Until death do us part -- clinging to the fairy tale view of Islam.

"Peace is the basis of all religions," [Pope] Benedict told [Ali Bardakoglu, chief of Turkey's Religious Affairs Directories].

At a time when it is crucial that the West be crystal clear about the nature of Islam, it would be nice to have just one major Western leader talk as though he had read Islam for Dummies from cover to cover, or at least had it explained to him.

The Pope had it right in his speech earlier this year, though he there did everything he could to soft pedal the obvious truth about Islam. Then he backpedalled the instant the predictable Muslim seething and kanipshin fits threatened to hurl all those Muslim moderates over the handlebars in Stockholm, Manchester, and Rotterdam.

"Pope urges religious leaders to reject violence." Associated Press, 11/28/06.

PS -- We're particularly proud of our unmixed bycycle metaphoring here.

Saudi perfidy - III: educating extremists.

The Colonel is not the only one who thinks the Saudis have a huge debt to pay to the rest of world for their role in spreading killer Wahhabi juju:

SPIEGEL: And yet the situation in the neighboring republics is more troubled than ever ...

[Sergei] Ivanov: There are two reasons for the tensions. The social situation is difficult, and religious extremism is spreading among the Islamic faithful. This is a consequence of the collapse of the Soviet Union. After 1991, many Muslims went to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan for their education. We are now dealing with the consequences.

Sergei Ivanov is the Russian Defense Minister.

"Russia Sees Itself as a Country that Is Self-Sufficient." Der Spiegel Online, 11/27/06 <-- Johnson's Russia List (main site).

Nuclear Iran?

This is the reality of Iranian and Pakistani nuclear weapon probrams:

These are dark times for the world: we are on the brink of the nuclearization of ancient pathologies.

To permit Fuligo septica jihadi barbatus to go nuclear is to commit an error of statecraft of stupendous proportions.

Any sacrifice is not too great. A massive, immediate strike on Iran and Syria will change the history of the next 50 years decisively in favor of the West.

Failing to strike will continue to subject us to the scourge of terror that has been inflicted on the world by the Islamicists and their sponsors for over 40 years.

Saudi Arabia, too, must be made to pay a price.

America has the power to change events in one blow. Now is the time to use that power.

"The state as a rootless transient." By Mark Steyn, Jerusalem Post, 8/6/06 <-- Melanie Phillips.

Craven Western intellectuals.

When it comes to Muslim outrages, European intellectuals -- and not a few American ones -- can be counted on to lie down like dogs and do The Cringe:

In 2001, two out of three charged with rape in Norway's capital were immigrants with a non-western background. Another Norwegian newspaper, Dagbladet, quoted Unni Wikan, a female professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo as saying that "Norwegian women must take their share of responsibility for these rapes" because Muslim men found their manner of dress provocative. One reason for the high number of rapes by Muslims was that in their native countries "rape is scarcely punished," since Muslims "believe that it is women who are responsible for rape." The professor's conclusion was not that Muslim men living in the West needed to adjust to Western norms, but that "Norwegian women must realize that we live in a multicultural society and adapt themselves to it."

The number of rapes, muggings and assaults committed by Muslim immigrants in Western countries is so extremely high that it is difficult to view this only as random acts of individuals.

"First They Came For the Jews: The Story of Yet Another World War." Fjordman, Dhimmi Watch, 8/24/06 (link omitted).

Last words of Alexander Litvinenko.

"The bastards got me, but they won't get everybody."

So said Mr. Litvinenko, a former Russian intelligence officer and dissident, before lapsing into unconsciousness.

He also dictated this statement before he died:

I would like to thank many people. My doctors, nurses and hospital staff ; the British police who are pursuing my case with vigour and are watching over me and my family. I would like to thank the British Government for taking me under their care. I am honoured to be a British citizen.

I would like to thank the British public for their messages of support and for the interest they have shown in my plight.

I thank my wife, Marina, who has stood by me. My love for her and our son knows no bounds.

But, as I lie here I can distinctly hear the beating of wings of the angel of death. I may be able to give him the slip, but I have to say my legs do not run as fast as I would like. I think, therefore, that this may be the time to say one or two things to the person responsible for my present condition.

You may succeed in silencing me but that silence comes at a price. You have shown yourself to be as barbaric and ruthless as your most hostile critics have claimed.

You have shown yourself to have no respect for life, liberty or any civilised value.

You have shown yourself to be unworthy of your office, to be unworthy of the trust of civilised men and women.

You may succeed in silencing one man but the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life. May God forgive you for what you have done, not only to me but to beloved Russia and its people.

An impressive man.

"Russia quizzed for clues on ex-spy's death." By Fergus Sheppard, Scotsman.com, 11/25/06.

Dealing with the implications of the Muslim presence.

We don't fault Mr. Bush for going into Iraq. Anything that was done after 9/11 to put the hurt on someone east of Beirut and north of India was a demonstrably good thing. And what was done scared the pants off the usual suspects until they realized we weren't really serious about revenge.

The goal of a democratic Iraq seemed mostly an afterthought or ex post facto justification, with which we are now stuck, at least for now. Ceasing to spend our blood and treasure where it can be spent elsewhere may indeed be the most important thing we can do just now.

Fjordman provides his usual excellent analysis of a long-term strategy, from which we provide the following excerpt, and we provide our own thoughts on how to extricate ourselves from Iraq in the short term:

. . . [Mark Steyn, who advocates remaining in Iraq to spread democracy] doesn’t fully understand Islam. The entire project of "spreading democracy" was a mistake from the very beginning, because democracy cannot be exported to an Islamic country such as Iraq. It is stupidity to waste hundreds of billions of dollars on Muslims while Islamization continues apace in the West.

* * * *

According to Srdja Trifkovic, the author of Defeating Jihad, "The tangible cost of the presence of a Muslim man, woman and child to the American taxpayer is at least $100,000 each year. The cost of the general unpleasantness associated with the terrorist threat and its impact on the quality of our lives is, of course, incalculable. (…) There is a direct, empirically verifiable correlation between the percentage of Muslims in a country and the increase of terrorist violence in that country (not to mention the general decline in the quality of life and civilized discourse)."

Sooner or later, we have to deal with the implications of this fact. The best way to deal with the Islamic world is to have as little to do with it as possible. We should completely stop Muslim immigration.

We can act now (by implementing this and other policies advocated by Fjordman) while the problem in the U.S. is small, or later when it -- and the danger to our chosen way of life -- is enormous.

On the topic of foreign policy, note the clarity that would come to our foreign adventures if we were able to know and declare the incompatibility of Islamic theocracy and democracy, rather than to indulge in expensive self delusion. "Islam, a religion of peace" is an instance of USDA Grade A happy talk that needs to be jettisoned from the brains of intelligent people forthwith.

If were were to leave Iraq after declaring the objective basically flawed (if well intended), one way to obviate the problem of again being seen to cut and run when the going gets tough would be to inflict nightmarish damage on Syria and Iran as our Parthian shot. This approach would surely stimulate new and refreshing thinking along the lines of, "One more American departure like that and we are undone."

And if we solved the problem of Iran's nuclear ambitions in the process, who would be sad except the certifiables?

"Why the Future May Not Belong to Islam." By Fjordman, posted at The Brussels Journal, 11/21/06 (links omitted, emphasis added).

Islamic decline.

Historian Paul Johnson points out one good thing about Islam, to wit, that its present eructations are a symptom of decline:

Islam is in gradual decline, like Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism and other world religions, especially in their heartlands. The fundamentalist descent into terrorism is more a symptom of long-term sickness than evidence of radical health, and it is likely that by mid-century, and perhaps long before, large parts of traditional Islam will have collapsed into secularism.

He's not overjoyed as he thinks this will leave secularism dominant in the world, where it has enormously destructive potential.

"The human race: success or failure?" By Paul Johnson, The New Criterion, Nov. 2006.

Inundation of the West.

Read Francis Porretto's post about Mark Steyn's belief that "the western world will not survive this century":

Fran’s Sunday Ruminations: Prophets, Jesters, And Destroyers." Eternity Road, 11/12/06.

The crimes of communists -- Perm executions.

The left in the U.S. focuses incessantly and pathologically on the supposed moral and intellectual failings of American leaders. The right concerns itself -- more appropriately -- with the mechanics of limiting government power, preferring to pit imperfect men against each other and to limit them with laws.

Leftists are utterly indifferent to such concerns, think Shangrila will be ushered in if people with good hearts and good thoughts can take power, think of laws merely as written instructions for distributing the boodle to favored constituencies, and gleefully do what they can to neuter or destroy competing non-government sources of power, such as small businessmen and the (immoral) rich.

Leftists are indifferent to the mass murders of the 20th century and clamor for more powers for the central government as though the slaughter perpetrated by unrestrained monsters never happened. The Colonel has never heard any leftist of his personal acquaintance even hint at the problem of untrammelled government power.

Consider, when you must endure the mewling of the left over its pathetic concerns, this tiny snippet of information about the ghastly daily experience of people under unrestrained leftism:

Vedeneyev, meanwhile, told Gazeta.ru that there were at least 20 mass-execution sites used by NKVD officials in the city [of Perm, Russia] . . . .

"Former Political Prisoner Protests NKVD Memorial." MosNews.com, 8/7/04.

Update: Francis Porretto has an insightful take on this at "Dictatorial Fantasies." Eternity Road, 11/15/06.

Droll Russian wit

The Colonel loves the dry wit of Yulia Latynina, a Russian journalist who enjoys skewering politicians:

Back then, in 2000, the financial and industrial concern known as Nakhodka FSB [successor organization to the KGB] was fighting for control of the port [of Nakhodka] with another respected financial and industrial concern, the Primorye prosecutor's office.

One has to admire any journalist in Russia who writes on topics other than fashion, sports, or kitties. A gunman waiting in one's apartment stairwell seems to be a definite career hazard for Russian journalists who wander just a bit too close to the truth of things.

"Lawyers Take a Beating in Vladivostok." By Yulia Latynina, Moscow Times, 11/22/06. (Ms. Latynina's commentary appears every Wednesday but goes behind the subscription wall after 24 hours.)

Short course in Russian politics.

The term "siloviki" seems to us to be something of a Rosetta Stone for understanding Russian politics.

See discussion here: "Siloviki." MosNews.com MN-files, 9/23/05.

Guard the Borders Blogburst: Religious-worker visas.

By Heidi at Euphoric Reality

Last week, two Muslim leaders in Boston were arrested for immigration fraud - illegally filing fraudulent visa documents and obtaining religious workers' visas. The arrests were the culmination of a multi-year investigation in Boston and New York:

The ICE agents arrested Hannan Wednesday along with 32 other people in eight states and the District of Columbia in connection with an alleged nationwide scheme to help many foreigners, mostly from Pakistan, immigrate and remain in the U.S. by filing false applications for religious workers' visas. Most of those taken into custody did not have religious training or experience to qualify for the visas, and held secular jobs here in the U.S., such as working at gas stations and factories or driving trucks, according to the ICE. Others were religious workers but had used fraudulent identity documents to get their visas, the agency said.

The agency claims the petitioners of the visas took substantial cash fees from the foreigners for the false paperwork filed on their behalf.

Despite the fact that the imams were not arrested precipitously, but only after a multi-year investigation, they have an excuse ready:

"All it is is a minor administrative technicality error" in his immigration paperwork, said Vilal Kaleem, associate director of the American Muslim Society's Boston chapter. "It's completely disgraceful in the manner they dealt with it," he said of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
[...]
Kaleem said Hannan was driving his family to an immigration office for an interview for the green-card proceedings on Wednesday when the federal agents arrested him. Hannan's son and daughter were crying following the arrest, Kaleem said.

So, so sad. My heart breaks.

Meanwhile, the Muslim community in Boston is doing what Muslims do best: seething.

Muslim leaders in the Boston area expressed outrage yesterday over the arrest and jailing of two senior clerics..."It's just so flabbergasting the way they would do this" ..."This seems to be a direct attack at our religion and community"..."it is deeply humiliating when a man of such high religious status in our community is treated as a criminal in front of the world"..."Why do you just arrest some respected members of the community and haul them away?"..."People are attached to the imam. They will be very upset. Everyone loves him."

Oddly enough, it is apparently not humiliating for "a man of such high religious status" to act as a criminal. Because though our government rarely enforces it, it is still technically illegal to break our immigration laws. Unfortunately, when it comes to our immigration law, this will likely turn into the following scenario: They broke the law. They got arrested for breaking the law, but now it's the government's fault for enforcing the law.

The Muslim American Society provides contact information to their community so that they can demand a "safe and speedy return" and to demand "fair, speedy, and respectable treatment" of the imams. I'll provide the contact info here for you should you prefer to register thanks that our laws are actually being enforced:

The MAS provides contact information, so folks can insist on "fair, speedy and respectable" treatment of the imams.

Senator Edward Kennedy (617)565 3170
Request to speak to Tom Cohan, (ext. 119)

Senator John Kerry (617) 565-8519
Request to speak to Carmen Velazquez

Yeah, I know - fat lot of good it will do to contact those two Senators, but if you've got nothing better to do, have at it.

At a time when Muslim immigration to America is at an all-time high, even more are sneaking into the country illegally than ever before. In July, Homeland Security discovered that more than one-third of religious workers visas were obtained using fraudulent means, and the fraud was particularly rampant among Muslims.

The probe found a particularly high fraud rate among applicants from countries the government deemed to pose a security risk, such as Egypt, Algeria, Pakistan, Syria and Iraq, the report found.
[...]
Some immigration watchdogs say that the program should be seriously curtailed because, even in cases where the applications are legitimate, the visas could bring radical clerics into the country.

Last year, for example, the FBI arrested three Pakistani men associated with a mosque in Lodi, California. All had entered on religious-worker visas. Two were accused of ties to a terrorist training camp in Pakistan before coming to the United States, and the third, an imam, allegedly delivered sermons endorsing violence against non-Muslims before he came to America.

This is only one more reason among many why our immigration enforcement is the front line of our national defense. The two issues are inextricably intertwined. To remain lax in immigration enforcement is to invite infiltration and attack. This is why all those whose first act on American soil is a criminal one MUST be deported, no matter their ethnicity or nationality. Our immigration laws have to be strictly enforced if we are to have any hope of future security.

---

This has been a production of the Guard the Borders Blogburst. It was started by Euphoric Reality, and serves to keep immigration issues in the forefront of our minds as we're going about our daily lives and continuing to fight the war on terror. If you are concerned with the trend of illegal immigration facing our country, join our Blogburst! Just send an email with your blog name and url to admin at guardtheborders dot com.

Bohica!

It's amazing to us why Mr. Bush and the now-history Republicans could not rouse themselves to control the borders.

But, no. It seems the incredible blessing of American citizenship is still to be handed out like cheap candy to any and all who wake up in some foreign land and decide that American citizenship is just the ticket for them.

Peggy Noonan connects the dots on the forthcoming Bush sell out:

What is the first thing men do when they're drowning? They save themselves. With the waters rising on every side the president will attempt to re-enact his first and most personally satisfying political success when, as governor of Texas, he won plaudits and popularity for working hand in glove with Democrats. He accepted many Democratic assumptions--he shared them, it wasn't hard.

The White House's reaction to the recent election was, essentially, Now we can get our immigration bill through with the Democrats. That was a clue. I suspect the president will over the next two years do to Republicans what he did to Donald Rumsfeld: over the side, under the bus and off the sled.

He doesn't need them. They're not popular. They're not where the action is. He'll work closely with Democrats, gain in time new and admiring press--"Bush has grown," etc.

This is the path he will take to build his popularity and create a new legacy.

"Who'll Claim the Center?" By Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal, 11/17/06.

An ideology of madness and savagery.

What [the film Obsession] shows above all is that we are up against an ideology which turns millions towards madness and savagery – but we are totally failing to combat that ideology. Indeed, we don’t even recognise it for what it is. This film goes a long way towards opening our eyes.

"Obsession." Melanie Phillips, 11/7/06.

California.

Damsel in distress.

Clever.

Election 2006.

Whatever the result of the election tomorrow it will decide precisely zero major issues.

There will be no resolution of the issues of immigration. The Republicans achieved only an anemic (southern) border fence (so far only a legislative reality) and the placement of tens, if not hundreds, of National Guardsmen down on the border where, it appears, the are themselves in need of the armed protection of Border Patrolmen to ensure their safety. God forbid that we should "militarize" the border one iota (that's Italian for smidgin) by actually giving our Guardsmen like, you know, real guns.

A Democrat victory will ensure more of the same of what we've had since the memory of man runneth not to the contrary, viz., de facto quasi-amnesty and dilution of the national sovereignty. A citizen reaction of sorts to the status quo lit a fire under the politicians but it seems unlikely to have much of an effect past this Tuesday.

On Iraq, all that is apparent is that the Democrats are desperate to regain power of any kind so that they can either

• make the Muslim fanatics ecstatic by engineering another American retreat in the face of resistance and an abandonment of that convenient tank and aeroplane park just next to Syria and Iran; or
• blunder about in Iraq in the same conceptual dark closet that Mr. Bush chose to enter so casually -- or to remain in without a tangible goal or improvement in our strategic position.

A Republican victory will not see the lash applied to the Iranians and Syrians, and Saudi Arabia will continue hell bent its efforts to build and fund Wahhabi mosques in the U.S. and convert our criminal class to their goofy but poisonous flavor of Islam.

Life in the U.S. today is like starring in a movie where all the passengers on the train haven't begun to figure out that the engineer died with the throttle stuck on "Open."

The Nation will continue rudderless and clueless. The documentary "Obsession" shows, in the words of Fox News that Americans suffer from "the naïve disbelief that we remain targets of thousands, perhaps millions of radical Muslims around the world." ^[1]

The election might have been about the issues of the goals and tactics of garden-variety fanatic Islam and possible Western countermeasures. Instead we have had pointless and duplicitous hyperventilations about Valerie Plame's (obviously) non-covert status as a CIA officer and the pathetic ass of a Republican Congressman who sent little "billets-doux" to his pages assuming these would remain confidential communications.

Perhaps serious people with the interests of the Nation at heart do concern themselves with such trifles.

But we doubt it.

Obviously, 9/11 was not enough to wake up America to the serious issues that face us. Gradual inundation by illegal immigrants doesn't seem to enrage any substantial segment of the electorate.

Something much worse than 9/11 will be necessary to make American's face reality.

Notes
^[1] "Documentary Portrays Islamic Extremists' Call to Arms Against the Free World ." FoxNews.com, 11/3/06.

What abandoning an ally means in practice.

The epitaph for the U.S. involvement in Indochina had been given earlier that month before the fall of Phnom Penh in neighboring Cambodia. Just days before his execution at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, Cambodian statesman Sirak Mitak penned a final note to the U.S. ambassador refusing his offer of evacuation.

"I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion. As for you and in particular for your great country, I never believed for a moment that you would have this sentiment of abandoning a people which has chosen liberty....You leave and my wish is that you and your country will find happiness under the sky.

"But mark it well that, if I shall die here on the spot and in my country that I love, it is too bad because we all are born and must die one day. I have only committed this mistake in believing in you, the Americans."

"America's Bitter End in Vietnam." By Col. Harry G. Summers, Jr., HistoryNet.com (emphasis added), originally published in Vietnam magazine, April 1995 <-- Neo-neocon.

Cool drawings.

Drawing of woman. FcMx.Net.

Another. FcMx.Net.

No believer in superior artistic sensibilities.

This is pretty choice from a commenter over at Gates of Vienna:

I see little reason to be a fan of the "artist" as a superior caste, better than the rest of humanity. If I want an intelligent opinion on a topic, I'm more likely to get it from the person next to me on a bus than at a famed artist colony. And the idea that artists are secular prophets with a special insight into truth is as silly today as when it first became popular in the nineteenth century.

Clearly this commenter is not familiar with the economic, military, and foreign policy acumen of Susan Sarandon, Garrison Keillor, and Barbra Streisand else he would not make such reckless assertions.

"Germany Gets a Backbone Transplant." By Baron Bodissey, Gates of Vienna, comment by InklingBooks .

Immigration Report Card on Congress

Report Card.

To our Democrat friends -- VOTE!

We Republicans are unfairly accused of trying to restrict the exercise of the franchise by Democrats. Nothing could be further from the truth. All voices need to be heard in a democracy, even voices with which we ardently disagree.

Thus, we encourage all our Democrat friends to be sure to next Wednesday so that we can keep this wonderful system that we have working as it should. Monday and Tuesday are the time for quiet reflection and study of the Sunday papers so that when you arrive at the polls to cast your vote your mind will be clear and undistracted by scurrilous last-minute campaign ads and rank appeals to your emotions.

Mark Wednesday on your calendar as the The Day that you do your part to maintain the integrity of the American way of life!