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‘m finally getting around to reading Mark Steyn’s America Alone, so as I read I check out from thinking about the election and start thinking again about Islam’s growth, its demand that we meet its intolerance with tolerance so that it can grow at our expense, and its commitment to jihad.

And so without further adieu, this shrine to what makes America great and, most definitely, non-Islamic:

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Y

es, the whole story of the Faina, its hull full of Russian weapons for American allies in Africa, hijacked by pirates off the Somali coast is major good stuff, matey.  Rrrrr.  But there’s a better one, this time with the Iranians. And chemical weapons.

This from The Times (of South Africa this time):

A tense standoff has developed in waters off Somalia over an Iranian merchant ship laden with a mysterious cargo that was hijacked by pirates.

Somali pirates suffered skin burns, lost hair and fell gravely ill “within days” of boarding the MV Iran Deyanat. Some of them died.

Andrew Mwangura, the director of the East African Seafarers’ Assistance Programme, told the Sunday Times: “We don’t know exactly how many, but the information that I am getting is that some of them had died. There is something very wrong about that ship.”

The vessel’s declared cargo consists of “minerals” and “industrial products”. But officials involved in negotiations over the ship are convinced that it was sailing for Eritrea to deliver small arms and chemical weapons to Somalia’s Islamist rebels.

Chemical weapons?  Is anyone really surprised that the Tehraniacs would provide chemical weapons to an Islamist insurgency in Somalia?  Will anyone really be surprised if/when the same Tehraniacs provide a nuclear device to Islamist insurgents to set of in Israel, Europe or America?

More on the story:

The ship is owned and operated by the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines, or IRISL, a state-owned company run by the Iranian military.

According to the US Treasury Department, the IRISL regularly falsifies shipping documents to hide the identity of end users, uses generic terms to describe shipments and operates under various covers to circumvent United Nations sanctions.

The ship set sail from Nanjing, China, at the end of July. According to its manifest, it was heading for Rotterdam where it would unload 42500 tons of iron ore and “industrial products” purchased by a German client.

The ship set sail from China?  Now if I was a crazed Mullah and I wanted to deliver some chemical weapons I happened to have on hand just down the pike to Somalia, I don’t think I’d do it by way of China.  It’s much more likely that the Tehraniacs contracted with China to purchase the chemical weapons.

Is anyone surprised that China would sell chemical weapons to anyone with the cash to buy them?  After all, they put melamine in their own babies’ milk just to make an extra buck.

There’s good guys and bad guys in the world, and thanks to some sick and dying bad guys in Somalia, we’ve been given a window into where the real evil resides.

Hat-tip: Jim

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This morning, I posted this quote from Obama:

“This isn’t 9/11. We know how we got into this mess. What we need now is leadership that gets us out. I’ll provide it. John McCain won’t.”

My focus was on his recommendations for dealing with the economic crisis.  Wrong focus. What should have jumped out was:

“This isn’t 9/11.  We know how we got into this mess.”

Of all the windows Obama has given us into the darkness of his soul and the radicalism of his politics, this is the floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall one.  Here is a nominee campaigning hard to be the leader of the free world telling us we don’t know how we got into the mess of 9/11.

Where should I throw up first?  Let’s start with the worst:  We know how we got into the financial melt-down mess, but we don’t know how we got into the 9/11 mess. Obama may not be sure what exactly it was we did – troops in Saudi Arabia, support of Israel, not kneeling and bowing toward Mecca a few times a day – but it was something we did that drove al-Qaeda to fly our airliners into our buldings.

Obama has done a good job of playing the centrist Democrat and not parroting the words of the radicals who pin the blame for 9/11 on us, but in this statement he is showing he’s a comrade in arms with the Bill Ayres set.

Next, the don’t know phrase.  Is Obama ignoring the 9/11 Commission findings?  Is he cozying up with the 9/11 Truthers Wackos?  Most of us know exactly what happened:  Radical Islamists attacked us as an act of war, an act of jihad.

And finally, all 9/11 is in Obama’s eyes is a mess.  You don’t justify wars over messes.  You don’t launch a long-term engagement with the Islamist enemy over a mess.  You don’t support democracy as an alternative to Islamism in order to avoid future messes.  I have never heard a serious elected official state so profound a minimization of what occured on 9/11 since today.  I thought it was bad enough to call it a “tragedy” instead of an “attack,” but “mess” is an insult of an entirely different, and more obscene, level.

This is why Obama is glued to his teleprompter.  When he talks for himself, he says things like “This isn’t 9/11.  We know how we got into this mess,” and let us see that inside that empty suit is the screaming heart of an anti-American radical.

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W

riting on another subject entirely, a friend sent me this email today:

Overall, though, I think things are moving in the wrong direction.

Unfortunately, 9/11 accelerated the process. Q: Is this what Osama wanted, to move the (self-inflicted) erosion of our freedoms along even faster? That has been suggested before; maybe that is part of what he wanted.

He was talking about the Patriot Act. Show me where that act has infringed on the rights of normal Joes … but that’s not my subject.  Rather, it’s something much more insidious and too much beyond our control: The pressure Islam is putting on our institutions, causing the foundations of our freedom to crumble.

Here’s what I’m talking about:

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Publisher Random House has pulled a novel about the Prophet Mohammed’s child bride, fearing it could “incite acts of violence.”

“The Jewel of Medina,” a debut novel by journalist Sherry Jones, 46, was due to be published on August 12 by Random House, a unit of Bertelsmann AG, and an eight-city publicity tour had been scheduled, Jones told Reuters on Thursday.

The novel traces the life of A’isha from her engagement to Mohammed, when she was six, until the prophet’s death. Jones said that she was shocked to learn in May, that publication would be postponed indefinitely.

“I have deliberately and consciously written respectfully about Islam and Mohammed … I envisioned that my book would be a bridge-builder,” said Jones.

Random House deputy publisher Thomas Perry said in a statement the company received “cautionary advice not only that the publication of this book might be offensive to some in the Muslim community, but also that it could incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment.”

“In this instance we decided, after much deliberation, to postpone publication for the safety of the author, employees of Random House, booksellers and anyone else who would be involved in distribution and sale of the novel,” Perry said.

America can be like Salman Rushdie and stand up to Islamic thuggery, or it can be like Random House and respond in a cowardly manner that not only encourages the growth of Islamic social cancers, but also shows the publisher’s blatant hypocrisy, and its overwhelming fear of Islamists.

Random House wasn’t so worried or sensitive to the feelings of others when it published Phillip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, a work that is probably more offensive to Christians than Jones’ novel is to Muslims. Random House didn’t just publish The Golden Compass; it flogged it:

Collectively, the promotional partnerships will result in approximately $50 million worth of advertising support, one billion consumer impressions, and $120 million of media value worldwide. Additionally, New Line has over 75 licensed partners producing hundreds of Golden Compass-related products worldwide, in six different categories including retail, beverage/concessions, non-profit, publishing, home entertainment, and in-book and online.

Wow!  That kind of corporate commitment behind a movie that promotes a deliberately anti-Christian POV could be really dangerous … NOT.  Christians don’t issue fatwahs. Christians don’t burn down embassies … or publishing houses, for that matter. And Christians don’t shoot artists eight times and leave them dead.

Because Islam allows violent Islamists who carry out those acts and worse to thrive within the bounds of their religion, and because Random House won’t show an ounce of courage, we the people are being deprived of a book that sounds as if it would be fascinating and insightful.

Point and match, Osama. The game is still ours to lose.

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he Beijingoists are taking no chances as the countdown to next week’s Olympics races towards the opening ceremony … and possible protests.

According to AP, rallied to action to suppress any protests are 110,000 police, riot squads and special forces, and another 300,000 Olympic volunteers and neighborhood watch members. The figure apparently does not include the Chinese military, which also will be out in force.

Gosh, I just don’t remember security being quite that tight during the ’84 Olympics here in LA …

Last week saw four bomb blasts in Western China, with an Islamist group taking responsibility. And this statement came today from a militant identified by the DC-based monitoring group IntelCenteras as Seyfullah:

“Our aim is to target the most critical points related to the Olympics. We will try to attack Chinese central cities severely using the tactics that have never been employed,” he said.

China discounts such threats and said the recent bombings were not the work of terrorists. Exploding space heaters … meteorites … or something … don’t know for sure.

I despise the regime in Beijing and wish them nothing by ill will. But I also despise Islamists and their similarly totalitarian cruelty. So in this odd case, I’m hoping there’s no violence during the games – but that there are plenty of hitches, little shows of resistance for the cameras, a thousand cuts against the pride of those that crushed the spirit of freedom in Tienanmen Square.

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B

arack Obama’s planned Berlin speech is the result of egomaniacal overreach by the candidate and his staff. Obama, the new Kennedy. Obama, the new Reagan. Obama, the new Narcissus.

But Kennedy and Reagan spoke in a Berlin that was the symbolic core of the Cold War; it was a platform for bravely confronting a freedom-crushing Soviet empire with the rousing rhetoric of freedom. What is Berlin symbolic of today? Hedonism? Eurocentrism? Anyone? Anyone?

That’s why I like the suggestion made by Tony Campbell at The Moderate Voice:

My suggestion to Obama: forget Berlin, go to Mecca. If you really want to be seen in a Kennedy / Reagan light in the diplomatic arena, you should use your popularity and your unique heritage to address the Christian and Muslim worlds.

Campbell seems to see his suggestion merely in a religious light:

However, the issue is much trickier and more dangerous than either Kennedy or Reagan had to face. Instead of disarming conventional and nuclear weapons, Obama has to disarm fear and prejudice on both sides, Christian and Muslim.

That’s an underestimation of the parallel Campbell’s defined; this is about much more than “fear and prejudice.” Radical Islamism is the common threat freedom-loving folk face today, just as the Soviets were in the 1960s and 1980s. Kennedy and Reagan took the rhetorical war against the Soviets to the city that was the chink stopping the Soviet advance, and spat some powerful, intimidating rhetoric in the direction of Moscow.

What part of the Islamic world is liberated and freedom-loving enough to allow a Western leader to cry out the modern-day counterpart of “I am a Berliner?” No place.

Who is brave enough today to go to Mecca and say “Tear down this jihadism?” No one, least of all Obama.

A meaningful, challenging speech in Mecca is what the world needs, but there’s one little problem Campbell overlooked: The religion of peace does not allow non-Muslims to visit Mecca – and Obama, as we all know, is not a Muslim.

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Let’s Hear It For Sharia Law!

Here’s the beauty of Islam and its perverted justice system in a nutshell: Keep women uneducated, so they don’t know how to defend themselves, and discourage men from defending them, then you can stone a whole lot of women to death without having to stone too many men! What’s not to love!?

In theory the penalty of stoning to death applies to both men and women.

But the lawyers say that in practice, many more women than men receive the sentence because they are less well educated and often poorly represented in court. (BBC)

And it’s happening again in Iran – that showplace of Islamic rule – as eight women and one man face imminent stoning for sexual sinning. The women were found guilty of adultery or prostitution, the man was found guilty of having sex with one of his students.

One imam, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, supposedly suspended stoning in 2002, but it hasn’t stopped the practice, and lawyers for the eight say they fear the sentences will be carried out at any time.

And what goes on at Guantanamo is cruel and unusual? Continue Reading »

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