Be thee merciless to infidels.

According to the Muslim weasels who strive to "interpret" the Koran for the infidels infidels can't really understand the Koran or this and that inconvenient passage in the Koran is to be understood in the context of the defensive wars that Muslims had to fight.

Some defensive wars! They resulted in massive amounts of territory and wealth falling into Muslim hands. So many aggressors!

Any way you slice such "interpretations" they're still baloney and let us be guided instead by the actual words of the Koran:

Muhammad is God's apostle. Those who follow him are ruthless to the unbelievers but merciful to one another.

Koran, 48:29.

Some other Koranic injunctions that should also make infidel swine just a littttttlllllle suspicious can be found here.

Nothing excessive, mind you. We're not after outright alarm, of course. Just read a few sayings from the Koran and see whether you experience that nascent, niggling little suspicion that all is not quite right in Six Flags Over Mecca.

Focusing on the fleas.

Wretchard has this quote on The Belmont Club today:

I think it's something new, in that a non-state organization has undertaken a major, sustained, broad-scale, and so far, the successful military offensive against a state," said William Lind, director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation, a Washington, D.C., think tank. "What changes here ... is that non-state forces are able to challenge states militarily -- and win."

We reproduce our comments on Wretchard's post:

It obscures an important point merely to refer to "non-state forces [that] are able to challenge states militarily."

The vital concept upon which to focus is: "non-state forces that are supported by states."

Hezbollah wouldn't be able to do 1/1000th of what it's doing now without the support of Iran, directly and through its Syrian intermediary. And . . . with the income from its criminal activities in North and South America, although the income from these activities is merely the lagniappe to what Iran provides.

Ergo, the problem is Iran and this focus on "non-state forces" is an unhelpful distraction from the main point. The world is infected by fleas but the silly Westerners just can't bring themselves to do something about the dog right there in the living room.

If elephants harbored fleas, the image would be perfect.

The solution to the problem with Hezbollah is to deal with the real problem -- Iran. Surely, we could use those stealth bomber we spent so much money on to bomb every Revolutionary Guard barracks, vehicle park, headquarters, and supply dump and every intelligence facility in Iran. We could do this while we bomb their nuclear facilities as sort of a PS to that those other love notes.

Anything short of this is just to play a parlor game with Ahmadinejad and the priests.

"The Sling and the Stone." By Wretchard, 8/8/06.

Fidel – "man of the people" . . . and fat cat.

Who knew that "commie dictator" was a vocation that afforded such entrepreneurial opportunities for personal enrichment?

Fidel has cultivated his status as a left-wing icon since taking power in 1959. Remarkably, the fact that he has extracted from his impoverished and oppressed people a personal fortune -- Forbes magazine estimated it last year at over half a billion dollars for its World's Richest People list -- has done little to dent his image as a man of the people. The standard apologetics for the sorry state of the Cuban economy begin from the premise that America, not socialism, is responsible for Cuba's travails. But Castro's personal financial success suggests that in fact substantial revenue is sluicing through the island. . . . It's just that nearly all of it the income . . . goes to the ruling clique or to the military, bypassing the population. There are good reasons to question the embargo, but the notion that it is the source of all of Cuba's ills isn't one of them.

Fidel had his hand on the pulse of the nation, it turns out, and in its back pocket.

And the riot police and his Caribbean Cheka on speed dial.

Did we mention that? There were actually people who objected to being thrown into jail or having their relatives executed.

Real soreheads.

"Romancing Fidel." Wall Street Journal Online, 8/5/06 (emphasis added; subscription).

The left's passion for breaking eggs.

Lenin said it was necessary to break a few eggs to make an omelet. Let Bolshevism triumph!

Vladimir Bukovsky famously complained that he had seen the broken eggs, but no one he knew had ever tasted the omelet.^[1]

Mr. Bukovsky was someone who had some authority on this point. Jamie Glazov quotes from Bukovsky's To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter, on what happened when he went on a hunger strike in the Soviet Union:

[T]hey started force-feeding me - through the nostrils....they straightjacketed me, tied me down to a bed, and sat on my legs so that I wouldn't jerk. The others held my shoulders and my head....The feeding pipe was thick - thicker than my nostril - and wouldn't go in for love or money. Blood came gushing out of my nose and tears down my cheeks....But they kept pushing until the cartilages cracked and something burst - enough to make you howl like a wolf....but she [the doctor] kept on shoving the pipe farther and farther down - you'd choke if it came back up....There had just been time for everything to heal during the night and the blood to stop flowing when the brutes came back and did it all over again.... Everything swelled up until it was agony to touch...As they say in the Soviet Union – like a razor across your balls.^[2]

You'd think left and right would be united in their determination to avoid handing power to human slime so they can inflict this kind of injury on real humans.

But . . . no. The left has an amazing indifference to such dirty little details of communism. Nobility of the object is what matters. "Good omelets for the People!"

For the left it's enough if you say you do what you do for the betterment of mankind. How you go about that betterment is a matter between you and your security forces or resident terror cell. Or: "Let me grind out my cigarette in the palm of your hand to demonstrate my contempt for pain."

By an amazing coincidence it's never the left's eggs that get broken. It's always someone else who gets to make the "necessary" sacrifice for the common good. There was a liberal college professor in North Carolina who was ardently in favor of mandatory school busing when that issue was just coming to a boil in the United States. No sooner than it was instituted in his district he enrolled his children in private school.

Q.E.D.

Nor for the left is there ever the need to deal with the inconvenience of researching the facts, making your arguments in the public forum, building a consensus for your position, and tolerating people to do whatever it is that unsupervised people do while this process is unfolding. That's why the left loves having the Supreme Court wave its magic wand and validate all those magnificent social and legal experiments. So much more convenient just to grind someone's nose in the dirt. Ignorant people make enlightened people impatient with their stupid resistance!

And the facts can be so inconvenient. The Soviets called people with actual knowledge of what problems were being created by state intervention in the economy "wreckers." It wasn't the party hacks put in to manage the enterprises who were at fault, but it was the experts who actually knew how to purify municipal water or generate electricity. They were the saboteurs of socialism.

So what if they had to be sacrificed? "Nine grams for you, swine."

The left's silence on the crimes of communism is one of the greatest moral failings of our age. How else could young people even think to wear a t-shirt with Che Guevara's picture? Only some monumental failing on the part of their teachers and guides could make them ignore Che's bloodthirsty nature.

Notes
^[1] "On Zizek and Trilling." By John Holbo, Philosophy and Literature, date unknown (link added).
^[2] "The West Lost The War: Vladimir Bukovsky." By Jamie Glazov, FrontPageMagazine.com, 5/9/01.

Real fox.

Flower.

In the event of Islamic victory, cultural oblivion.

"Those who refuse to criticize Islamic fascism," according to the senator, "undermine the cause of freedom of religion because if the Islamic fascists win this war, no other religion will be permitted to flourish.

~ Sen. Richard Santorum, R-Pa.

"Santorum speech on Islamofacists: A turning point in defining the enemy?" By Wes Vernon, Renew America, 8/2/06 (emphasis added).

The dire threat of resident Muslim populations.

The intent to Muslims in Western nations to subjugate any of their host societies is conclusively show in Fjordman's extraordinary essay.

An excerpt:

[Emigrating Dutch] leave what was once their country in favor of people such as Dyab Abou Jahjah, founder "of the Arab European League (AEL). The AEL, founded in Belgium in 2000, now has branches in the Netherlands and France, and intends to spread across the EU. Jahjah, who has called the 9/11 attacks "sweet revenge," recruits Muslim youth to spread his ideology, which calls for the introduction of sharia in Europe. "We have three basic demands he says. "Bilingual education for Arab-speaking kids, hiring quotas that protect Muslims, and the right to keep our cultural customs." "Assimilation is cultural rape. It means renouncing your identity, becoming like the others." Jahjah has also demanded that Arabic should be made an official language in Belgium.

"Beheading Nations - The Islamization of Europe's Cities." By Fjordman, Dhimmi Watch, 7/12/06 (links in original, emphasis added).

Those wacky, devious Americans.

Item:

[U.S. Secretary of State Rice] wants the other 14 nations of the U.N. Security Council, many of whom are deeply distrustful of U.S. intentions in the Mideast, to sign onto her plan in a matter of just days.

Just what are those dastardly intentions? Free Iraqis from past and present tyranny? Give Iraqis a shot at some semblance of democracy? Neutralize a psychotic Iranian mullocracy with regional nuclear and global homicidal ambitions?

We wonder what would it take to have the members of the Security Council to express a smidgen of distrust of, say, Iran. If President Bush expressed his belief that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ were just around the corner, the world would collectively roll its eyes and write Mr. Bush off as delusional.

However, if it becomes evident that the Iranian President, Mr. Ahmadinejad and all the Iranian mullocracy believe in world chaos as an ok prelude to the imminent return of the 12th Imam, why no one would dream of marking that as grounds for distrust of the Iranians.

Nope. What we have to mistrust are U.S. intentions.

I guess.

It's almost enough to shake one's faith in the United Nations.

"U.S., Israel Start to Diverge As Casualties Mount." By Yochi j. Dreazen and Marc Champion, Wall Street Journal Online, 8/1/06 (subscription).

Up, up, Buttercup.

Many years ago, the Colonel visited Point Lookout in Maryland, where there is an obelisk erected in memory of the Confederate soldiers who died as prisoners of war in the Union prison camp there. (We tried to visit some of the remaining prisoners there but couldn't get past the gate guard.)

As we read the names and units of the men, we envied them their freedom to make a leisurely assessment of the danger to them and make a decision about how they would respond. This was still in the time of the Cold War with only a 20-minute ballistic missile flight time from the Soviet Union -- which allows only a somewhat abbreviated (and limited) assessment of one's survival options.^[1]

Today communism is not dead and the long-term danger of a revived and militarized China is not clear. Much ink will be spilled on that issue. (J.R. Nyquist's piece, The fatal Befuddlement, is a good start if you want to read about this issue.)

Nonetheless, the immediate threat of the Soviet Union has been replaced by the more insidious danger of cultural and demographic suffocation at the hands of Mohammedanism and the forces working in favor of complacency are as hard at work as before.

In his post referenced below, Fjordman mentions, among other things, the West's "sleepwalking middle class" and it remains to be seen whether Westerners will heed the tocsin that sounds every minute of the day in countless ways. Oriana Fallaci, in her "The Rage and the Pride, speaks of a Mr. Salvemini

who on the 7th of May 1933 speaks [in New York] against Hitler and Mussolini, shouting in despair [as he] addresses an audience that does not understand but will understand on the 7th of December 1941 . . . ."

Needless to say, Mr. Salvemini got nowhere.

Alas, given:

• the odious and obvious nature of our enemies and the threat they pose;
• the tepid response to that threat;^[2]
• the mind boggling unwillingness to close the U.S. border to illegal infiltration, let alone close off all Muslim immigration;
• the moronic treatment of Islam in the media;^[3] and
• the sinister ass kissing of the Saudis;^[4]

among other things, it is obvious that it isn't only Representative Patrick Kennedy who has trouble with his sleep meds.

Anyyyyyway, here is a disturbing extract from a hugely important piece by Fjordman, which does not at all allow anyone to entertain the option of business as usual:

If Muslim immigration continues, the impending fall of France could mark the starting point of the Balkanization of much of Europe, perhaps later even North America. I fear this is a world war. Maybe future historians will dub it the Multicultural World War. Just as WW1 was caused by Imperialism, WW2 by Fascism and the Cold War by Communism, this one will be caused by Multiculturalism. The term “the Multicultural World War” has been coined by Fjordman. I find this to be more accurate than “The Islamic World War” because what will cause this world war is Western cultural weakness, through Multiculturalism and Muslim immigration, rather than Islamic strength. ^[5] 

Notes
^[1]  It was also a time of legions of addled leftist intellectuals on the home front eager to do their utmost to obscure the realities of communism and lull their fellow citizens into complacency about the cancer of communism. We suppose we have to grant that intellectual opinion in the Confederacy was probably solidly on the side of war with the persons not wanting to rush to war being at a disadvantage. The aforementioned intellectual opinion was not wrong. This is only to say that in any age humans must swim against the tide to some degree or another with respect to various issues. The real issue is, of course, who is in the right, and 20th-century liberal intellectuals were decidedly wrong in what they concluded and advocated vis-a-vis the Soviet threat. Today's pantywaist, lickspittle pussy apologists for Islamic depredations and goals are also wrong.
^[2] Witness the baffling formulations of "religion of peace," "war on terror," and the "axis of evil," and the apparent nervousness of President Bush about letting the Israelis "get 'er done."
^[3] "A recent MSNBC program on the Beltway Snipers, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo meticulously documented the killings and hunt for the snipers but did not mention one word of John Allen Muhammad's association with "Jamaat ul-Fuqra (Arabic for “community of the impoverished”), a terrorist organization founded by a notorious Pakistani cleric, Sheikh Mubarak Ali Gilani." For this, see "Jamaat ul-Fuqra in Virginia, Part 1 ." By Baron Bodissey, Gates of Vienna, 10/10/05. We did miss some portions of the program and will correct our assertion here if there was any mention of this association (or of his prior membership in the non-Islamic Nation of Islam) but we saw the end where one might expect a discussion of motive and the body of the program was a death-by-death account of the snipings and the fevership activities of the police to find the sniper(s) and their public statements as the crisis dragged on. If the same producers had made a film about D Day, we would have seen troops landing, cliffs being scaled, the Navy bombarding the German positions, supply ships supplying, and Channel storms storming without any mention of National Socialism. (Our Wikipedia reference above does mention the NOI connection but limits its speculation as to motive to Mr. Mohammed's possibly wanting to extort money from the U.S. government.)
^[4] "Black Gold." By Baron Bodissey, Gates of Vienna, 7/30/06. There's a very interesting discussion of the economics of oil in this great piece as well as an outstanding picture of a man at a gas pump, which you must check out.
^[5] "The Fall of France and the Multicultural World War." By Fjordman, 4/18/06.