To be or Dhimmi?

The American Thinker has a story on dhimmitude and redemption in American publishing: a book withdrawn from publication because of fear of Muslims, followed by interest from other publishers.

WC at Infidel Bloggers Alliance tells us about a Jihadist movement to shut down anti-Islam websites. Who's their next target?

And, as Mark Steyn notes, there are many in the west who will no longer defend freedom of speech: "there’s very little difference between living under Exquisitely Refined Multicultural Sensitivity and sharia." And so, soon it will be everyone's choice to play dhimmi or fight.

Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, provides a model for those who will fight:

Howard has launched a scathing attack on Australia's left-wing intelligentsia, questioning its loyalty to the nation over the past decades.

In a speech delivered last night for the 50th anniversary of the conservative magazine Quadrant, Mr Howard said the left had a history of denigrating the nation and was now doing the same with the war in Iraq, describing Islamic terrorism as the new tyranny.

He said Australian universities were still breeding leftists and described pro-communists of decades past as “ideological barrackers for regimes of oppression opposed to Australia and its interests”

UPDATE, a fine example of multiculti oppression, via Pastorius:

Amber Mangum was a frequent reader during lunch breaks at her Prince George's County middle school, silently soaking up the adventures of Harry Potter and other tales in the spare minutes before afternoon classes. The habit was never viewed as a problem -- not, a lawsuit alleges, until the book she was reading was the Bible.

A vice principal at Dwight D. Eisenhower Middle School in Laurel last month ordered Amber, then 12, to stop reading the Bible or face punishment, according to a lawsuit filed Friday by Amber's mother. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Greenbelt, alleges that the vice principal's actions violated the girl's civil rights... According to Mangum and the lawsuit, Rainey told Amber that reading the Bible violated school policy and that she would face discipline if she continued to do so.

Let the world know his words

By now, you have probably heard the story of Robert Redeker, French philosophy teacher, who published an article critical of Islam and is now in hiding for his and his family's lives after numerous death threats along with internet postings of maps to his house. Once again, we see that some members of Islam will protest any slander against the eternal and uncreated truth of the Koran; they will even threaten death to those who they feel misrepresent Islam as a religion of sacrificial violence, an idolatrous cult.

Some westerners, in a hurry to avoid the finger of Islamophobia that is often pointed at them, are insisting that Redeker should have drawn some disctinction between violent Islamists and ordinary Muslims. Once again, the evident fact that there are lots of Muslims who like to live in secular western countries is used to argue that Islam cannot be criticized in general terms. But why is it that we can never escape in our debates such simple category errors? Redeker's target was clearly the Koran and Islamic insitutions, not Muslims as individual people who live and make choices in the world, much of which has nothing to do with Islam.

If the Koran is a text that promotes violence against the unbeliever, the question remains, can the west remain western and free if it allows in large numbers of Muslim immigrants, some of whom, if not the more happy and passive majority, will push for the values of Sharia law in their new lands? The likely fact that many Muslims will not got to war for Islamic institutions like Sharia is to avoid the question no one really wants to answer: for what else can institutional Islam possibly stand, today and tomorrow?

Since Redeker's article has already disappeared from Le Figaro's web site, the newspaper where it first appeared, all bloggers might consider leaving a record of his words. Canada's Judeoscope reproduces the article in French, with a misguided disclaimer that makes Redeker's attack on the Koran into an attack on all Muslims. I have found two English translations: Tiberge at Galliawatch has most of the article translated; there is also a translation by Fausta.

From Galliawatch:

Islam is trying to impose on Europe its rules: special hours at swimming pools just for women, no caricature allowed of this religion, dietary requirements in cafeterias especially for children, a fight to allow the wearing of veils in schools, accusations of Islamophobia against free thinkers...

As before with communism, the West is under ideological surveillance. Islam presents itself to the Western world, as did the now defunct communism, as an alternative to the Western world. Like communism before it, Islam conquers minds and hearts by playing upon a sensitive point. It boasts of having a legitimacy that troubles the conscience of the West: it is the voice of the poor people of the planet. Yesterday, the voices of the poor claimed to come from Moscow, today they are coming from Mecca! Today, once again, the intellectuals are the watchful eye of the Koran, as they were the watchful eye of Moscow. Today they excommunicate for Islamophobia, as yesterday for anti-communism.
[...]
The Koran is a book of unheard-of violence. In the Encyclopédia Universalis, Maxime Rodinson utters some truths that are as important as they are taboo in France. First, "Mohammed displayed in Medina unsuspected qualities as a political leader and military chief (...) He turned to private war, a common institution in Arabia (...) Mohammed soon sent small groups of his followers to attack caravans from Mecca, thus punishing his infidel compatriots and at the same time, acquiring rich spoils."

Secondly, "Mohammed, flush with victory, eliminated from Medina by having them massacred the last remaining Jewish tribe, the Qurayza, whom he accused of suspicious behavior." Finally, "after the death of Khadidja, he married Sawda, a widow and a good house-keeper, and also little Aisha who was barely ten years old. His erotic tendencies, long suppressed, were to lead him into ten concurrent marriages."

Exaltation of violence: merciless war chief, pillager, killer of Jews, polygamous, such is the Mohammed that is revealed through the Koran.
[...]

Continuing, from Fausta's translation:

True, the Catholic Church is not free from reproach. Its history is strewn with black pages, of which it has repented. The Inquisition, witch hunting, the execution of the philosophers Bruno and Vanini, the poor-minded epicureans who in the middle of the eighteenth century were tried for impiety, do not plead in its favor. But what differentiates Christianity from Islam appears: it is always possible to turn to evangelic values, the soft person of Jesus against the drifts of the Church.

None of the faults of the Church are rooted in the Gospel. Jesus is non-violent. The return to Jesus is a recourse against the excesses of the institution connected with the church. The recourse to Muhammed, on the contrary, reinforces hatred and violence. Jesus is a Master of love, Muhammed a Master of hatred.

The stoning of Satan, annually in Mecca, is not a mere superstitious phenomenon. It doesn't only show a hysterical crowd flirting with cruelty. Its rage is anthropological. Here is indeed a rite, to which each Moslem is invited to subject, registering violence like a duty crowned in the heart of belief.

This stoning, where annually some of the faithful - at times hundreds - die from being trampled on, is a ritual which breeds ancient violence.

Instead of eliminating this ancient violence, by imitating Judaism and Christianity, by neutralizing it (Judaism starts with the rejection of human sacrifice, i.e. by which it enters into civilization, Christianity transforms the sacrifice into Eucharist), Islam builds a nest for it, where it will grow from the heat. While Judaism and Christianity are religions whose rites delegitimize violence, Islam is a religion whose very own sacred texts, as banal as some of its rites may be, exalts violence and hatred.

Hatred and violence live in the book in which any Moslem is educated, the Koran. As in the times of the Cold War, violence and intimidation are the means used by an ideology with hegemonic vocation, Islam, to throw its lead cover on the world. Benedict XVI suffers from this cruel experiment. In these our times it is necessary to call the West "the free world" compared to the Moslem world, and in these times the enemies of this "free world", dedicated civil servants of the Koran, swarm in its centre.

What Redeker fails to distinguish, in my view, is the fact that Islam has learned something from the Hebrew faith - it is something of an anti-idolatrous religion that, by outlawing contests over the image of God, goes some way in protecting the peace among those within the fold. But clearly, the Koran does indeed draw a fundamental distinction - on almost every page - between believers and unbelievers. Islam, to the degree it follows the Koran, keeps whatever peace it keeps among the believers by relentlessly scapegoating the non-believers and blaming them for all troubles. It has the utopian idea that if all the world were Islamic, there would be some kind of perpetual peace among men. This, clearly, is at odds with the inherently conflictual basis of human nature that makes religion necessary in the first place; and so Islam, like Christianity and Judaism to some (now much lesser) extent, often indulges in dangerous millennial and apocalyptic imagery to avoid coming to terms with the fact that religion can never banish conflict from this world. Furthermore, Islam, in relentlessly targetting the unbeliever and never taking the blame for its worldly woes for itself, does not make it clear that it is man, not God, who wills this conflict.

And for pointing so much out, what is Redeker's fate? Well, it is a punishment entirely consistent with a utopian Muslim point of view, if not with that of a modrn westerner who can't get his head around the fact that you can face a death sentence for saying that Islam is violent. As Redeker says in a letter to Andre Glucksmann (via Tiberge):

Dear André,

Hello.

I am now in a personal situation that is catastrophic. Numerous explicit death threats have been sent to me, and I have been condemned to death by organizations that are offshoots of Al-Qaïda. L'UCLAT and the DST (2) are on the case, but...I am no longer entitled to live in my own house (the websites that have condemned me show a map with instructions on how to get to my house to kill me, there is a my photo, a photo of my workplace, phone numbers, and the statement of condemnation). But at the same time they do not provide me with a lodging, and I'm forced to ask others for help, two nights in one place, two nights somewhere else...I am under permanent police protection. I must cancel all my classes. And the authorities are forcing me to give up my home. I'm a homeless person. An insane financial situation is the result: I must pay all the expenses, including any future rent for one month or two, someplace far from here, the cost of moving twice, the legal expenses, etc...This is quite sad. I asserted my constitutional rights and I am being punished for it, on the very territory of the French Republic. This affair is also an attack against national sovereignty: foreign laws, created by criminal fanatics, are punishing me for having exercised a French constitutional right, and I am suffering, right here in France, a terrible wrong.

According to Tiberge, there is now a large mobilization of support in France for Redeker, except on the far left and in the government offices:

Let us point out also the dhimmitude of Education Minister Gilles de Robien, who, instead of defending the teacher and freedom of expression, drives the nail in deeper by saying: "A functionary must display prudence and moderation in all circumstances."

These events will reveal who is bowing before the fatwas of MRAP and Al Qaïda, and who dares defend the values of the Republic. The French people will learn a political lesson!

Make your choice, Vancouver

And then there is us. We are contributing our thoughts to building a new covenant for Canadian nationhood, Thursdays, 7-9pm, atrium of the main branch of the Vancouver Public Library (at least for now, until further notice) - look for the blue scarves and bandanas.

Which is the bigger joke? The jihad for the eternal, uncreated, and singular truth? or multiculturalism policies - Canada's gift to the world?

News from Londonistan is sometimes so strange it seems that the ideology of multiculturalism is going all out to reveal its incompatibility with responsible representative government, or democratic self rule, and with true respect for the human unity that is the basis of all real and meaningful diversity:

POLICE have agreed to consult a panel of Muslim leaders before mounting counter-terrorist raids or arrests. Members of the panel will offer their assessment of whether information police have on a suspect is too flimsy and will also consider the consequences on community relations of a raid.

Members will be security vetted and will have to promise not to reveal any intelligence they are shown. They will not have to sign the Official Secrets Act.

So the Brits are going to tie up their police with enforced consultations with an anti-police, anti-government, anti-American, Judeophobic, pro-Iranian nuke, group and any police actions which do not meet with the Muslim watchdogs' pleasure will now presumably be officially sanctioned as victimizing the Ummah.

When governments bring such non-elected advisors/critics into consultations not only on policies, but on day-to-day policing with all its needs for timely action and control of information, we are surely seeing a prime example of how multiculturalism assumes that the various members of a nation are not fit to govern themselves. Just as the supposedly independent (from political interference) police are here implied to be incapable of governing themselves, of maintaining their own professional standards, practices, and public consultations without need of suspicious and politicized watchdogs, multiculturalism policy assumes that the disparate members of a nation do not have sufficient common interests or any unifying principles that can serve as a rational basis for governing themselves. Instead of a country in which, say, a Muslim or a Christian, a person of Xinjiangese or Basque ancestry, can aspire to the virtue of going into the public sphere and making representations that could appeal to many disparate members of his nation, the ideology of multiculturalism assumes we can only speak for our own, however defined.

What this assumption must leave unanswered is the overall basis or reason for the decisions made by the high officials of state who co-ordinate the various interest groups over which the government - which becomes an imperial hierarchy riding the winds of power - rules. Democracy requires a common purpose or reason that is the basis for the people ruling themselves through their representatives. And staying alive by keeping the system and the diversity it fosters from being ripped apart into competing, warring, camps is ultimately at the root of such common purpose or reason.

But there is no accessible rationality behind the present multicultural order in full pomp; there are only attempts to obscure the fact that a liberal order, trying to serve all the conflicting desires that it pretends to have room for, and without deferring to any unifying principles or respect for a nation's foundational events that give it a particular history of self-representation, will sooner or later fall into a tyranny of high officials negotiating differences in back rooms, without the possibility of publicly accounting for the rationality of such negotiations other than in terms of deferring to competing interests and powers.

Such a "nation" might become a place, say, where police cannot protect against terrorism, from risk of offending those with a right to restrain their investigations. Or it might become a place where dhimmi police trade their powers to Muslim leaders in return for the promise that the latter will control violent trouble makers under some kind of imperial millet system.

On the other hand, maybe it is only when all see multiculturalism reveal itself for the arational and potentially tyrannical system it is, that we will be able to see clearly that the emperor has no clothes. What fun then to read:

COLUMBUS, Ohio — A car dealership's planned radio advertisement that declared "a jihad on the automotive market" has drawn sharp criticism for its content but will not be changed, the business said Saturday.

Several stations rejected the Dennis Mitsubishi spot, which says sales representatives wearing"burqas"_ head-to-toe traditional dress for Islamic women _ will sell vehicles that can"comfortably seat 12 jihadists in the back."

"Our prices are lower than the evildoers'every day. Just ask the pope!"the ad says."Friday is fatwa Friday, with free rubber swords for the kiddies."A fatwa is a religious edict.

Dealership president Keith Dennis said the ad does not disrespect any religion or culture. He said it was"fair game"to poke"a little fun at radical extremists."

"It was our intention to craft something around some of the buzzwords of the day and give everyone a good chuckle and be a little bit of a tension reliever,"he said.

The Columbus chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations decried the ad as disrespectful.

Friends, Colleagues, It's time to Renew the Covenant Zone

"the going gets tough" for India

"When the going gets tough, the tough get going", was a saying my mom drilled into me as a kid, to make sure I would learn that how I reacted to a problem was going to reveal much about my character.
For some reason, this childhood lesson came to mind as I read this morning of the terrible series of explosions that have occured in Malegaon, India today:

At least 37 people were killed and over 100 injured in Malegaon on Friday as explosions rocked the scene of a Muslim congregation in the powerloom town in north Maharashtra.
The blasts occurred around 1.55 pm — within minutes of each other — after Friday namaaz as the crowd made its way out of a mosque called Rehmani Masjid and a nearby cemetery referred to as the Bada Kabrastan. ....
The casualties included a number of beggars who had lined the streets seeking zakat (alms), which is distributed on the occasion of Shab-e-baraat.

[Compare what happened next to how the United States, and the citizens of New York City, reacted on the morning of September 11, 2001.]

Soon afterwards, mobs went on the rampage through the town which has a history of communal violence, pelting stones and shouting slogans to protest against the incident. Curfew was immediately clamped and the police rushed reinforcements to secure the area.

It seems that the police will be hampered in their investigation of the bombings, by local tensions within the muslim community:

The "secular" parties may have made things more difficult for the law-enforcing agencies in Malegaon.
Malegaon witnessed a bitter electoral battle during the 2004 Assembly polls as six-time MLA Janata Dal (Secular) leader Nihal Ahmed faced off with Congress contender Sheikh Rashid. Rashid pulled out all stops to defeat the socialist veteran, dividing the Muslims like never before. And the bitterness, for all appearances, still lingers.
There was so much of bad blood in the campaign that elders wondered if the tussle was worth it. Rashid accused Ahmed of playing the communal card and supporting Osama Bin Laden. Ahmed refuted the charge and accused Rashid of using unfair electoral practices. The divided Muslim community is now one of the main problems that police face, say officials.
"If we talk to Rashid, the Ahmed camp gets upset with us and vice-versa. It has become virtually impossible to bring about a consensus among local Muslims, many of whom are migrants from UP [the northern state of Uttar Pradesh]. The other problem is that a section of Muslim youth, fed up with the slanging match between Rashid and Ahmed, is increasingly turning towards organisations like the SIMI [Student Islamic Movement of India] ...

The first suspects that authorities have placed on their list of possibilities, are the Bajrang Dal, whose main slogan, according to Wikipedia, is
..."Seva Suraksha Sanskar", or "service, safety, and culture". An integral part of its agenda is preventing the killing of cows. ...
It has also vowed to protect India's Hindu identity, from the dangers of Muslim population growth, Christian conversions, and antinational communists.

Like a certain peaceful religion we hear a lot about, the members of Bajrang Dal are somewhat flexible in their definition of "protection":

The Bajrang Dal is known to have followed a similar pattern in blasts at Parbhani’s Mohammadi Masjid and mosques at Pona and Jalna earlier this year.
"We are probing this angle, though it is too early to hold any group responsible," DGP P S Pasricha said on Friday.
Another theory doing the rounds is that a Jaish-e-Mohammad module could have engineered Friday’s blasts to create communal trouble.
...
Intelligence agencies suspect that the Malegaon blasts were aimed at provoking communal tension as terrorists could not foment trouble during the recently concluded Ganapati festival.
A senior official from one of the central agencies in Pune said similar, subversive acts had been planned during the 10-day Ganapati festival.
However, tight security measures prevented any untoward incident. "There was no specific intelligence input on Malegaon," the official said.
"The motive seems not only to kill people, but also create panic and communal tension in the already sensitive Malegaon," he said, explaining that after failing to cause damage during the Ganesh festival, Malegaon could have been seen as a soft target.

As we approach The Date of another September 11th, it is hoped that citizens of the west will undertake a thorough reflection on our collective and individual reactions to that event. What light has the past five years revealed about our reactions; have we done what we should have, has it been the right response... as tempting as it may be to think in leftist utopian terms of absolute solutions and absolute failures, have we done the most we could have done under the circumstances, should we have gotten more tough; what is to be a dignified definition of "getting tough" in our response to islamic barbarity?
Incidents like this bombing in Malegaon, if indeed undertaken in retaliation for the recent Mumbai train bombings, are a useful reminder that eye for an eye justice is not always the dignified path, that adopting a long-term view (seeing beyond our own life being one of the characteristics that elevates humans above animals) involves measuring more than just material details, it must also include measuring things unseen: one's sense of humanity, one's sense of civility, one's ability to rise about the natural, animal-like tit for tat and embrace one's sense of responsibility to struggle to live with honor. Where is the honor in blowing up beggars? Where is the civility in killing every single muslim, wouldn't that just make us like the fundamentalist wahabbis and their fanatical shia cousins, who think in precisely the same inhumane terms?

If ultimately we are to be judged by how we handle adversity, reactions being the most revealing x-ray of one's inner character, then the judeo-christian heritage animating western civilization exhorts us to renew our ability to measure solutions to the tough choices we continue to face.
Our challenge today remains the same as on the afternoon of September 11: how to find the civilized middle ground between the extreme temptations to become either as barbaric as the jihadis or as suicidal as the left's ongoing determination to remain grazing sheep waiting to be fleeced.
Between the painfully clear extremes of killing everyone and killing no one lies a half-seen shifting ground that will be so tough to recognize, we will need the participation of as many penetrating judgments as possible to adjudicate a tough solution worthy of a human being.

Covenanting Every Thursday

We meet in the atrium of the main branch of the Vancouver Public Library, 7-9pm, and discuss the renewal of nationhood and the defense of human rights against all evils, including those quietly ignored by the reigning ideology of White Guilt. This victimary ideology of our elites finds ways to excuse the resentful violence of those it considers outsiders and victims of western culture. We do not. We defend those western values that are essential to the progress of freedom around the world, and of self-rule at home. To rule ourseves we need to learn again how to combine individual integrity, the right to own our own lives, with a sense of belonging to a coherent, bounded, constitutional, moral, and rational political community from which a national identity, simultaneously particular and universal, can flourish. We wish to foster social and cultural networks to promote our belief that the renewed national identities will be best represented in the hands and minds of ordinary capable individuals, not cultural or institutional elites. In solidarity with the patriots in France reclaiming their nation from the gnostic empire of the left and its imperial anti-nationalism, we wear blue scarves and bandanas - if you can, please join us at the tables in front of Blenz Coffee, this or any Thursday.

Fear of the Sacred

A Hasidic Jew was recently forced to leave an Air Canada flight from Montreal to New York because his praying scared fellow passengers:

The airplane was heading toward the runway at the Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport when eyewitnesses said the Orthodox man began to pray.

"He was clearly a Hasidic Jew," said Yves Faguy, a passenger seated nearby. "He had some sort of cover over his head. He was reading from a book.

"He wasn't exactly praying out loud but he was lurching back and forth," Faguy added.

The action didn't seem to bother anyone, Faguy said, but a flight attendant approached the man and told him his praying was making other passengers nervous.

"The attendant actually recognized out loud that he wasn't a Muslim and that she was sorry for the situation but they had to ask him to leave," Faguy said.

The man, who spoke neither English nor French, was escorted off the airplane.

Air Canada Jazz termed the situation "delicate," but says it received more than one complaint about the man's behaviour.

The crew had to act in the interest of the majority of passengers, said Jazz spokeswoman Manon Stewart.

"The passenger did not speak English or French, so we really had no choice but to return to the gate to secure a translator," she said.

The airline is not saying if the man was told he was not allowed to pray, but a spokesperson said the man was back on board the next flight to New York.

Now ask yourself, why would anyone be scared of a Hasidic Jew praying on a flight to New York City? Surely there are few more unlikely sources of terrorism. So, unless we wish to believe that the passengers or crew supposed, with no evident reason, that the lastest ploy of Al Qaeda may be to disguise themselves as pious Hasidim, we have to assume that this is a case of simple fear of unfamiliar signs of religious piety (and perhaps some queer, MSM-influenced misconceptions about orthodox Jews and violence).

And this, I think, is an interesting but disquieting sign of our cultural weakness. For on the one hand it shows that the people involved vaguely recognize, and fear, the power of the sacred over human minds; and yet, on the other hand, it suggests that these same people have little interest in the sacred and no idea what Hasidic Judaism is about. Indeed, we can confidently guess that only people who don't take prayer seriously - in the sense that they don't seriously practice it - would raise objections to a Jewish man praying. Such people would assume that pious, semi-public prayer is a sign of an unstable mind, and while they recognize its power, it may not be for the good.

In other words, if and when this type of person is indeed challenged by people motivated by the power of the sacred, people who see the secular North American as weak and decadent, the under-educated, secular-Gnostic, North Americans are going to run screaming if they can't find authority figures to complain to first. They are not going to be able to feel confident and very superior to the other. Sure they will think the other is crazy, but they will not have the courage to face him down in a fight. They will not be able to say "our faith is superior to yours", because they will only fear the power of faith and not be able to embrace it.

This kind of North American is simply buying time. They know the religious crazies are coming, but like the Spanish voters who responded to the train bombings by voting out a government that was willing to fight Islamic terror, they just want to do whatever it takes to avoid, but not face or understand, the supposed danger, and to keep the jet-settting and partying going for as long as they can, until the fearful power of the sacred triumphs in its return to the scene...

We need to learn again how to promote good faith, and so also an understanding of the sacred, that is suited to our times and needs.

Meanwhile, Concordia University continues to fear Jewish speakers.

While we work on bigger posts...

Here's a thought teaser to keep you anticipating the arrival of the next Covenant Zone posting - whose post will it be? Dag's, Charles's, John's?

NORWICH (Reuters) - Many people have experienced the phenomenon of receiving a telephone call from someone shortly after thinking about them -- now a scientist says he has proof of what he calls telephone telepathy.

Rupert Sheldrake, whose research is funded by the respected Trinity College, Cambridge, said on Tuesday he had conducted experiments that proved that such precognition existed for telephone calls and even e-mails.

Each person in the trials was asked to give researchers names and phone numbers of four relatives or friends. These were then called at random and told to ring the subject who had to identify the caller before answering the phone.

"The hit rate was 45 percent, well above the 25 percent you would have expected," he told the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. "The odds against this being a chance effect are 1,000 billion to one."

He said he found the same result with people being asked to name one of four people sending them an e-mail before it had landed.

However, his sample was small on both trials -- just 63 people for the controlled telephone experiment and 50 for the email -- and only four subjects were actually filmed in the phone study and five in the email, prompting some scepticism.

Undeterred, Sheldrake -- who believes in the interconnectedness of all minds within a social grouping -- said that he was extending his experiments to see if the phenomenon also worked for mobile phone text messages.

Of course, how can you even trust an article from Reuters? Nonetheless, I might note that I have this kind of experience not infrequently - thinking of someone and then meeting them on the street, or receiving their call, or being told when I call that "I was just thinking of you..." but I've never been sure if these seemingly coincidental occurrences happen more than, statistically, they should.

Covenant Zone weekly meeting

A heads up that tonight's weekly meeting is going ahead after all.
The Atrium of the Vancouver Public Library, 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm, to discuss
the issues raised on our blog.

As ever, we'll be the ones sporting the blue scarves and bandanas, to help identify ourselves
to each other, and to you.

See you there!

Whitewashed Tom Sawyer converts to Islam

Interesting approach to multiculturalism going on in Turkey, a country aspiring to enter the European Union:

Pinocchio and friends converted to Islam

Pinocchio, Tom Sawyer and other characters have been converted to Islam in new versions of 100 classic stories on the Turkish school curriculum.
"Give me some bread, for Allah's sake," Pinocchio says to Geppetto, his maker, in a book stamped with the crest of the ministry of education.
"Thanks be to Allah," the puppet says later.

In The Three Musketeers, D'Artagnan is told that he cannot visit Aramis. The reason would surprise the author, Alexandre Dumas.
An old woman explains: "He is surrounded by men of religion. He converted to Islam after his illness."
Tom Sawyer may always have shirked his homework, but he is more conscientious in learning his Islamic prayers. He is given a "special treat" for learning the Arabic words.

Pollyanna, seen by some as the embodiment of Christian forgiveness, says that she believes in the end of the world as predicted in the Koran.
Heidi, the Swiss orphan girl in the tale by Johanna Spyri, is told that praying to Allah will help her to relax.
Several more books have been altered, including La Fontaine's fables and Victor Hugo's Les Miserables.
....

[The government is outraged, and will be swinging into action... not out of concern for literary heritage, but because some of the books contain sly insults to the government.]

...
Other books contain insults, slang and rude rhymes which mock the president and the prime minister.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is Turkey's first Islamic premier, has called for swift action to be taken against the publishers.
The education ministry has threatened to take legal action against any publisher which continues to issue such books.
Huseyin Celik, the education minister, said: "If there are slang and swear words, we will sue them for using the ministry logo."...

This story puts previous news from Turkey in a potentially new light. Recently another mainstay of western litterature was banned for being the "wrong version"

Turkey seizes Pippi Longstocking in Kurdish

Over 1,000 books about Pippi Longstocking, the world-famous fictional children's character, translated into Kurdish have been seized by Turkish authorities in Istanbul, the Swedish news agency TT said Thursday.
The shipment was impounded because it lacked the documentation required by Turkish customs authorities and did not have the necessary license from the Turkish education ministry, TT said.
...
The 1,208 books, including 25 different Pippi titles, were sent August 7 from Sweden by Komak, an organization that runs an education project for Kurds in Turkey, TT said.
The books had been set for delivery to libraries in five Kurdish villages.
...

Flagrant disrespect for western cultural tradition: I guess as far as Europe's elite governing class are concerned, they'll be even more convinced that Turkey is fully prepared to join the EU!

Is Britain a greater security threat than Iran?

A busy week is keeping us from our usual rounds of blogging, but I just couldn't pass up noting this article from the UK.
(thanks to Hodja at Infidel Bloggers Alliance)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/08/29/wsecurity29.xml&pPage=/core/Matt/pcMatt.jhtml

Britain now presents a greater security threat to the United States than Iran or Iraq, an American magazine said yesterday.
In an article on Islamists headlined "Kashmir on the Thames", the New Republic painted Britain's Muslim communities as a breeding ground for violent extremism.
Citing recent opinion poll evidence suggesting that one in four British Muslims believed that last year's London Tube bombings were justified, the magazine said: "In the wake of this month's high-profile arrests, it can now be argued that the biggest threat to US security emanates not from Iran or Iraq or Afghanistan, but rather from Great Britain, our closest ally."
...
The claim is the latest in a series of hostile reassessment of Britain by Americans in the wake of the alleged plot to bring down transatlantic airliners.
...
Other publications and the think-tanks that shape public debate in America have also issued stern criticism both of Britain's Muslims and of the Government. Nile Gardiner, of the Right-wing Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Telegraph yesterday that Americans were coming to view Britain as "a hornet's nest of Islamic extremists" and thought it posed ''a direct security threat to the US".
...
A major concern would be the tightening of travel restrictions unless the authorities start to crack down on Islamist militancy," he said. More than four million Britons enter America annually using the visa waiver programme. Any change would force Britons wishing to visit the US into lengthy queues at American diplomatic missions.
Mr Gardiner said the issue had not yet acquired a head of steam in Congress, but that another plot, or a "successful" attack by British Muslims on an American target, would be likely to spur an immediate response.
Investor's Business Daily has already demanded an end to the programme because it "allows Pakistani Britons to dodge security background checks".
Much of the outraged American response this month was sparked by the call from Muslim leaders for a change in British foreign policy. The letter from six Muslim MPs and 38 community leaders said "current British Government policy risks putting civilians at increased risk both in the UK and abroad".
The theme was taken up by the Wall Street Journal, which said: "It is typical of some of Britain's so-called moderate Muslims, who seem less concerned with fighting extremists in their midst than in excusing them."
The newspaper went on to attack Tony Blair's government for "cultivating and promoting such pseudo-moderate Muslim organisations". The BBC and the Foreign Office, described as "a preserve of Arabists", were also lambasted both for quoting extremists and allowing them into Britain.

Maybe if enough people throughout the west are ticked off by sufficient inconveniences, such as standing in lengthy queues, they will finally stop accepting the growth of fundamentalist islam without having to be picked off by sufficient bomb-making expertise of those self-same fundamentalists.

The original New Republic piece referenced by the article is here, but behind a registration curtain.

"You can't assimilate with a nullity"

Another great contribution from Mark Steyn, courtesy of Scott at Crusader:

....
A friend of mine did a satirical play in England a couple of years ago, he's an old leftie, very anti-Iraq war, so in his show he had Bush and Blair come out and sing 'we're sending you a cluster bomb from Jesus' ... ha-ha, very funny. Well how about if you have a couple of Imams dancing around singing 'we're sending you a schoolgirl bomb from Allah'.
Well oddly enough, my pal was far more reluctant to do that, on the reasonable grounds that unlike insulting Christianity, if you insult certain other faiths, a far more motivated crowd is likely to be waiting for you at the stage door.
Multiculturalism seems to operate to the same even-handedness as the old Cold War joke, in which the American tells the Soviet that 'in my country, everyone is free to criticise the President' and the Soviet guy replies 'same here! In my country everyone is free to criticise your President'. Under the rules, as understood by the New York Times, the West is free to mock and belittle its Judeo-Christian inheritance, and likewise, the Muslim world is free to mock and belittle the West's Judeo-Christian inheritance.

If one had to choose, on balance, Islam's loathing of other cultures seems psychologically less damaging than the Western elite's loathing of their own.

Now I have a great sympathy for Muslims that face demands that they assimilate; it's on the front pages of all the newspapers in London this weekend. Even if you wanted to, even if you wanted to, how would you assimilate with say, Canadian national identity? You can't assimilate with a nullity, which is what the modern multicultural state boils down to. It's much easier to dismantle a society than put anything new and lasting in it place. And across much of the developed world, that's what's going on right now.

The advantage for the US and for Australia, and to a lesser extent other parts of the English-speaking world, is that Europe, in its civilisational exhaustion, is ahead in the line, and its fate might wake up even the most blinkered on this side of the continent.
...

Read the rest, it's worth it.

Mark Steyn is a terrific columnist, but I think he's an even more effective speaker. There's an insistence in his voice that makes the points he underlines all the more powerful. I've been listening to him as a weekly guest on the Hugh Hewitt radio show for .... gosh, can it be two years now?... and he's usually a highlight of the broadcast week.
Here are some recent appearances of Steyn's on Hewitt's show:

Thursday August 3rd

Thursday July 27th

Apparently he filled in for Rush Limbaugh's radio show one day last week? Did anyone hear how he did? I usually only tune in to Rush when I know that Walter Williams is filling in, because that means a talk with Thomas Sowell, one of my favorite writers; what a thrill it must have been to get a 3-hour dose of Steyn..!

Searching for the Golden Mean in turning the other cheek to militant islam

"If a man finds that his nature tends or is disposed to one of these extremes..., he should turn back and improve, so as to walk in the way of good people, which is the right way.
The right way is the mean in each group of dispositions common to humanity; namely, that disposition which is equally distant from the two extremes in its class, not being nearer to the one than to the other."
— Maimonides on The Golden Mean

Our battle against islamist aggression is made so much greater by the struggle it entails we engage in within ourselves; as the muslim moderates might put it, we undertake a "jihad", an "inner struggle" to resist the temptation to descend to the barbaric level of our opponents.

Thinking about the long future of our conflict with militant islam, surely the most frightening implications we face concern the brutal steps we might have to take to defend and preserve our values. The moral dilemma we struggle under, is that to sustain our values, we seem destined to forsake them, if we are to win through to absolute victory.
With every human shield, with every mother willing to use their children as ammunition, with every protest in our streets calling for the extermination of the jews, our ideological enemy raises the bar for our personal struggle not to become as savage as they are in our response to their savagery.

In reading Matthew the other day, I pondered long and hard over the admonition to turn the other cheek. Years ago it was one of the statements that turned me away from my faith; it seemed such a senseless piece of advice, not designed for "the real world". With the passing years, the know-it-all teenager became (hopefully) a bit more of a humbled man, as I got to spend a bit more time living in that real world; now I frequently find myself returning to this advice I had long found so challenging, and try to give it the benefit of the doubt.
Truth must be sensible, so where might be the sense in turning the other cheek to terrorists?

I guess understanding this passage comes down to understanding language itself. The advice is given in the language of man so that it can be clear to man, in the form of stories; like language itself, the advice is amorphous, designed to be followed in principle, not in rule, adaptable so that as circumstances change, we can change to meet them; we can measure it in long-term policy, not just short-term act. We don't literally "turn the other cheek", we figuratively search for a way to respond in a dignified manner. It's not about ignoring evil, or never resisting it's effect on us. It's about responding to evil in ways that are still dignified, civilized, and holy.

For our dignity to remain undiminished by our response, we need a brutal amount of honesty, because we desperately need clarity and truth in order to meet our obligations to do The Right Thing. The extreme of doing nothing to protect ourselves devalues our dignity, because it presumes that there is nothing to defend. That to me, it is even worse than doing too much, responding too heavy-handedly; at least we can atone for mistakes made through the latter approach, whereas the paralysis of the former surely dooms a correction as coming too little too late.
Finding a balanced response, a Golden Mean between the two extremes, of killing everybody and killing no one (the solution of the "peace-keeping" crowd), needs honesty. To arrive at our desired destination, we need moral clarity about the true point of departure. The stories of recent air passenger reactions to muslims on their flights shows us that the honest dialog we've been avoiding in our public arena, needs to be addressed, and lost time made up for... otherwise who can predict how far the pendulum will swing to the other extreme in a hastened attempt to redress grievances?
If we're to find the right balance, we'll need all the help we can get, so let's learn from the experience of those who have been traveling down this road long before we have.
India, for instance, has been under assault for ... well, when have they not been under assault by militant islam? The swinging pendulum of doing too much or too little is addressed in a recent editorial in India's Hindustan Times, brutally honest in order to find a more dignified response to brutality itself:

Blackening our conscience

Two things need to be said about the incident on board a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Bombay. One of them is self-evident and will, I think, meet with widespread agreement. The second is as self-evident but will, I suspect, be greeted with greater scepticism.
The first is that, no matter what spin the Dutch authorities and the US marshals on board who ordered the plane to be turned back give to the incident, what happened was clearly an instance of racism and religious prejudice.
It is all very well to say that the passengers suspected of terrorism were behaving suspiciously. But what did they actually do?
Judging by what the Dutch police are now saying the men changed seats, called out loudly to each other and attempted to speak on their mobile phones (though how they got a signal at that height is not explained).Such behaviour can be irritating. But is it suspicious enough to give rise to such paranoia? To have an entire aircraft turned around?
The real reason why the US marshals sprung into action was the ethnic and religious origin of the passengers. Firstly, they were brown. And secondly, they were Muslims.
Imagine for a moment that the passengers in question were white Americans ... would the US marshals have been as suspicious?
Forget about nationality. Suppose the 12 men who called out loudly to each other were white. Would there have been any panic? Would anyone have regarded them as potential terrorists? I think the answers are obvious.
It is the second point I want to make today that I suspect will be a little more controversial.
Imagine for a moment that there had been a terrorist alert on a train in India. Assume now that the police had been called in and had taken 12 Muslims into custody. What do you suppose would have happened next?
I’ll tell you. The Home Secretary of the state in question would have called a press conference to declare that a terrorist cell, possibly linked to the Lashkar or the Jaish, had been apprehended even as it was minutes away from blowing up the Rajdhani/Shatabdi Express.
The men would have been taken to the police station and placed in indefinite custody under one pretext or the other... Police teams would have fanned out all over India to raid their homes and their offices. Their neighbours would have been questioned. If they owned shops, these would have been shut down.
At some stage, when the interrogation yielded no concrete leads, the men would have been beaten up. Their families would have been threatened. At least one of them would have been broken so completely that he would have signed his name to any confession that the police had produced.
Do you think this is far-fetched? Am I being too harsh on the Indian system?All right. Just look at our recent history. Forget for a moment about the Islamic terrorist angle because that still provokes strong emotions. Think back instead to the Punjab agitation.
Do you remember a time when every Sikh who drove through Haryana on his way to Delhi was stopped and hassled by the police? When every Sikh who tried to board an aircraft was treated as a potential hijacker and forced to submit to the most humiliating searches?
And that’s just the people who could afford to buy plane tickets and drive their own cars. Poor Sikhs got an even worse deal.
Remember the detenues in Jodhpur jail? Remember the time when every Sikh pilgrim who was caught in the crossfire during the botched military operation that was Bluestar was treated as a potential terrorist and arrested? Remember how many of them protested that they were harmless pilgrims who had come to the Harminder Sahib not realising that the Indian army was on its way to blow up the Akal Takht?
Every family in every village in the Punjab had some story about police brutality during that era. Everybody knows somebody who was arrested falsely during those days. And everybody has heard of some innocent man who died during a police encounter and was later described as a ‘deadly terrorist’.
Fast forward now to the Bombay blasts in 1993. Nobody in his right mind can defend those terrorist acts. Nor can anyone deny that the police had a right to launch a comprehensive investigation into the people who assisted the bombers.
But speak to anybody who lives in Bhendi Bazaar or on Mohammad Ali Road. Listen to their stories of how the Bombay police — clearly communalised during that era — went from house to house dragging out the sons even as the mothers wept and wailed. Hear about the bribes that were extracted from innocent Muslims by corrupt policemen who threatened them with arrest unless they paid up.
Some of this went on under the TADA laws but many of those arrested were actually charged with crimes that they had never committed. Coolies who unloaded the explosives that were used for the Bombay blasts without knowing what was in the packages were picked up and thrown into jail. Hundreds of Muslims who may have had some nodding acquaintance with people who knew somebody who knew one of the bombers were arrested and charged with terrorism.
It is all very well to say that we are a society where the rule of law prevails. But just look at the progress of the Bombay blasts case — and this is before a special court so none of the usual arguments about judicial backlogs apply — where the verdict has still to be announced 13 years after the blasts themselves.
In the interim, witnesses have disappeared, some of the accused have died, whole families have been ruined and lives have been destroyed.
But at least the Bombay police didn’t go around shooting everybody — in those days. Consider how other police forces have handled so-called terrorist threats.
Who can forget the cold-blooded murder of two men in the parking lot of Ansal Plaza by the Delhi police? It is possible that the men were terrorists and I also grant that there is widespread public support for encounters as part of the fight against terrorism. But isn’t there something worrying about a society where policemen can drive two suspects into a public area, shoot them in front of witnesses and then claim they have foiled a terrorist plot to blow up Diwali shoppers?
So much for the rule of law.
I could go on. What about the five men who were described as the terrorists responsible for the Chattisinghpura massacre? When the bodies were exhumed after public pressure they were shown to have been innocent civilians who had been murdered by men in uniform.
So, let’s not get too self-righteous about the Dutch or about the US marshals. Yes, of course, they over-reacted. And, yes, there is no doubt that white people would not have been regarded with the same degree of suspicion.
But let’s also recognise that the West ... does function on the basis of the rule of law. The Indians who had been wrongly detained from the Northwest flight were set free. And it was made clear that they had no terrorist links. When the British police killed an innocent Brazilian on a tube train and tried to lie about the circumstances of the shooting, the media exposed the truth and the government ordered an inquiry, which uncovered the lies.
In India, alas, we are so terrified of terrorism and organised crime that we allow the police to do pretty much what they want. When the HT exposed the Ansal Plaza murders, we were called anti-national and it was suggested that we were on the side of the terrorists. Anybody who raises questions about the behaviour of the authorities in the battle against terrorism is regarded as unpatriotic. Can you think of a single democratic country where there would be no public outrage about the scandal that is the delayed trial in the Bombay blasts case? But in India we choose to gloss over it, claiming that all this is necessary to fight terror.
Only now, as we become victims of the anti-terror paranoia simply because we are brown, do we realise how great the injustice can be. What a shame then that we reserve our indignation for the West — and ignore the blood in our own backyard.

Covenant Zone: exploring the sting of conscience

We survived our weekly gathering last night, and what a very illuminating meeting it was.

Interesting to compare notes about the recent controversy over liberal MP Wrzesnewskyj's pro-hezbollah remarks. It's Push Comes To Shove time for many on the left, in an interesting parallel to the stings of conscience that befell the European colonial powers in the 20th century. I think particularly of the manner in which Britain left India, since that nation's Independance Day is still fresh in our minds: an appeal to conscience, not economics, was the tipping point and the leverage found to budge the english.
Liberalism's citadel of steel turns out to be built on sand, as it now slowly sinks under the weight of recent events in the Middle East, increasingly stripped of its illusory justifications for moral relativism. Their shining city on a hill, turns out to be a mere sand castle, washed away by the arrival of the morning tide.

The left's ongoing attempts to prop up certain groups as victims worthy of ennoblement is a hard fantasy to maintain when videos of throats getting slit are being filmed or downloaded by members of those groups. Many on the left are finally being forced to confront the logical and moral consequences of the rhetoric they've been preaching for many years. How fitting that those who place such great stock in "gestures" and "appearances", now appear exposed by their gestures. What are feminists and homosexuals and and separatists and unions doing supporting hezbollah, and by tacit extention, Iran, for instance? How do the islamist groups the left endorse, interact with their cultural counterparts? The dishonesty of their stand is exposed for all to see, since in some instances, islamic culture doesn't even allow for a cultural counterpart to exist (any gay pride parades in Iran that I may have missed...?) and finally they themselves are starting to see it. We're starting to see who on the left is motivated by a sincere belief to do good, and who just wanted to look good in order to hide the defects they feared confronting in their mirror.

Dag had some striking comments on pacifism that I found very provocative; it got me to thinking, that some pacifists defer violence into a reluctantly undertaken last response to contact with the real world, while others, who profess to be the most pacifistic, end up using violence as their first response, as the necessary defence for a worldview that cannot withstand contact with the real world. I nominate the United States of America as an example of the former, and those who would march in protest against Israel, as examples of the latter.

Some people just cannot deal with the sting of their conscience, because such stimulus reveals to them that they actually have a consciousness, a piece of themselves existing outside the physical and material, and that it shines a light on the path that their physical and material selves should be following; conscience can be a hard taskmaster, in that it expects a constant series of judgements, not just one judgement one time. It is our conscience that reminds us of the possibility of changing circumstances: things do not remain frozen, "life goes on", and we must adapt to these changes if we are to continue to survive.
Ignoring one's conscience for but a moment can be a painful experience indeed, and the longer it is ignored the more the pain accumulates. What we're seeing with liberalism's current apocalypse, if I may borrow Truepeers' expression, is the price being paid for this lifetime of avoidance.
Above all else, the current war on civilization seems to reveal that some people are so incapable of living with change that they would prefer to be dead than proven wrong.

Liberalism is collapsing all around us

Charles' latest post, just below, is only more evidence for the notion that an apocalypse - which is an unveiling and revealing of the historical purpose and destiny - of liberalism is now under way. What comes next? How can we transcend one order, while preserving what is good and necessary in it, and help bring about the next in a manner that serves our nation best? This is a question I'll raise at this Thursday's Covenant Zone/Blue Scarf Meeting, 7-9 pm, the atrium of the main branch of the Vancouver Public Library (we're the guys in front of Blenz). If you can, please join us.

Are Liberals re-balancing their views on Israel and hezbollah..?

When Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper first took his principled stand to support Israel during the recent Middle East war, there was a rush to condemn him for his "out of the mainstream" position. Polls, pundits and practicalities were put forward to prove all the many reasons why this was a dumb political move, often without even a rueful acknowledgment establishing the moral justification for Harper's position.
This week the candidates jockeying for leadership of the Liberals, our main opposition party, race to avoid being considered as pro-hezbollah. Maybe now they don't consider Harper's stand quite so "out of the mainstream" anymore..?

MP Wrzesnewskyj resigns over Hezbollah comments

Embattled Liberal MP Borys Wrzesnewskyj has resigned as deputy foreign affairs critic following the uproar over his comments suggesting Canada should negotiate with Hezbollah.
.....
After the Toronto MP suggested the Mideast peace process would benefit from Canada being more open to talking to Hezbollah, Liberal leadership hopefuls Scott Brison and Carolyn Bennett had immediately demanded Wrzesnewskyj step down from his post, saying his comments were "unacceptable."
The comments quickly became the central topic of the three-day Liberal caucus retreat in Vancouver, which was supposed to be a strategy session for the upcoming session of Parliament.
All 10 leadership candidates condemned the remarks, including Wrzesnewskyj's preferred candidate Gerard Kennedy.
At a news conference Tuesday, [Conservative MP Jason Kenney] blasted Wrzesnewskyj, calling his comments nothing short of a sign of support for terrorist groups.
"Their idea of a balanced approach is one where Israel is always wrong," said Kenney. "This represents a totally irresponsible approach to foreign security policy."
Wrzesnewskyj, who was one of three opposition MPs on the Mideast mission, said Monday he favoured changing a Canadian law that forbids contact with known terrorist organizations.
He said the law undermines efforts to obtain lasting peace between Israel and Hezbollah fighters.
Wrzesnewskyj denied media reports that claimed he wants Hezbollah taken off Ottawa's official list of terrorist organizations.
"I've said all along that Hezbollah is a terrorist organization and will continue to be," Wrzesnewskyj told reporters.
"Where I have difficulty is with the legislation that says a group on the list cannot be communicated with."
......

[What possible kind of communication was the Liberal MP expecting? This isn't a labor dispute that might end in a wildcat strike, or a child custody battle; it's a hate-fueled attack on a civilized people by a pack of barbaric savages, whose stated objective is to settle for nothing less than the obliteration of the nation of Israel. It's not about money, or material needs: it's about spiritual needs. On Israel's side, it is the conscientious struggle to survive and remain civilized while doing so, despite being surrounded by bloodthirsty maniacs hellbent on destroying them (stripping Israel of its civility in the process, through hiding behind human shields, among other evils), whereas for hezbollah it is an attempt to exterminate the neighborhood of every Israeli, and anyone sympathetic to them, so that they can postpone confronting the fatal flaws of their islamist belief system.
Survival, extermination; where's the middle ground to be negotiated for a "lasting peace"? Only killing some people, in accordance with a scheduled quota??
Thank God our prime minister continues to understand the "nuances" of the war which elude these deluded MPs...]

Harper says comparison of Hezbollah, Nazis is fair

OTTAWA - Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Tuesday it's not unfair to liken Hezbollah to the Nazis, who once ruled Germany, because both stand for the destruction of the ''Jewish nation.''
In an interview with CanWest News Service, Harper was asked if the comparison made earlier in the day by his parliamentary secretary Conservative MP Jason Kenney, was appropriate.

''Like all comparisons, it's true in some ways, and not in others,'' he said, ''but as near as I can tell, both Hezbollah and the Nazi party stand for the elimination of the Jewish nation. So I think that's pretty fundamental and, in that sense, I don't think it's unfair.

''I think those who associate themselves with Hezbollah in this country are operating beyond the pale, and they're frankly operating in defence of an organization that is an illegal criminal organization in this country," said Harper.

Blood and Treasure, and Home Movies

To understand why we are fighting in Afghanistan, and why we need to continue fighting there, we need to recognize who we are fighting.

Let's take a cultural phenomenon that we are all familiar with: making home movies. What motivates us, to buy a camera and film ourselves? What do we, in the west, choose to point the camera at, what do we wish to see?

Here's a good summary of our western approach to "home movies":

"Making movies can be a fun way to preserve your families’ event well into the future. Years later you will be happy that you videotaped a family Christmas event, or a birthday party, and will enjoy the ability to sit back and relive those memories again and again."

From Germany comes this report of what the enemy we fight in Afghanistan are doing with their camera equipment, and the ends to which they are using their time and money:

High-Res Executions and Bloody DVDs

...The man is 38-years-old and has only one leg -- war is his life. His name is Mullah Dadullah and he is considered the Taliban's second-in-command in Afghanistan. And he is a brutally savage man.

His victims lie on the ground, their hands tied behind their backs. The self-appointed holy warrior grabs one of the men by the hair and slits the "traitor's" throat. He does the same with the next. And the next. A total of six times. The butchered men are accused of having collaborated with the "infidels."
Death is their punishment.
....And the carnage is available for the world to watch. The act was recorded with a digital camera the resulting DVD is sold at markets in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and is also available on the Internet..
.......
That the Internet has become a communication platform for terrorists -- as well as for their supporters and their adversaries -- is nothing new. These days, though, a close monitoring of the Web reveals the increasing brutality of the international jihadist movement.
...
[The images] also document the vulnerability of Western armies in the remote mountainous regions of Afghanistan and Iraq, together with the challenges they face in dealing with the realities of the countries in which they operate.
......
One of the sites even announces its terror videos as if they were entertainment. Global Islamic Media Front presents "Mujaheddin's Hidden Camera -- Blood Comedy."
In that video, the Russian diplomats kidnapped in Iraq on June 3 beg for their lives. But their appeals are in vain. Thirty seconds later, the men are brutally beheaded. The film goes on to show US soldiers collapsing in Iraq after being mortally wounded by snipers, Navy Seals being massacred in Kunar in eastern Afghanistan and military vehicles being blown up.
The credits read: "In the name of the merciful, oh Allah, let the shots hit their mark and strengthen our steps."
On their long marches through the forbidding landscape of the Hindukush, the Taliban wear old sandals and simple, traditional clothing, and carry nothing but light handguns. Their roadside bombs are handmade and they live in primitive mud huts. And yet, when it comes to technology, the Taliban are completely up-to-date. Their short films can be downloaded in various formats from Web sites, even onto mobile phones. And the chronicle of horror is constantly updated, with new material added daily from Afghanistan, Iraq, the Palestinian Authority, Chechnya and Indonesia.
....

The Taliban terrorists show us that where one's treasure is, so is one's heart: we spend our time and money on the things that are the most important to us, actions speaking louder than words.

Instead of spending money on warmer clothing or better housing, they buy expensive camera equipment and improve the marketability of their "home movies".
It reminds me of an older german fellow, with a little hairbrush black mustache, who faced a two-front invasion of his nation, yet diverted trains that could have carried reinforcements and ammunition to the front, and instead used them to send jews to death camps.

We felt his war machine was worth fighting; are the Taliban any less worthy of fighting..?

"NO!", screams a recent public statement from the pro-suffering/anti-war group MAWO:

CANADA OUT OF AFGHANISTAN!
Self-Determination for Afghanistan!

According to Col. Tom Putt, deputy commanding officer of the Canadian Task Force Afghanistan the two deaths [of Canadian soldiers] are "the price Canada has to pay today for a brighter future for the people of Afghanistan,"
Contrary to what Col. Putt is alleging, this occupation is not bringing any future for Afghanistan. The death toll for Afghan people is many thousands. Thousands more are wounded and hundreds of thousands on top of that have been devastatingly impoverished and made into refugees. Schools are not functioning. Afghans have no control over the political process and state machinery that they need to create a future in the interest of the people of Afghanistan.
Stephen Harper met the deaths of the two Canadian soldiers with these comments, "we are proud of the men and women of the Canadian Forces, who continue to stand on guard for Canadian values around the world"
What the policy of the Stephen Harper and the Canadian Government has shown is that "Canadian values" include denying the democratic, political and legal rights of an entire country of people in Afghanistan. "Canadian values" mean military suppression of a resistance movement demanding their right to sovereignty. "Canadian values" mean air strikes, house raids, checkpoints, arrests and torture. No wonder that Afghan people have rejected Stephen Harper's "Canadian values"!
For Afghanistan to have a chance to build a future that will benefit the needs of Afghans, they first need self-determination. Occupation troops must immediately withdrawal and Afghans must be left to determine their own future.


Judging by the home movies broadcast by those attacking the "occupying forces", I wonder what kind of "self-determined future" MAWO envisions lies ahead for embattled Afghanistan..? Just which Afghans would have their "needs" served by withdrawing Canadian troops from Afghanistan: those wielding the knife, and filming the slaughter, or those teaching little girls how to read and write?
For despite what the NDP, MAWO and other "well-meaning" "peace" protestors wish to believe, these Afghans are not one and the same, it is one or the other.

Anyone who has ever watched the home movies taken by this "resistance movement demanding their right to sovereignty" might disagree with MAWO's description of events taking place in Afghanistan, and arrive at a different definition of "Canadian Values".
My values as a Canadian demand that I deny a barbarian the "right" to cut off a school-teacher's head, filming his cries for mercy, and broadcasting that home movie across the internet for the world to see.

It seems MAWO cannot say the same.

Withdrawing Canadian troops, at this time, is alien to Canadian Values, because of the deadly consequences that would befall that nation if we stop waging war against the Taliban.

Bravo to Prime Minister Stephen Harper for staying the course in Afghanistan, and an even greater cheer for our troops serving in that war-zone: their courage and commitment is inspiring, and absolutely honourable.

Feeling good about oneself vs doing good for others: victimary culture exposed at Toronto AIDS conference

Back in June of this year, as Vancouver played host to a "World Urban Forum", we at Covenant Zone blogged on the contribution of guest speaker Jockin Arputham, an award-winning activist who has devoted over 30 years of work in his own slum neighbourhood and others to improve services, education and housing. Arputham delivered a blistering critique of the conference itself, calling the self-serving activists "lip-service people", and denounced most attendees as being more interested in keeping the"poverty-conference industry" going, than of genuinely solving the problems of poverty in the Third World. "We request our friends throughout the world, especially the First World, to stop crying", and actually do something to help, instead of holding expensive conferences to talk about how much they all care.

A similar damning charge has emerged from this week's high-profile AIDS conference taking place in Toronto, Ontario.

Martin Sempa, "...who has struggled against HIV/AIDS in his home country for 16 years – through radio, college 'edutainment' rallies, research and advocacy and government policy formulation", exposes the moral shallowness of yet another group who, he claims,
"... don’t care about stopping HIV/AIDS but just about managing the disease, keeping it going so they can continue to profit.”

AIDS a Glamorous Multi-Billion Dollar Industry – Sufferers Forgotten

Huge profits for pharmaceutical and condom manufacturers, bottomless grants for researchers and NGO’s, publicity and money for research foundations, six-digit salaries for advertising executives and increasing fame for big name celebrities are creating a disincentive to actually stop the disease say some AIDS activists.
The “AIDS industry,” is a multi-billion dollar international enterprise now, and those who gather to enjoy lavish meals and hotels in Toronto this week, are more interested in “managing the disease” than in curing it or stopping its spread, says Martin Sempa, a leading AIDS fighter from Uganda.
[Sempa says] that the roving publicity circus that the annual International AIDS Conferences have become is a distraction from what is really happening in Africa and other countries blighted with the disease.
But worse than this, he says, they have become a vehicle for an inhuman leftist ideology under the guise of multi-million dollar philanthropy, a vehicle for a Hollywood-style celebrity cult and brazen anti-American political machine.
....
“It’s a multi-billion dollar industry,” he said. “Pharmaceuticals, condoms, counsellors, distributors, advertising executives, grants for fake human rights groups and celebrity status. If you have AIDS you can be a star if you promote their agenda. It’s become a disease of opportunity. If AIDS stopped today there would be millions of people who would stop getting an income.”
“I wouldn’t waste my time.” Sempa said when asked why he had not attended the Conference. “I didn’t want to spend good money on fancy hotels and expensive meals to have no one listen to me.
In Bangkok {2004}, the president of Uganda was booed {for promoting his country’s abstinence program}. It was a hostile social environment and not conducive to a free exchange of ideas. A single mention of abstinence makes them become rabid.”

A similar response apparently occured at the Toronto conference, during the opening remarks of billionaire Bill Gates:

[Bill] Gates briefly mentioned the controversial ABC (Abstinence, Be faithful and Condoms) program, the program of HIV/Aids prevention that is pushed internationally by the Bush Administration, and which has been employed with unprecedented success by the Ugandan government. “This approach,” said Gates, “has saved many lives, and we should expand it.”

The mere mention of the program, however, which focuses primarily on abstinence and faithfulness as the surest means of prevention, with condom-use as a distant last resort, provoked unanimous and energetic boos from the thousands of attendees.

The idea of lives being saved provokes loud boos from the attendees? Isn't the whole point of the AIDS conference, to save lives? Nope, suggest some of the attendees:

"This conference has been more of a Hollywood conference for philanthropists and stars than for people who are living with AIDS," said Sipho Mthathi, head of the South African group Treatment Action Campaign.
"We would like this to be registered by the International AIDS Society that we are quite aggrieved...."

...Ms. Mthathi said the hundreds of conference sessions featured too many celebrities and "professionals" -- scientists and government and agency officials largely from the Western countries least affected by the pandemic. Delegates from Africa, which has been ravaged by the disease, were seriously under-represented on the podiums, she said.

What is needed is a solution-based meeting that better incorporates the voices of patients and those on the front lines, and puts political pressure on countries like her own that have hindered the AIDS fight, Ms. Mthathi said.
...
Gregg Gonsalves of the AIDS Rights Alliance for Southern Africa also created a stir at a special session with leading lights of the AIDS community, including Peter Piot, head of the UNAIDS agency.
"We have created a large infrastructure [around AIDS] that is largely unaccountable," he told the audience of hundreds. "No wonder things aren't getting better. We have designed the system to fail."
Mr. Clinton and Mr. Gates have been treated at the conference "like some kind of royalty," but it is activists on the ground who really make the difference, said Mr. Gonsalves.

It appears that the system isn't designed to "fail", so much as never actually succeed, since any measurable solution would disrupt the necessary stasis required to fuel the victimary religion of today's international left. So long as there can be individuals identified as "victims", there can exist the left's victim-and-victimizer view of the world.
The immorality of the left's position stops being a laughing matter once we hear from the suffering individuals who find themselves propped up or pointed to as if they were nothing more than museum pieces, rather than living beings actually aspiring to the humanity denied them by their leftist caretakers.
To be human, surely, involves the aspiration to better one's circumstances, through an increase in individual freedom, life expectancy, and personal wealth. Imagine having these universal aspirations sabotaged by others using your genuine suffering as an opportunity to make themselves feel better about themselves, even if it involves an irrelevant issue:

[Uganda AIDS activist Martin Sempa] said, “This movement doesn't think any more. It’s agenda based and driven. If you don’t like George Bush, attack the AIDS program in Africa. Or the Iraq war.
If you don’t like the Pope or the Catholic Church you can attack him on his stand against condoms. That’s how the AIDS crisis is being used politically.”

Extra, extra, read all about it: Iraq's newspaper war

Now that the decades-long iron grip of Saddam Hussein's tyranny has been lifted from the throats of Iraqi muslims, they are free to practice their religion to the fullest extent of their faith. The result: the Iraqi people currently suffer under the iron grip of an even older dictatorship: fundamentalist islam.

Stories like the following are enough to make one weep from frustration. All that blood spilled, all those lives lost.. for this??
It's as if a surgeon operated without his glasses on, and as a result, became satisfied in only cutting off one of a patient's two gangrenous limbs, pronouncing the patient cured, even as the effects of that gangrene continue before his very eyes... if only the doctor had sufficient vision to see the full scope of the job before him.
The myopia of multi-culturalism and the censorship of political correctness have much to answer for, in Iraq, as the butcher's bill keeps growing more costly... and the solution harder to diagnose.

The pro-suffering/anti-war "peace" protestors whom we protest against, claim that the US is "occupying" Iraq. Oh how I wish that were literally true, for then it would be far less likely that we would allow stories such as the following to occur, where we learn that, of all things, reading the wrong newspaper in Baghdad can now get you killed:

... [Mohammed Shakir] used to offer a selection [of newspapers] from all of Iraq's political movements and parties - but no more. In his majority Sunni neighborhood that has proved simply too dangerous. Two months ago a group of masked men showed up at his stall and ordered Shakir to stop selling papers printed by Shiite groups or government officials, saying that he would be killed if he did not comply.
"They even threatened people who buy these papers in the neighborhood," said Shakir, who took the threat seriously and closed down because most papers he carried dealt with Shiites and Shiite issues.
And it appears that these were not idle threats. Two paper sellers were killed in the last two months in Baghdad's Adhamiya neighborhood, a Sunni area. Another three lost their lives in Dora, a district south of the capital that used to be mixed but is rapidly becoming purely Sunni.

Paper sellers say that no one dares to sell newspapers in these areas since they fell under the control of Sunni militants.
...
And it is not just paper sellers and their customers who have been caught up in this latest form of sectarian violence sweeping the Iraqi capital. Cafés with televisions have been threatened with bombing unless they stop showing Shiite stations. Several bookshops have also been burned down or targeted by bombers. The attacks come against a backdrop of a seemingly vibrant media environment in Iraq.
...
After the regime's fall, the media scene flourished.
In summer 2003 dozens of new titles appeared, and after decades of censorship Iraqis were at last able to enjoy diverse viewpoints.
In the last year, however, the Iraqi media has developed a strong tendency toward sectarianism. Many papers, radio, and television stations are now closely affiliated with political or ethnic groups, which often provide them with funds.
Sadiq Abdel Hussein, 35, a schoolteacher from the working class Shiite district Sadr City, points out that it is not just Sunni militants who are trying to stifle press freedom. He says that members of the Mehdi Army, a militia loyal to the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Al Sadr, are also intimidating paper sellers - and bookshops - in areas that they control.
"The militias try to restrict the shops to selling only religious books and force the paper sellers to circulate leaflets from the Mehdi Army," he said. "The Mehdi Army also banned all papers issued by American troops."
In another development, the Mehdi militia is also said to have forbidden the public showing of music channels Rotana or Melody, Arabic versions of MTV that are popular among young Iraqis. "Anyone who shows these channels publicly might be whipped or tortured by militia members," said Hussein.
....
Saif Muhsin, a 33-year-old government employee, who lives in the Adhamiya neighborhood, is dismayed at the situation. "I never expected that the country would reach this low point of freedom where people get killed for reading or even carrying this or that paper," he said, adding, "If only the government and the security forces granted citizens as much freedom to read different opinions as militias have to roam the streets."
"But the government sits safely in the Green Zone and the militants rule the streets," he said.

Let's be clear in how to place the blame for this outrage: the Iraqis suffering from the followers of islam are not "victims" of "US occupation", they are victims of their religion's historically demonstrated propensity for inspiring violence.
We play a role in their suffering, however, if we have enabled these followers to practice their religion this faithfully, by defending their right to their violent faith.
"All cultures are of equal value, and therefore deserving of equal status", goes the mantra of multi-culturalism. Then how to justify the protection of a culture that is in itself ruthlessly intolerant of paralell cultures?
If one culture considers it permissable to condemn citizens to death for a "crime" as innocuous as reading a newspaper... how can a multi-cultural relativist ennoble this way of seeing the world?

The story is frightening in its revelation of how quickly things have deteriorated, and shows rather clearly that the more faithfully the religion of islam is practiced, the more of a menace to freedom it becomes.
How many lives must be lost before Iraqi newspaper vendors are not the only ones to get this news?