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March 2016

Murray Walters Terrorists, Paedophiles and Delusion

Murray Walters is a Brisbane psychiatrist
Once more we are treated to sermons by those who demand we ponder the grievances behind the Brussels slaughter. For them, the unthinkable truth that Islamists hate us must be always obfuscated. In this regard they match those bishops who could not fully grasp the evil of pederast clerics.

Another insane act of mass murder, followed hot on its heels by the usual piffle about disenfranchisement, powerlessness, and other exculpatory historicisms. The “minimisers” were keen to get their camera time, barely waiting for atomised human flesh to be scraped from an airport’s bomb-shattered departures hall before demanding that this latest slaughter be contextualised and their simple “truth” accepted as gospel. There is a mad futility to doing anything about it, they say, other than drawing maudlin pictures, lighting candles, singing “Imagine” and exchanging empty slogans about “standing with Paris”. Sorry, that was the last massacre, this time it was Brussels. It’s getting hard to keep up these days.

Simon Jenkins in the Guardian was amongst the first to occupy the apologists’ lectern, reminding us that “political terror is as old as war,” and that “…what is not stupid is seeking to alleviate, or not aggravate, the rage that gives rise to acts of terror, and then to diminish the potency of the incident itself”. Re-iterating a well-worn theme, he mouthed the purported wisdom that “a response to terror requires patience and restraint.” In other words, do nothing, mouth pieties and hope Allah’s suicide bombers go away. Or at least find someone else to terrorise.

Call me a callous, cynical sort if you will, but isn’t it funny how no one has urged “alleviating, not aggravating” or “patience and restraint” during the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse. Cardinal George Pell might have had a darn sight easier time of it if the same logic had been applied. After all, paedophilia is also as “old as war”. In fact, like old-fashioned rape, it’s often an integral aspect of it.

Here’s Jenkins again:

There is no way any community can make itself immune to terror attacks. Since they are random, no protection can defend that community from them. No amount of police work or surveillance, no deployment of armies or navies, let alone of missiles or nuclear weapons, can guard against them. Intelligence and surveillance can go so far, but the bombers and killers will get through any net.

Islam—Facts or Dreams? Andrew C. McCarthy

The following is adapted from a speech delivered on February 24, 2016, at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C., as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series.

In 1993 I was a seasoned federal prosecutor, but I only knew as much about Islam as the average American with a reasonably good education—which is to say, not much. Consequently, when I was assigned to lead the prosecution of a terrorist cell that had bombed the World Trade Center and was plotting an even more devastating strike—simultaneous attacks on the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, the United Nations complex on the East River, and the FBI’s lower Manhattan headquarters—I had no trouble believing what our government was saying: that we should read nothing into the fact that all the men in this terrorist cell were Muslims; that their actions were not representative of any religion or belief system; and that to the extent they were explaining their atrocities by citing Islamic scripture, they were twisting and perverting one of the world’s great religions, a religion that encourages peace.

Unlike commentators and government press secretaries, I had to examine these claims. Prosecutors don’t get to base their cases on assertions. They have to prove things to commonsense Americans who must be satisfied about not only what happened but why it happened before they will convict people of serious crimes. And in examining the claims, I found them false.

One of the first things I learned concerned the leader of the terror cell, Omar Abdel Rahman, infamously known as the Blind Sheikh. Our government was portraying him as a wanton killer who was lying about Islam by preaching that it summoned Muslims to jihad or holy war. Far from a lunatic, however, he turned out to be a globally renowned scholar—a doctor of Islamic jurisprudence who graduated from al-Azhar University in Cairo, the seat of Sunni Islamic learning for over a millennium. His area of academic expertise was sharia—Islamic law.

I immediately began to wonder why American officials from President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno on down, officials who had no background in Muslim doctrine and culture, believed they knew more about Islam than the Blind Sheikh. Then something else dawned on me: the Blind Sheikh was not only blind; he was beset by several other medical handicaps. That seemed relevant. After all, terrorism is hard work. Here was a man incapable of doing anything that would be useful to a terrorist organization—he couldn’t build a bomb, hijack a plane, or carry out an assassination. Yet he was the unquestioned leader of the terror cell. Was this because there was more to his interpretation of Islamic doctrine than our government was conceding?

Peter Smith Identifying The Enemy

The enemy, we are told again and again, is not Islam but ‘radical Islam’. There is comfort in that appellation, certainly, but unless and until the West acknowledge that violence is enshrined in the Koran, the soft pillow of such delusions will smother us

lamb shadow smallZuhdi Jasser is a self-proclaimed devout Muslim and, I believe, an all round good guy. He is a medical doctor and a former lieutenant commander in the US Navy. He founded and heads the American Islamic Forum for Democracy. He rejects what he calls political Islam. He is a regular media commentator. After the attack in Brussels he correctly pointed out that the problem lies within Islam, as he always does. And again, par for the course, he argued that Islam needs a reformation. At the same time, he expressed “love” for his religion.

I will guess (without too much risk of being wrong): the religion Dr Jasser loves is about moderation, peace and tolerance, and exists separately from the state. But what is his religion? That to me is the mystery. Religions need a scriptural base. Islam has the Koran (the very words of God) and the Sunna and canonical Hadiths (the instructions, doings and reported sayings of Muhammad). I imagine Dr Jasser’s scriptural base is a subset of this Islamic scripture from which all of the nasty bits have been excised. For example, this nasty anti-Semitic bit from the Bukhari Hadith 52:177:

The Hour will not be established until you fight with Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say “O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.”

Dr Jasser and others of like mind do not express themselves on this point. On this point we hear only platitudes.

OUR UNRAVELING NUCLEAR DEAL: LAWRENCE J. HAAS

Iranians are famously savvy negotiators, so recent revelations that, under the U.S.-led global nuclear deal, Iran has far more leeway than we had thought to hide its nuclear progress and test ballistic missiles shouldn’t surprise us.

It should, however, alarm us.

The revelations – reflecting the precise wording of resolutions by the International Atomic Energy Agency’s board of governors and the United Nations Security Council – come amid increasingly aggressive Iranian behavior in the region, mocking any remaining hopes that the nuclear deal would moderate Tehran.

Iran watchers and nuclear experts were stunned to learn this month that the International Atomic Energy Agency’s director general, Yukiya Amano, believes he has new instructions on what the agency should report on Iran’s nuclear program. The agency, he said, no longer should report broadly on the program but, now, only on whether Iran is meeting specific commitments under the nuclear deal.

CAROLINE GLICK: THE CONSEQUENCESOF ANTI-ZIONISM

What do radical Israeli groups have in common with their European funders?

Last Thursday, Channel 2 broadcast candid camera footage of Breaking the Silence members gathering classified information on IDF operations. The footage was taken by Ad Kan activists.

Breaking the Silence claims to be an organization dedicated to collecting testimonies from IDF soldiers documenting ill-treatment of Palestinians. Posing as soldiers with information to share, Ad Kan activists were interrogated by Breaking the Silence investigators.

Yet rather than question them about how their units treated Palestinians, Breaking the Silence members asked them about troop movements, weapons platforms, IDF cooperation with foreign militaries. The investigators asked what sort of guns an unmanned combat vehicle carried, who controlled the vehicle and whether it was in operational use.

They wanted to know how the IDF discovers Hamas tunnels. They wanted to know when tanks were used in battles and how.Breaking the Silence’s intelligence operations didn’t stop with post-operational debriefs.

A Breaking the Silence employee named Frima Bobis is filmed telling Ad Kan activists how when she was still in high school, a Breaking the Silence worker advised her where to serve during her military service.

Society’s Child The strange, posthumous career of Capt. John Birch.A Review by Gabriel Schoenfeld

Everything has a history and a pre-history, and that includes Donald Trump and his angry hordes. Trump is by no means the first American tycoon to stir up fears and resentments and attempt to ride a populist wave. One of his notable predecessors, mostly forgotten today, is Robert Welch.

Born in the last year of the 19th century, Welch built his fortune in the confectionery trade. His company came up with the Sugar Daddy and then, after a slide into bankruptcy, returned successfully with Sugar Babies and Junior Mints. Candy made Welch fabulously wealthy; but his forays into electoral politics—including a run in 1950 for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts—went nowhere. Welch found another vehicle to advance his agenda, which in its essentials amounted to anti-communism on steroids.

That vehicle was the John Birch Society, which Welch established in 1958. By that juncture, the embers of the McCarthy era had already begun to cool. The demagogic senator from Wisconsin had died the previous year, not long after discrediting himself by recklessly lodging unfounded accusations. But the John Birch Society, picking up where McCarthy left off, was nonetheless extraordinarily successful. At its peak, at the close of the 1950s, it boasted 100,000 members—mostly white suburbanites—managed by a paid staff of 200, with 60 regional coordinators running chapters across the United States, making it the largest conservative grassroots organization in the country.

Incubators of Islamic Supremacism Surveillance in Muslim communities is indispensable for defeating terrorism. By Andrew C. McCarthy

With no hope of winning an argument on the facts, demagogues resort to the argument ad hominem. Too often, it works. And in the modern “progressive” West, no demagogic tactic works better than branding one’s political adversaries as racists. That is why the Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s most influential Islamic-supremacist organization, dreamed up the term “Islamophobia.” It is why Western progressives, stalwart allies of the Brotherhood, have lustily embraced the Islamophobia smear tactic — even sought to engrave it in our law, in brazen violation of the First Amendment.

It beats trying to refute the irrefutable nexus between Islamic scripture, sharia supremacism, and jihadist terror. It beats trying to rationalize the sheer idiocy of a policy, their policy, that idealizes Islam as the irenic monolith they would like it to be, rather than the complex of competing and contradictory convictions it is. Of the latter, the most dynamic is the conviction that Islam is an alternative civilization determined to conquer the West by force, by political pressure, by cultural aggression, and by exploiting Western civil liberties (liberties that are forbidden in the sharia societies Islamists would impose).

ANDREW HARROD: EUROPEANS WARN AMERICA OF CIVILIZATIONAL JIHAD

This was an interesting Center for Security Policy panel at CPAC. http://www.religiousfreedomcoalition.org/2016/03/25/europeans-warn-america-of-civilizational-jihad/ “Do not let what has happened in Europe and Britain happen to America,” stated Paul Weston, leader of the small British rightwing party Liberty GB, on March 3 at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).  Weston along with the Danish writer Lars Hedegaard warned in apocalyptic terms […]

The Obama approach to terrorism Ruthie Blum

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=15613 “It’s very important for us not to respond with fear,” said U.S. President Barack Obama, defending his decision to enjoy a baseball game in Cuba with his wife, daughters and dictator Raul Castro, while dozens of dead bodies and hundreds of body parts lay strewn across the Brussels airport and Metro station. “Groups like […]

Sweden? Negative Image? What Could You Be Thinking? One Month of Islam and Multiculturalism in Sweden: February 2016 by Ingrid Carlqvist

Two “unaccompanied refugee children,” remanded in January on suspicion of the aggravated rape of a younger boy at an asylum house in Alvesta, were revealed to be much older than 15 years old — the age they claimed to be. One of them, an Afghan man, wrote on Facebook that he was 44.
On Sweden’s most popular TV show, host Gina Dirawi and a children’s choir rewrote Sweden’s national anthem — instead of “I want to live, I want to die in the North”, they sang, “I want to live, I want to die on Earth.” The producer stated that the show “is not for those who get upset if the national anthem is changed. The focus should be on the people of this country who have ‘different roots.'”
Adult migrants with residence permits now have a right to bypass Swedes in waiting lists for housing. There is a massive shortage of housing, which has led to young Swedes, well into their 30s, being forced to live with their parents.

No one seems to have given any thought as to where all the people who are granted asylum in Sweden are supposed to live. There is a massive shortage of housing, which has led to young Swedes, well into their 30s, being forced to live with their parents. In 2014, a report from the Swedish Union of Tenants (Hyresgästföreningen) disclosed that close to 300,000 young people between the ages of 20-27 do not have their own place to live. The Immigration Service has the right to send “unaccompanied refugee children,” who are often, in fact, undocumented adults, to the local municipalities — and then it is their problem to procure accommodation. It was also recently reported that adult migrants with residence permits have a right to bypass Swedes in waiting lists for housing. The municipality of Skellefteå now plans to inventory all the empty houses in the countryside, looking for possible alternatives for migrants.

February 3: Teenage girls attending the Vårboskolan high school in the Malmö suburb of Arlöv were sexually assaulted and stalked by young migrants in their 20s who take Swedish language classes at the school, according to the local daily newspaper, Sydsvenskan. As most of the migrants are male, the gender balance at the school has been severely skewed. 14-year-old Emilia and Nora told Sydsvenskan:

“The guys stared at us and made kissing noises. They said things we did not quite understand, told us we were sexy and good looking and stuff like that. And they took pictures of us and other girls with their phones. During recess, they stand outside waiting for us and then they follow us. Sometimes guys have groped us in the lunch line.”