-believers has occurred for 1,400 years, even amidst duplicitous attempts to appear conciliatory and engage in interfaith dialogue.

[Truepeers: if I may make a suggestion, have a look at the interpretation of this video by Australian scholar, Mark Durie - here and here.]

Muslim enmity toward Jews is a special, more extreme case than that against other non-believers, Al-Maqdisi and Solomon argue. The dispute with Israel has a religious and moral basis rather than a territorial one. So its presentation as a solvable political crisis over land claims is little more than a smokescreen for an intrinsic, unending jihad against the Jews. The authors draw parallels between Muslim displacement of Arab Jews from Iran, Egypt, the Sudan, Morocco, and Syria in the last century and similar threats facing Jewish (and Christian) populations today in Europe and the Middle East.

In Al-Yahud, the authors reveal how Israel is systematically discredited by the alleged Israeli victimization of Muslim-Palestinians. The so-called Arab-Israeli conflict provides a flash point and platform to advance Islam under cover of a struggle for statehood and "restoration" of "stolen" land. These issues are cloaked in the vernacular of a desperate human rights tragedy; yet, the authors observe, all aid to Arab-Palestinians comes from the non-Muslim world. Fellow Muslims fail to lift a finger to aid their "victimized" brethren. They sabotage efforts to alleviate Palestinian suffering by refusing to accept Palestinians as citizens elsewhere in the Arab world.

While Israelis are denounced as "occupiers" and history is rewritten to deny more than four thousand years of Jewish presence in the land, the reality of terrorist and rocket attacks by Hezb'allah, Hamas, al-Qaeda, and Iran are largely ignored. The conflict is presented to the West in terms of Israel's recent actions -- the 1948 "occupation," 1967 "expansion," West Bank wall, and "settlement expansion." Recognition of relentless, decades-long Arab attacks on Israel, Jewish rights to the land, and legitimate national security measures of a sovereign state are all ignored or denied. Academia and the media willingly participate in the deconstruction of Israel and the legitimization of "Palestine." So the issue appears to outsiders to be over land, when in reality, the present-day enmity toward Israel is based on the Koran's 7th-century doctrines against the Jews. Modern-day Muslims are seeking to enforce this mandate of the Koran, according to Al-Maqdisi and Solomon.
[...]
In Al-Yahud, Maqdisi and Solomon refer to another doctrine, the Fitrah Doctrine, which Muslims also use to establish present-day land claims. The Fitrah Doctrine proclaims that all mankind from eternity is Muslim. The proclamation is irrevocable and mandatory and labels anyone who is not in observance of it as having gone astray. Jews in particular are viewed as perverted, and they are purported to be followers of the path of Satan for their refusal to recognize the Prophet Mohammed even though being forewarned in the Jewish scriptures.

These proclamations and doctrines help bolster Islamic attitudes in which any perceived criticisms of Islam or the very existence of non-Muslims within a Muslim society is viewed as an attack against Islam. Non-Muslims, simply by their religious choices, are resisting Allah. Thus, kuffars are considered to be in rebellion and must be "returned" to their Muslim faith by "reversion" or by force (jihad). Jihad is always viewed by practicing Muslims as a defensive move against unbelievers for rejecting Islam. Thus, by their deaths, Islamic martyrs receive exalted status, celebrations, and rewards, having gained favor with Allah.

Lamentably but realistically, the authors conclude that there is no Arab-Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but instead, a Muslim-Jewish conflict that dates from the time of Mohammed. They demonstrate through well-researched and extensive citations of passages from Islamic doctrine how the policies of enmity and supremacy have their origin in the Koran and Sunnah, and not in the present-day situation in Israel and the Palestinian territories. They clearly illustrate that throughout Islamic history, treaties with infidels have been employed as temporary deceptive measures to be broken at an advantageous time, in accordance with Allah's instructions and commandments. Al-Maqdisi and Solomon discouragingly surmise that any Israeli attempts to forge land or peace treaties with Muslims are destined for failure, as has been repeatedly illustrated since Israeli statehood.

UPDATE: Vlad Tepes interview of Sam Solomon:

Congratulations Geert Wilders

The consensus in the reports I am reading is that Geert Wilders and the Freedom Party, while coming in third in the Dutch elections, must still be considered the big winners as they have almost tripled their representation in Parliament. It seems that the Dutch will either have a dubious alliance of (somewhat) free market/fiscally conservative and socialist parties aimed at keeping Wilders' party out of government, thus no doubt only highlighting the issues for which Gilders is persona non grata in the salons of the moribund EU elite, or he will be brought into government and Dutch politicians will attempt to hash out the kind of compromises  that may become viable in future in a poorer, more EUrosceptic, Europe, or the Dutch will soon be returning to the voting booths.

Dutch electorate votes right-wing and populist | Radio Netherlands Worldwide

The conservative VVD has won its first parliamentary election ever, but Geert Wilders and his populist Freedom Party (PVV) are seen as the real winners of these elections. The Islam-bashing party nearly trebled its seats. What do the Dutch see in the populist Geert Wilders?

'Fellow party members, bring along a battering ram, because tomorrow we are going to break down the doors”. With this admonition Geert Wilders marked his party’s election victory. The one-and-a-half million voters who cast their ballots for the man and his relentless crusade against ‘mass immigration’ and the ‘Islamisation of the Netherlands also celebrated his victory. The Freedom Party has nearly trebled in size compared to the 2006 elections, and is now the third largest after the conservative VVD and the social democratic PvdA.

Jeering
When PvdA leader Job Cohen at a party meeting in Amsterdam congratulated Geert Wilders and his PVV on their major election victory, his remark was greeted with loud jeering. However, the former Amsterdam mayor rebuked his supporters, saying: ”I don’t want to hear any jeering, the PVV has won a major victory and we should respect that”. All established parties have since congratulated Wilders, and much of the criticism has died down now that one in six Dutch voters cast their ballots for the populist party.

The much-vaunted Dutch ‘polder model’, i.e. the system of ensuring economic prosperity and political stability by seeking broad political consensus on major issues, is unlikely to provide an answer to the current situation. The major parties are deeply divided on how to fight the economic crisis and how to address the thorny issues of immigration and Islam. And the election has failed to provide a clear winner with a strong mandate to form a coalition.

Come on World, do you really want to belong to a death cult?

Lebanese Threaten Mass March on Israeli Border - Defense/Middle East - Israel News - Israel National News

The anti-Israel flotilla has turned the tide of world opinion against Israel, Fatah leaders in Lebanon say, and the time is ripe for a mass civilian charge against Israel’s border.

Mounir Al-Makdah, a leading Fatah leader in Lebanon, says plans are being made for a mass charge against Israel’s northern border. “What can Israel do,” he asks, “kill the entire Palestinian nation [sic]?”

“And even if they kill all those who take part in the march, the number of remaining Palestinians will still be more than all the Jews in the world.”

That's some fancy number crunching, but what the heh, this guy is clearly another sane and responsible "Palestinian" leader.

Many Die as Anti-Jews Shape World's Media

Poor Palestinians taunted with empty "aid ships" full only of gawking-at-suffering tourists and Shahid Youngsters of Anti-Zion.

Gobsmacked Gazans teased with expired and near-expired medicines and crushed cargo.

It's Official: There was No Humanitarian Aid on Mavi Marmara - Defense/Middle East - Israel News - Israel National News

In other news:

The president of the United States has just announced that his country must give in to the defiance of a dictatorship with about 1.2 million people. The chief executive of the greatest power in the world (even if he doesn't think that's true) is changing his policy because a few dozen radical Islamists picked up iron bars, hit Israeli soldiers, and forced a confrontation. How do you think that lesson will be absorbed by others in the world, especiallyAmerica's enemies, and what do you think that will motivate them to do?

And so now President Obama is going to subsidize and stabilize a genocidal-intentioned, antisemitic, terrorist regime allied to Iran for no material gain to U.S. interests.

Sign the petition to classify IHH (the Gaza flotilla attactivists) as a terrorist entity under Canadian law

Sign here

Because standing up for the truth and against the most corrosive forces of the present global order is a good thing.

And because, notwithstanding the humanitarian work the IHH does, its Turkish members and supporters are Islamists who take an obvious pleasure in drawing Infidel blood and don't deny that they instigated the Gaza flotilla fight. The close ties of IHH to the present Turkish government that is turning that country away from modernity and liberal democracy, and deepening its alliance with the most tyrannical and regressive forces (Iran) in its quest for leadership of the Islamic Umma, in hopes of building another Turkish/Islamic empire, is all the more reason to sign.

(And even because it pisses off all the right people.)

B'nai Brith has proposed... the petition against the Turkish Islamist group that sent armed "martyrs" to attack Israel and die to serve the cause of a death cult and the blood libel of the Jews who, they allege, have no right to defend themselves.

Background on IHH here:

Though my DIIS paper made no mention of IHH's activities in Gaza or in support of suffering Palestinian refugees, some of those angered by the Israeli flotilla raid have instead turned their emotional animus on past critics of IHH, such as myself. While I certainly can't speak with any authority on what took place on the Gaza flotilla boats, I'm rather mystified why the flotilla killings--whether right or wrong--would have any bearing on the factual question of whether the IHH has engaged in illicit financing and episodic support to extremist groups. The evidence in this regard is fairly weighty, and much of it comes directly from the Turkish government -- not the United States, nor the Israelis.

and here:

In practice, besides its legitimate humanitarian activities, IHH supports radical Islamic terrorist networks. In recent years it has prominently supported Hamas (through the Union of Good). In addition, the ITIC has reliable information that in the past IHH provided logistical support and funding to global jihad networks.

Motivation:

Anyone want to infiltrate the next Vancouver hate rally with me?

How To Deal With Moonbat Protests : Israellycool

Free them or kill them: in the end will there be any other choice?

I got a laugh out of the scene in the film Downfall where Hitler, facing death in his Berlin bunker, decides to marry Eva Braun. They bring in a marriage commissioner who is on his bureaucratic best behaviour. At the appropriate point in the "ceremony", he asks for Hitler's certification of pure Aryan ancestry. Hitler doesn't have it. Goebbels breaks the pregnant pause... "But he's the Fuhrer!!?". The commissioner proceeds.

When antisemitism take over a people's minds, it drives them crazy and self-destructive; no matter how many you kill, there is always the need for another "Jew" or Zionist or Yankee blood sucker to confirm the rightness of the regime and one's personal identity; it becomes a mad quest: one cannot face up to and deal with one's resentment of the way the world is - with all its necessary differences - letting go of much of the uncreative resentment in good faith; one can only dive deeper into it. Hell, if Hitler had survived to lead some rump of hold-out Nazis in the Alps, Argentina, or somewhere, his followers may eventually have turned on him, discovering that he had deceived them because, they would conclude, he must have been at least part Jewish. Such is often the fate of those who step out of the mob and into history, by making some significant difference, good or bad.

I wonder if in the last of days, the Muslims will witness a similar marriage scene.

Cairo to Strip Citizenship from Men Who Marry Israelis - Defense/Middle East - Israel News - Israel National News

Cairo's High Court of Justice has upheld a lower court ruling that ordered the Interior Ministry to ensure that Egyptian men lose their rights if they marry Israeli wives.

Administrative Supreme Court Justice Mohammed al-Husseini handed down a decision Saturday that Egypt's Interior Ministry must ask the country's Cabinet to take what steps it must to strip citizenship from men married to Israeli women -- and from their children.

At present, Egyptians marrying Israelis are allowed to retain their Egyptian citizenship, and their children are automatically considered Egyptian citizens as well. The practice parallels that of the Muslim faith, in which custody of the children, and the religious faith, follows that of the father.
[...]
Al-Wahsh explained to the Qatar-based Al Jazeera satellite news network that he wanted to prevent the creation of a generation who are “disloyal to Egypt and the Arab world.” The children of such marriages “should not be allowed to perform their military service,” he commented.

Al Jazeera reporter in Cairo, Rawya Rageh, commented that the case has “highlighted the divide between the official Egyptian stance on peace with Israel versus the real sentiment on the street of the Arab world's most populous nation.”
[...]
“It's not clear whether the Egyptian government will indeed enforce the verdict,” commented Rageh. “but for now, the verdict has quenched the thirst of many in an increasingly angry population seeking action against Israel.”

Ahh, but just as an Arab in the desert can never stop dreaming of water, and enemies, the only thing that will really cure Jew hatred is a conversion to the truth, the truth that the world, that any kind of possible social order, will always provoke some amount of resentment; and so if we want to progress as a culture or civilization, we will have to deal with this resentment without madhouse conspiracy theories that target those who are in some way different, or creative, unless we want forever to live in a madhouse of conspiracy and human sacrifice, which is where today's left-Islamic alliance now lives, as any cool reading of the movement to deny Israel's right and responsibility to defend itself from those who would destroy it now makes clear.

The resurrection and prominence given to the anti-Jewish blood libel by the recent MSM "reporting" of the Gaza attactivist flotilla is a very scary sign of things to come. The mob in the Arab and "Western" worlds will not be sated for long by one or another anti-Israel measure. They will still return to the desire to kill the Jew, i.e. to kill free societies with rational justice and economic systems; and if they ever get their way they will just have to find more "Jews" to kill, unless and until they can be converted to the truth, to good faith full of doubt and real thinking and not ritualistic certainties.

Humanity in future is going to have to revisit, I fear many times, the "neocon" or Lincolnian proposition that we cannot live with any kind of security in a global village that is half free and half slave. If the mad mobs of the Arab world are allowed to fester in self-righteous scapegoating, they will forever be in need of another victim to sacrifice to guarantee their unity, to forget, if only for a moment, all their internal tensions and resentments. We can feed them Israel, but it will not, cannot, stop there. They will forever project their internal resentments onto external enemies. And what will the rest of us have to do about it? Can we bottle them up, with real walls, without seeing many of them die (in populations that have grown through access to Western technology, trade, migration, to numbers that "Sharia economics" or isolated big man tyrannies can never support), thus provoking further our "white guilt"? And can we continue to let them into our Western world without also seeing many people killed through the growing irrationalism of the Islamist-left alliance, one that can never produce enough victims of "the Jews"/America to flaunt and to justify revenge against white guilt?

If we value life, we must face up to this historical challenge sooner rather than later.

Binks is back in the saddle with a great slew of links

Steynite 412nd « Free Canuckistan!

Of course his pro-freedom topics are numerous and diverse. I was, in present mood, natually drawn to his writing on the Gaza Attacktivists in service to Turkish Hubrislam (HT to our punster, David).

~ ITEM: Ayers, Dohrn top activists in Gaza flotilla group; and Connecting Some Communist Dots: The Free Gaza Movement Flotilla, Illegal Migrant Workers, May 1st Coalition and Organizing for America

~ ITEMS: Batchelor: Terror Soup; plus Commander of Gaza flotilla announced participants wanted to become ‘martyrs’. Also declared activists planned ‘resistance’ against Israeli commandoes; Gaza Flotilla activists chanted anti-Jewish battle cries. Prepared ‘resistance’ against Israeli commandoes, spoke of welcoming ‘martyrdom’; plus Flotilla activists ‘tried to lynch Israeli soldiers’. ‘They were fully prepared to provoke this deadly confrontation’

~ ITEM: More Mavi Marmara video released by the IDF

~ ITEM: Muslim Brotherhood Heavily Represented In Gaza Flotilla; B’Nai Brith says: Kangaroo courts rush to condemn Jewish State

~ ITEM: “Pictures of Weapons Found on the Mavi Marmara Flotilla Ship, 31 May 2010″

~ OUR BS-DETECTORS are off-kilter when it comes to stuff we like, people we hate, and “news”. Nonetheless, this elf smells boatloads of BS in the coverage of the Gaza Fauxtilla.

When it comes to the Paleostinian talent for staging news-events– add Hizbie/ Hamas, some Turkish Jihad, a dash of American Bolshies (including Obama-buddies Ayers & Dohrn), and you got a grade-A world-class “official memory” established via the usual Israel-hating world establishment. They’ve done it over and over again, ever since the Paleos and their Jihadi buddies realized the craven evil that resides in most of our media-outlets.

Facts? Truth? The Eternal Jew! (Der ewige Jude). Jewsdidit! Even when everybody else made it up. Hence this 2010 Bolshie-Jihadi Pirate Adventure.


This is a media-stunt, done by evil people, to cripple Israel. Media. Stunt.

The clueless man-child Obama is aiding and abetting the Jew-bashing, and what we are seeing is his own radical activists cuddling with Paleos, Hamas, Hizbullah, and the Turks in the logical extension of the seething of both groups against Israel & America. Israel will be destroyed first, and then America. It’s all about the utopia/ Caliphate thing.

Get it? ~

I also found this video highly related to the madness of the Atacktivists:

We are the bloodthirsty

(HT: Augean Stables)

Ayaan Hirsi Ali recognizes that an honest conversation is one that tries to convert the Other

On why Christians should try to convert Muslims - Books, The Interview - Macleans.ca

Q: One of your more startling arguments in Nomad is that Christian churches should proselytize in immigrant communities to try to convert Muslims.
A: Look at the amount of money Saudi Arabia spends on coming into Muslim communities in America and Europe, building schools and also taking leaders and training them in Mecca and Medina, then replanting them. It’s surprising that no other group of people is targeting the same communities. If you look at Western civilization, at the institutions [and movements] that were engaged in changing people’s hearts and minds—the Christian Church, humanists, feminists—they are doing next to nothing in these Muslim communities. When I was in Holland [recently], I heard about a Christian mission that had been proselytizing in Morocco. The government kicked them out and sent them back to Holland. I thought, “You don’t have to stop proselytizing—just go to the Muslim community in Amsterdam west and carry on there.” But of course there, they’re not only going to face the radical Muslims as opponents, they’re also going to face the multicultural opponents, saying they’re not supposed to be telling people to leave their religion.

Q: So how would they do it?
A: Next to every mosque, build a Christian centre, an enlightenment centre, a feminist centre. There are tons of websites, financed with Saudi money, promoting Wahabism. We need to set up our own websites—Christian, feminist, humanist—trying to target the same people, saying, we have an alternative moral framework to Islam. We have better ideas.

Q: But you also argue that children are indoctrinated very early in Islam. How would you even get them to listen to such a message?
A: They only get indoctrinated if they go to Muslim schools. I would, if I had the power, abolish Muslim schools. Children born to Muslim parents in North America or anywhere else in the West would get Islamic teachings at home, which is fine. But when they go to school, they would get the regular education that’s going to enable them to be absorbed into our society and become law-abiding, well-established citizens.

Q: In a multicultural and democratic society, how could we ban Muslim schools?
A: It depends how we weigh this problem of jihadism and terrorism. If we think it’s a chronic disease we have to live with, and I think that is actually the dominant opinion, people will take more trouble to look at what is going on in these schools and abolish them. If we think of these children as kids who, when they finish school, will be hostile to our society, then I can compile a whole host of arguments why they can and should be abolished.

Q: Let me ask a question you once posed. You said, “Western civilization is a celebration of life—everybody’s life, even your enemy’s life. So how can you be true to that morality and at the same time defend yourself against a very powerful enemy that seeks to destroy you?”
A: That is the big question for the open society today. We want to be distinct from closed societies, have less authoritarianism, allow people to make their own choices. And what we’re seeing now is that as far as that applies to an Islamic subset of society, there are other factors at work that are frightening. To have a whole generation of people just indoctrinated with this jidhadist mentality and for us to do nothing about it, and then every time there’s a terrorist attack, we panic—it’s not viable.

Blood libel as standard MSM narrative

This evening I decided to bite the bullet and see how the CBC - supported by Canada's taxpayers with a billion dollars annually - is reporting on the Gaza flotilla story. I knew it would be anti-Israel, but I was not expecting such utter and complete hatred of the Jew/Israel, depicted in officious tones as a fundamentally violent blood-sucker. The radio report began by saying that, unprovoked, Israel attacked with deadly force (who could believe such incredible fantasy, as if Israel just goes about randomly murdering people; and yet it was stated with absolute certainty and "authority"?). We were also told that Israel faces massive international critcism, with no mention of what Israel's friends are saying. We were told that this violence is troubling to friends and foes alike because it is not just a one-off but a pattern of repeated use of disproportionate force. And that was it. They picked up the report of a smarmy BBC p.o.s., Jeremy Bowen, and not a word from the pro-Israel side. Not a mention that this - the one ship that violently resisted the Israeli boarding party - was clearly a Turkish state provocation in the battle to lead the Umma by taking up the cause of Hamas. No mention that maybe some of the dead were killed by their own side in a hurry to have "martyrs" to flaunt before a credulous world.

It was a viscerally shocking experience that left me with a feeling no amount of intellectual study and understanding leaves, an experience of what it must have been like to be a Jew living under the most oppressively Jew-hating of modern states.

When opinion leaders in a country like Canada can fall so deeply into a bizarre narrative of unprovoked violence from evil Jews, we are all in serious trouble, whether we like Jews or not. Nothing good can come from such hatred but only the further erosion of a once free society.

But we must remember that no historical trend lasts forever (even if some evils, like Judeophobia, have always existed as long as there have been Jews). We must remain hopeful that narratives with some grasp on reality will one day gain ascendance and the horrible anachronism that is the CBC and the BBC will be put to their fitting ends by indignant tax payers. To this end, let us keep trying to promote writers and narratives that are not completely delusional. And let us even demand more and better from the state of Israel when it comes to defending itself. Israel should be on the offensive, making demands of Turkey for supporting (and apparently there are another two ships on the way) this attempt to crash a blockade of an armed enemy committed to the elimination of Israel (an act which should be seen as tantamount to war) and to get people killed in the attempt, as was surely desired.

To this end, I recommend another great piece from Barry Rubin.

See also Melanie Phillips.