Friday Afternoon Roundup - The Wind from the East

HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF

The Yalta Conference briefing book stated that the United States did not favor any Chinese political faction, but only “a broadly representative government which will bring about internal unity, including reconcilement of Kuomintang-Communist differences.”

In an echo familiar from countless modern-day speeches about American allies in the Middle East, political reform was touted as the best defense against Communism. And by political reform, Truman meant bringing the Communists into the government for a peaceful and unified China. American aid to the Nationalists was explicitly conditioned on their acceptance of that form of peace and unity.

Political leaders, diplomats and reporters tell us that we should not fear the Muslim Brotherhood, that it is a moderate organization, and that like other political Islamists, it can be our ally in the war against the real extremists. The American people were similarly told that the Chinese Communists were not the bad extreme kind in Moscow. They weren’t even real Communists at all, only “red on the outside, white on the inside” types. And then having learned nothing from the fall of China, the same propagandists then began assuring us that the Viet Cong were not true Communists either.

...that's an excerpt from my article, How Democrats Turned China Red and Egypt Green



A FABLE AND A TRUTH

Obama had advocated political reform for Egypt as early as his first anti-war speech in 2002. Ten years later the ashes of the Arab Spring are fluttering over American embassies and consulates. Mitt Romney has proposed economic reform instead of political reform as his prescription for change, but it is not likely that reforming Muslim economies will work any better than reforming their governments did.

As in the fable of the blind men and the elephant, each of our blind doctors steps up to feel the ten-ton elephant of Muslim violence and offers his proposed philosophical cure. The blindness of the doctors is in their Western preconceptions which prevent them from seeing the huge beast as anything but a conglomerate of familiar parts. One of the blind doctors sees a lack of democracy and another sees a lack of free enterprise, and they prescribe what they think is lacking in the Muslim world.

Their false sense of familiarity with the Muslim world, akin to the linguistic false friends that deceive us into thinking that a familiar foreign word is the counterpart of a word in our own language, leads them to see the East as the West with a few missing spots that need to be filled in. But the Muslim world cannot be fixed by attempting to graft on a few Western institutions; if it were that easy then British and French colonialism would have already fixed the Middle East.

... that's from my article, Moral Reform for the Muslim World



WORLD TURNED INSIDE OUT

Islamists saw Afghanistan as the future of the Middle East and they were right. Saudi Arabia and the oil states that backed the Arab Spring are Afghanistans with oil. Egypt, Tunisia and Syria are on the way to becoming Afghanistans without oil.

Eleven years after September 11, Afghanistan is nowhere near being stable; instead it is the Middle East that is becoming Afghanistanized. Forget about having only one Afghanistan, after the Arab Spring we can pick and choose from new Afghanistans popping up all over.

The Muslim Middle East is facing a choice between two paths. One leads ahead to a Westernized society and the other back to the barren deserts of the 7th Century. The Muslim Brotherhood and other political Islamists claim that it is possible to have the best of both worlds, combining high tech and desert morals in a society where every woman is covered and every man is an engineer. But that illusion is under siege as Islamist militias begin fragmenting countries into tribal encampments.

... and that's from my article, The Afghanistanization of the Middle East



THE POINT

There's a cure for Abu Hamza's blues

Luckily he can get a brain scan here. And if Abu Hamza is truly depressed, one treatment for severe depression is electroshock therapy. ECT or Electroconvulsive Therapy is still in use for really tough cases of depression and the United States has some top notch ECT specialists in a little facility positioned near Cuba to take maximum advantage of the advanced Cuban health care system. Those specialists, I know, will be pleased to help Abu Hamza beat the blues. And if ECT doesn’t work, there’s always Hydro-Immersive Therapy, which former patients like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed absolutely swear by.

Not that Obama would allow Abu Hamza access to this kind of advanced mental health therapy. That must be why the American health care system is so hopelessly backward.

and a look at why the Muslim Brotherhood is having trouble taking over Jordan (hint, it's the Palestinians) and the racial pathology of leftist Obama whiners

The liberal fetishization of black rage is a creepy thing and it is also inherently racist. Liberal commentators expect Obama’s anger to be racial rather than political. They keep thinking that Obama is the Incredible Hulk with a mild-mannered exterior and uncontrollable rage over the oppression of the black man pulsing within. All he has to do is step into a phone booth, tear off his suit and underneath he’s Huey P. Newton.

This is actual racial stereotyping and Moore, Schultz and Co. never seem to have considered that Obama has nothing to be angry about. Obama has become successful with a minimum amount of effort. He lives a comfortable life and a charmed one. He really has nothing to be angry about.

As well as the top Federal prosecutor targeting the Mohammed filmmaker, the failure of Obama's moderate Taliban strategy, our GDP growth falling behind Cuba, the fact that every Al Qaeda leader has been a member of the Muslim Brotherhood... and the parable of the Islamist Scoprion

A scorpion wanted to cross a river, so it hitched a ride on a friendly naive useful idiot of a toad. The toad swam the river with the scorpion on its back and then the scorpion bit it when it got across to the other side. The toad said, “But don’t you know that we are both part of the international left and believe in LGBT rights and revolutionary change. So why did you bite me?” And the Scorpion answered, “Praise Allah, it’s in my nature. You knew what I was when you asked me to move to your riverbank, collect welfare benefits and for your politicians”

And finally why Putin cannot afford an Obama defeat.



IT'S A WONDERFUL ALLAHLESS LIFE

Edward Cline at Rule of Reason imagines what life would be like without the prophet of Islam.

It is tempting, for example, to imagine recent history and the state of America had President Barack Obama never existed – if, say, Stanley Ann Dunham had decided to try out for the Dallas Cheerleaders, or pursued a degree in physics, instead of trying to prove her "tolerance" with a sham marriage with a Kenyan Muslim and making whoopee in Hawaii with a black Communist on the FBI's watch list while pursuing degrees in anthropology and micro-financing – and so have never been born and sparing the country of his brand of super-sized community organizing. But, that would be too easy. 

...the other prophet of Islam.




OH WHAT FUN WE'LL HAVE

In one of my more casual posts at The Point, I took note of a New Yorker piece on J.K. Rowling's new book and described it as a left-wing screed. This led to attacks on a Daily News blog and an entire comment thread at Harry's Place for reviewing the book without having read it.

I was not reviewing the book, obviously, as it had not been released at the time. People who review Rowling books generally do so under armed guard lest one of those precious tomes fall into the wrong hands and be immediately sold to gypsies on eBay. But the comment thread lead to a lively debate on the welfare system with some interesting observations.

Leciat

yeah we’re all evil scum, who get up every morning and piss in a cup to prove we are drug free in order to work 40, 50 , 60 hours a week to give half our pay to people who can not be asked to piss in a cup because it would violate their constitutional rights



M*o*r*g*y            

Perhaps Gene could point out the exact number of words in her books written by the Welfare State as a proportion of the total?

The true reactionaries here are the likes of Gene and Brownie who want to help themselves to ever greater sums of other people’s money and can’t see an end to the statist gravy-train. Because they care don’t you see?

SAVE THE WORLD, SINK THE WORLD

But for those of "the vision that dare not speak its name" it is precisely the American hegemony, and no other, that must be removed to make way for the glorious one-world where it is "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need." And that world, in their shared visionary imagination, will be made of a green, caring, carefully stewarded world where the we all get to "do our thing" in perfect freedom and without any interference from dictators, power blocs, theocratic states, weapons of mass destruction, crime, guns, and oppression of any living thing on the planet, including animals.

Like the world after the Rapture, the vision of the One-Worlder is Gaia triumphant for the many and a shining realm of gracious living for the elite few. It is a green Hobbit realm with iPods for all and no Saurons to be found anywhere. A technotronic Middle Earth.

...

When discussing the character of Rolling Stone founder, the execrable Jann Wenner, someone once remarked to me, "For some people it will always be 1968." That's pretty much the case with the cosmopolitans of "The Not So Great Generation." Because they no longer live in America but in the Happy World, they deeply and fundamentally believe that their unnameable vision will prevail, and with the defeat of the nation on which their freedom and prosperity depends, all shall ascend finally into Happy World of Obamaland where the world will leave us alone to pursue our various socialist experiments if only we leave it alone.

Save the world or sink the world, it's all a matter of perspective. So long as your intentions are noble and your ideology tells you that the way things are is completely unacceptable and that compromises are the only reason why we aren't living in a leftist utopia now, right now.



IN THE WASH

Remember the slogan “These colors don’t run,” captioning the American flag?

Neither does al Qaeda.

Why should they?  They’ve just won.  They have forced us out of Benghazi.  It did take multiple attacks over several months, and the gruesome torture and murder of our ambassador, to edge us out.  But the job is done now.  We’re running scared. 

...from the Optimistic Conservative




WHAT LIFE WILL BE LIKE IF WE ACCEPT MUSLIM BLASPHEMY LAW

The next day she was told that a pupil, Mohamed Moustafa Ahmed Hashim, had filed a complaint against her, claiming that she had said something offensive about the Prophet.

on Sunday afternoon, police arrested Gad and took her to an Assiut police station, on charges of contempt of religion and insulting Prophet Mohamed, following a complaint from Moustafa Ahmed Hashim, the student in question's father, who is known locally to be a Salafist.

Gad denied all charges, but was detained and spent the night in a solitary confinement cell, her lawyer told Ahram Online, causing her family great worry as she is eight months pregnant.

You think the TSA is bad, try the reason that we have the TSA and all the appeasement. It's worse.



AND MO'S YOUR UNCLE

But we’re already used to it. Don’t believe me? Afshin Ellian, an Iranian-born Dutch law professor, poet and columnist, puts it this way: “If you cannot say that Islam is a backward religion and that Muhammad is a criminal, then you are living in an Islamic country, my friend, because there you also cannot say such things. I may say Christ was a homosexual and Mary was a prostitute, but apparently I should stay off of Muhammad.”

...signs you're already living in a Muslim country.




THE LAST WORD ON BLASPHEMY AND ISLAM

What we are discussing today about article 18 which is freedom of thought, conscience and religion and belief.

Within this religion, we have the freedom to change; within Islam you don’t have this choice with over 1.3 billion people they don’t have the freedom to change. That’s that.

We have to rely that as human beings, and just listening to you today, we have different opinions, we have different agendas. We have different ways of thinking. And I would like the world to be like this room, where we can talk and discuss and we [have] our points of view, without killing. And to have the right to change one’s religion.

It doesn’t work, we are created free. And God has given us the freedom, because he wants us to love him and without freedom we cannot love God.

What more is there to say?

Islam was built on the power to take away religion and freedom, to force people to worship Allah by destroying their religions, their cultures and their freedom to choose.

Islam is an anti-religious religion that purges, persecutes, tortures and intimidates. It is a religion based around the man and the power of his followers to terrorize those who might decide for themselves that an illiterate pedophile mass murderer is not their way to the truth.

Islam is power. There is no love in Islam. Only hate and fear. There is no G-d in Islam, only death.