Eternal Sunshine of the Intolerant Mind

I am an intolerant man.

Ask anyone who has ever exchanged anything beyond social pleasantries with me, and they’ll confirm it.

I am an intolerant man, and this is my manifesto.

Once, caught up in the “liberal at 20” portion of the well-known (wrongly attributed) quote about the impact of aging on one’s political ideology, I would have agreed with the generally-accepted opinion which painted intolerance as a bad thing. All you have to do is to Google “quotes about intolerance” and you can see what I mean.

“Intolerance is itself a form of violence and an obstacle to the growth of a true democratic spirit.” – Mahatma Ghandi

“When you discriminate against anyone, you discriminate against everyone. It’s a display of terrible intolerance.” – Alan Dershowitz

“Intolerance is evidence of impotence.” – Alistair Crowley

Intolerance is violence.

Intolerance is discrimination.

Intolerance is impotence.

One would have to assume then that if intolerance means all of those things, then the opposite of intolerance must mean… well, the exact opposite, and that a world totally devoid of intolerance would be a world where peace, inclusiveness and potency abounded.

Think again.

Continue reading at The Last Wire

The War on Terror Isn’t Over … The Administration is Just Switching Sides

By way of The Daily Caller, author Diana West sits down for a very frank interview about the current state of affairs in the fallacy of the “Arab Spring” Middle East. She points out the Obama administration’s open allegiance with al Qaeda groups in Libya and The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and how it mirrors our Cold War practices. She talks about the layers of unanswered Benghazi questions, and the courting of groups our country is continuing to support who fly the black flag of Jihad.

“It’s what happens when you switch sides openly”

And as Obama plans to empty Gitmo of terrorist detainees, keep in mind they will re-enter a batttlefield somewhere. There will be more Benghazis ahead for the U.S. and our people abroad.

This coincides with Obama’s long and droning “the war on terror is over” speech the other day. Brit Hume has a more accurate translation …

Meanwhile, Sen. John McCain snuck across the Syrian border to meet with the “rebels” in that country’s conflict that McCain himself has been demanding U.S. support for. Make no mistake, these “rebels” are infiltrated with the exact same al Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood groups as were seen in Libya.

Boston Bombing Fallout

In the two weeks plus after the Boston Marathon bombings, we have learned quite a bit about the terrorists and their family. One scandalous fact is that these cretins had received welfare benefits.

  Imagine that, immigrants that are welcomed into the best country on earth, provided with security and an education and even public assistance, repay it by attacking it. Someting so absurd that it  prompted president Obama to ask “…why did young men who grew up and studied here, as art of our communities and our country, resort to such violence? (perhaps he should just ask that “guy from the neighborhood,” Bill Ayres, but that’s another post…) 

Others are saying never mind they were on welfare , why are we letting these people in the country in the first place? In fact, in the minds of some, the Boston Bombings have negatively impacted the chances of bi-partisan immigration reform.

 The murderous religious fanatics that perpetrated these crimes were here because, like us Cubans, they had been granted political asylum. Like me and many of you, they were refugees which entitled them to all the rights and privileges bestowed on those lucky enough to be American citizens.

 Before this, there had been little if any talk of incorporating major changes to the asylum process into immigration reform. In fact, the proposed tweaks to asylum seekers  would have made it easier for them.

 But now,  people, like Bill O’Rielly and Charles Krauthammer, are asking how it can be that a person who is allowed to settle in the United States because they are being politically persecuted in their country, can return to said country to vacation, invest, attend cultural events or even “schooling” without any repercussions. Such was the case with the dead bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev who returned to Russia where he was allegedly under danger of persecution because he was an Islamic ethnic Chechen.

 And that’s a hell of a question. Specially when you’re granted refugee status from a country that’s on the State Department’s list of State Sponsors of Terrorism, who trains and harbors terrorists, engages in and traffics espionage,conducts cyber and economic  attacks and  even once urged the USSR to attack the US with nuclear weapons: Cuba.

 The risks of refugees returning to Cuba being “radicalized” and trained to harm the United States are the same, if not greater, than any other group. The Cuban regime aggressively recruits sympathizers, agents and even uses blackmail and hostage taking to advance its cause and sphere of influence.

 Now that the United States’ political asylum policy has become part of the immigration reform debate, it’s only logical some legislators will begin to question the legitimacy of  some refugees and reach the conclusion that if a person  who was granted political asylum can return to the country where they claim they were in danger without any consequences, they did not deserve to be granted “political refugee” status and are just common immigrants who must follow the same immigration rules as everybody else.

The fallout from those bombs that went off in Boston may very well hit Miami soon…

In A Nutshell: “You Came to Suck The Fat of Our Land…”

jihadi mom

Have you seen and heard the rantings of the “Jihadi Mom”, Zubeidat Tsarnaev, of the terrorist Boston Marathon-bombing brothers?

Well, somebody had to finally say it, and FOX’s Judge Jeanine Pirro did a hell of a job over the weekend…

However, FOX’s resident liberal Alan Colmes insists we should show sympathy for Tsarnaevs’ anti-American, grieving Jihadi Mom. Umm … no. She can kiss my ass.

UPDATE: Judge Jeanine Pirro mentioned the tangle she had with a newspaper’s publicizing of her name and address in an interactive article on registered legal gun owners.

The doctrine of acceptable lies

In this superb essay titled “Taqiyya and the Father of Lies,” Gates of Vienna takes us on a tour of how Taqiyya has become the norm in the West among, you guessed it, the left…

[…] In 1966 I flew from London to Singapore. I walked to the barrier with my parents, showed the tickets, walked out onto the tarmac and up the steps to the airplane. But it was In Singapore that I had my first experience of bombs. The Indonesians mounted a campaign of terror in the Singapore at the time, aimed at increasing racial tension. Behind this strategy was a Jihad aimed as a protest against the formation of Malaysia as a multiracial/multicultural community. We were not officially informed of this, but rather we were told to be very careful of the Malays (Moslem) as being hypersensitive.

Later that year, Singapore broke away from Malaysia, the demands of the ethnic Malays being incompatible with the relative racial harmony achieved in Singapore.

That this was all about Jihad was covered up, but not long after, in 1968, Leila Khaled and the Marxist PFLP struck, first of Palestinian terrorist attacker to use lethal hijacking as a publicity stunt.

In 1970 they hijacked two large airliners (plus a 747 that was too big for the airstrip) and took them to Dawson’s Field, an abandoned airstrip in Jordan, where all but the Jewish passengers were released.

Leila Khaled was captured when she tried to hijack an El Al jet, she was handed over to the British, who exchanged her for the passengers. The Singaporean bombers were hanged in 1968; I don’t think Singapore has had any more problems. Britain, on the other hand has had a continuous stream of them.

From that time on, hassle-free air travel became a thing of the past. The Palestinians have cost us dear, but somehow, it is to the Palestinian Authority that part of our Jizya is paid. In the days of Al Capone this used to be called a ‘protection racket’. Now it is called ‘International Aid’. Thus are the lies perpetuated.

The impact of Islam on our lives is enormous, but it is obscured by a huge web of deceit and lies. Every time you go to an airport or other public place, and are subjected to searches and the invasion of personal space, it is because the ‘Religion of Peace’ wants you dead, and by association, one must assume that Socialists also want you dead, or at least somewhere where you cannot attack them with the truth of their perfidy. […]

Read the entire essay.

Why ‘The Great Crime’ still matters today

Raymond Ibrahim on the anniversary of the Armenian Genocide:

Today, April 24, marks the “Great Crime,” that is, the Armenian genocide that took place under Turkey’s Islamic Ottoman Empire, during and after WWI.  Out of an approximate population of two million, some 1.5 million Armenians died. If early 20th century Turkey had the apparatuses and technology to execute in mass—such as 1940s Germany’s gas chambers—the entire Armenian population may well have been decimated.  Most objective American historians who have studied the question unequivocally agree that it was a deliberate, calculated genocide:

More than one million Armenians perished as the result of execution, starvation, disease, the harsh environment, and physical abuse.  A people who lived in eastern Turkey for nearly 3,000 years [more than double the amount of time the invading Islamic Turks had occupied Anatolia, now known as “Turkey”] lost its homeland and was profoundly decimated in the first large-scale genocide of the twentieth century.  At the beginning of 1915 there were some two million Armenians within Turkey; today there are fewer than 60,000….  Despite the vast amount of evidence that points to the historical reality of the Armenian Genocide, eyewitness accounts, official archives, photographic evidence, the reports of diplomats, and the testimony of survivors, denial of the Armenian Genocide by successive regimes in Turkey has gone on from 1915 to the present.

Indeed, evidence has been overwhelming.  U.S. Senate Resolution 359 from 1920 heard testimony that included evidence of “[m]utilation, violation, torture, and death [which] have left their haunting memories in a hundred beautiful Armenian valleys, and the traveler in that region is seldom free from the evidence of this most colossal crime of all the ages.”  In her memoir, Ravished Armenia, Aurora Mardiganian described being raped and thrown into a harem (which agrees with Islam’s rules of war).  Unlike thousands of other Armenian girls who were discarded after being defiled, she managed to escape. In the city of Malatia, she saw 16 Christian girls crucified: “Each girl had been nailed alive upon her cross, spikes through her feet and hands, only their hair blown by the wind, covered their bodies.”  Such scenes were portrayed in the 1919 documentary film Auction of Souls, some of which is based on Mardiganian’s memoirs.

[…]

Indeed, if we “fail to deal radically” with the “horror” currently being visited upon millions of Christians around the Islamic world—which in some areas has reached genocidal proportions—we “condone it” and had better cease talking “mischievous nonsense” of a utopian world of peace and tolerance.

Put differently, silence is always the ally of those who would commit genocide. In 1915, Adolf Hitler rationalized his genocidal plans, which he implemented some three decades later, when he rhetorically asked: “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”

And who speaks today of the annihilation of Christians under Islam?

More on the Boston Bombers from Hansen and Hinderaker

Two excellent dissections about the inability of many to come to grips with the reality of Islamism in our society.

First, Victor Davis Hansen: “The Paradoxes of the Boston Bombings”:

A certain American (or for that matter Westernized) resident or citizen — usually male, almost always young, born a Muslim, prone to guilt over temporary secularization or Westernization, as often (or more so) from Pakistan, a Russian Islamic province, the Balkans, Iran, the Philippines, or Africa as from the Arab Middle East, usually failing in American society, always absorbed within American popular culture and guilty over such absorption — at some moment channels his own sense of failure into radical Islam. He seeks some sort of cosmic resonance and redemption for his own personal inadequacies. Presto, a pathetic loser becomes a wannabe bin Laden jihadist, as murder becomes cause for publicity.

The would-be Times Square bomber, Major Hasan, those who killed Jews in Los Angeles and Seattle, and the Salt Lake City shopping-center killer find empowerment in the laxity and tolerance of American culture that seems to grant unlimited rights to the newcomer or second-generation without commensurate responsibilities about learning — and learning to love — the culture and history of their adopted country. We don’t call these killers “terrorists.” We claim that they have nothing to do with al-Qaeda. And yet they give proof that a post-9/11 Islamism energizes their violence — and sometimes enables it by contacts and training.

[…]

Like it or not, two  half-educated and young killers, at the expense of a few hundred dollars and one dead, with very little capital, shut down an entire city, committed mass mayhem, ruined the lives of hundreds, destroyed the Boston Marathon, and cost the city billions of dollars. But for the chance scans of video cameras, the Tsarnaevs might well have let off more bombs and turned their terror of a day into far greater mayhem of a week. That lesson is not lost on jihadists. To the degree they can enthuse another Tamerlan Tsarnaev in Chechnya or reach a Major Hasan at a mosque or on the Internet, they will continue. I expect more al-Qaedism. […]

Next, John Hinderaker in Powerline: “Why Does Evil Make Liberals Stupid?”:

In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, we are suffering through the inevitable period of liberal hand-wringing. Liberals can’t help themselves: while normal people are reviling the bombers, celebrating their capture or death, and debating measures that can be taken to prevent future atrocities, liberals’ thinking (if you can call it that) goes in a different direction. Liberals call for understanding; tell the rest of us we don’t realize how complex mass murder is; recommend introspection (But why? I didn’t do it.); and warn against various forms of overreaction to the latest terrorist outrage. The reality of evil, a constant in human affairs for millennia, renders liberals not speechless–that would be too much to hope for–but incoherent.

These days there are more such outpourings of liberal feelings than one can count, but let’s note just two, for now. First, Governor Deval Patrick, who appeared on Face the Nation this morning:

The governor of Massachusetts said Sunday that he has no idea what motivated the brothers accused of exploding two bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon.

Really? Hmm. Check out the Boston Globe, Governor. They think Islam might have played a secondary role.

Speaking on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Gov. Deval Patrick said it’s hard to imagine why someone would deliberately harm “innocent men, women and children in the way that these two fellows did.”

It is, indeed, hard to imagine if you aren’t evil. But this is a banal and singularly unhelpful observation. Experience tells us that some people do indeed want to harm innocent men, women and children in this fashion. Muslims alone carry out, on the average, several terrorist attacks a day for the purpose of harming innocent men, women and children, and they are by no means the only source of evil in the world. So our public officials should stop expressing amazement at the existence of evil and start figuring out how to protect the rest of us from it. […]

The left’s obsession with demonizing us fails again

The rush to judgement by the mainstream media and leftist pundits on who the Boston Marathon bombers was just the latest in a long sick tradition. The left, incapable of rational and logical thought, and lacking even the slightest bit of deductive reasoning, continues to make the same mistake over and over again, proving they are, of course, insane.

[…] The Sparkman accusations were based on nothing more than a desire to demonize the newly formed and rapidly growing Tea Party movement as terrorists and un-American.  It was as if they were hoping for an act of Tea Party violence.

Yet there was a theory behind the madness, the Eliminationist Narrative created by Dave Neiwart of Crooks and Liars about an “eliminationist” radical right seeking to dehumanize and eliminate political opposition.  It was a play on the over-used narrative of Richard Hofstadter’s “paranoid style” in American politics.

The Eliminationist Narrative was aided and abetted by an abuse of the term “right-wing” to include groups who are the opposite of conservatism and the Tea Party movement.

In the case of Sparkman, the accusations were just Another Failed Eliminationist Narrative.  And the Eliminationist Narrative would fail time and time again […]

For a more detailed picture of this sick state of mind, read “10 Depressing, Morally Confused Reactions to 4/15/13, the Boston Jihad” in the PJ Tatler.

If you want to learn about Chechen jihad…

Read this book:

20130419-101437.jpg

These folks have been fighting the Soviets and Russians for generations. Very, very dangerous. You do not fuck around with these guys.

P.S., This book was published in 2007.

P.P.S., Bodansky was one of the analysts who very presciently wrote about bin Laden’s intentions towards the United States well before the horrible events of 9/11.

Political correctness on Tatooine

Lego to stop production of Star Wars set due to Muslim ‘sensitivity’:

Lego will cease production of a popular “Star Wars” toy set after Muslim communities complained about the product as the company says the criticism played no part in the decision to do so.

The Independent reports that several Muslim groups in Austria claimed “Jabba’s Palace” was anti-Muslim as it showed popular “Star Wars” character Jabba the Hut in a mosque-like lair with a hookah, guns and an imprisoned Chewbacca.

“This sort of thing does not belong in a child’s bedroom,” Melissa Gunes, spokeswoman for Austria’s Turkish Cultural Association, told The Independent. “The game is pedagogical dynamite. It depicts Muslims as terrorists.”

RT News reports that Muslim critics felt “Jabba’s Palace” looked like the Hagia Sophia and the Jami al-Kabir mosques.

“We are very grateful and congratulate Lego on the decision to take Jabba’s Palace out of production,” Birol Killic, president of the Turkish Cultural Association, told RT News.

In a statement, Lego says the decision to stop production of the set didn’t come from the criticism.

“As a normal process products in the LEGO Star Wars assortment usually have a life-cycle of one to three years after which they leave the assortment and may be renewed after some years,” the statement read. “The LEGO Star Wars product Jabba’s Palace 9516 was planned from the beginning to be in the assortment only until the end of 2013 as new exiting models from the Star Wars universe will follow.

“The LEGO Group regrets that the product has caused the members of the Turkish cultural community to interpret it wrongly, but point out that the design of the product only refers to the fictional content of the Star Wars saga,” the statement said.

The uprising against the Lego set began earlier this year when a father in Austria’s Islamic community found that his sister bought it as a present for his son, according to The Independent.

Lego originally fought back against the claims that “Jabba’s Palace” was anti-Muslim.

Jabba the Hut was first introduced in “Return of the Jedi” in 1983 and the Lego set first hit shelves in 2012.

Yeah, I understand. We’re still a little sensitive too…

9-11

February 26, 1993 (Updated)

Twenty years ago today, I happened to be in New York City on the last day of a consulting gig with a large international bank. As I left the offices of the bank to walk to my hotel to checkout, I decided to stop for a bite to eat on the way to LaGuardia for my flight. It was a little after noon as I was sitting finishing my meal when I heard all hell break out on the street, the most sirens I had ever heard in my trips to NYC — and that’s saying a lot. Dozens of police,  fire trucks, and fire rescue were heading in one direction: downtown. I asked around but nobody seemed to know what was going on; in those pre-internet days the only way to get news was print, radio or TV — and I had a dearth of all three heading to the airport and boarding my flight.

As soon as I was able to, I used a new-fangled toy aboard my flight: an AirFone (remember those?). I called home to find out everybody was worried sick about me and the terrorist attack in New York. Needless to say I was more than a bit shocked and surprised. That terrorist attack was the first attempt to destroy the World Trade Center towers by the blind Sheikh Abdul Rahman and Ramzi Yousef, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s nephew. I don’t remember visiting New York City after that for a long time. It turned out that that day was my last opportunity to see the Twin Towers in all their glory.

I regret it to this day.

Read more

Our ‘Islamist’ predicament

Hot on the heels of CAIR telling journalists not to use the term “Islamist” because it’s Extremist/Racist/Sexist/Homophobic™ (or whatever), comes a thoughtful essay From The American Spectator, about our Islamist predicament.

At least since 9/11, the Muslim jihad against the West has led to a number of eloquent books detailing the plight of the West and documenting in detail what is happening.

I include not only Muslim colonization of Europe, but also the attacks on Christian communities in Africa, Asia and the few Christians remaining in the Middle East.

However, those works which I have read, and some of them are truly excellent pieces of writing and research, all seem to me to share a common weakness.

When, in the concluding chapters, they turn from detailing the remorseless advance of Islam in one continent after another, and the impotence of liberal democracy in the face of it, to what to actually do about it, their often-razor-sharp prose has a tendency to turn to vague platitudes and truisms.

It is impossible to blame the authors of these publications for this. For one thing, the West is facing an enemy unlike any other, an enemy particularly skilled at using the West’s institutions of liberal democracy and the pacific elements of Christianity, to its own advantage.

Further, the enemy has no recognizable military structure. It has no general staff whose mistakes can be taken advantage of, no population concentrations that can be bombed to any point.

Against a drive to Islamize the world, bombing Afghanistan has never been much more than a waste of time, creating an illusion of purposeful activity and cutting a few heads off a hydra. Killing Osama Bin Laden did not damage Islamic jihadism as in, say, World War II killing Hitler would have destroyed the heart of German National Socialism. There can be no possibility of the equivalent of a Gorbachev who either could or would end the machinery of the terrorist jihad. The war in Afghanistan was plainly futile from the start if its object was to defeat international terrorism. The Boko Haram killing Christians in Africa in the name of Allah have probably never heard of Afghanistan. Winning or losing ground in the vicinity of the Khyber Pass will make no difference to the unemployed Muslim “youths” in slums ringing the French (and not only French) cities who regard Western Civilization with fascinated disgust.

We have the finest navies and air forces in the world, almost useless against an enemy who has neither. Further, to even advocate any sort of comparable counter-attack is not only incompatible with our own civilized values, but probably illegal.

I realize I am doing more-or-less what I am criticizing others for: floundering for an answer.

It is the first war in which our side has made broadcasting our own propaganda, let alone anything more active, illegal. Things have reached such a pass that even a cultural revival of patriotism (one, but only one, of the essential requirements, and for Europe more than the United States) would probably need some sort of censorship or government influence in the media comparable to, say, the anti-smoking campaign. […]