PING!
Posted on 09/13/2006 8:43:18 AM PDT by GMMAC
The enemy within -- and it's not who you think
Ottawa Citizen
September 13, 2006
COMMENTARY: DAVID WARREN
Listening to President Bush speak, on Monday's anniversary of 9/11, after a day of distastefully sentimental memorials, my question was not what have we achieved in the last five years, but rather, what have we learned? Bush and Blair -- the captain and vice-captain of Team West in the war against "the terrorists" so far -- are both now in the twilight of their political careers. Both have recently broken with habitual discretion, and made attempts to name the enemy. This has, if anything, added to their unpopularity, for when they mention that the enemy presents himself as Islamic, there are shrill cries not only from radical Muslims, but across the spectrum of the Left in the West.
Mr Bush, much the less eloquent of the two, has now retreated from his use of the term "Islamofascist" -- which as I said in a previous column, is a fairer label than "Islamist" for an enemy that spreads a palampore of traditional Islam, over a stuffing from the Western-bred totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century. As I wrote Aug. 27, from Ahmadinejad to Zawahiri, we hear rhetoric that uses an Islamic vocabulary and crude grammar, but animated with a syntax that owes more to Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, than to the Prophet and his traditional interpreters. The term is thus meant to suggest a skewed Islam, an Islam "adapted to our age" by psychopathic men, whose own Islamic learning is purposefully politicized, and aggressively de-spiritualized. Since the alternative would be to say that Ahmadinejad, Zawahiri, et al. do speak legitimately for Islam, I don't see why anyone should object to the term "Islamofascist".
Mr Blair gave an interview worth reading to the Israeli daily, Haaretz, published Monday. The editors present characterized it as "sombre". The British prime minister was still going through the motions of advocating the "peace process", and the "two-state solution" for Israel and Palestine, without (according to me) any real conviction that it could work. It is just something Western politicians do to please the figurative "Arab street", and it does not please anyone, any more. With much more conviction, he said leaders throughout the West have grasped that we are in a truly "global struggle", for which the people of the West are not prepared. The politicians have failed to explain to us how much is at stake, and how much will be lost if we are not resolute in defence of Western values.
For all its uncharacteristic awkwardness, Mr Blair's answer to a question about British home-grown terrorists donged the bell:
"It's not necessarily what have we done wrong, because part of the problem of what you have in Western opinion is that Western opinion always wants to believe that it's our fault and these people want to have a sort of, you know, grievance culture that they visit upon us and say it's our fault. And so we have a young British-born man of Pakistani origin sitting in front of a television screen saying I will go and kill innocent people because of the oppression of Muslims, when he has been brought up in a country that has given him complete religious freedom and full democratic rights and actually a very good job and standard of living. Now, that warped mind has grown out of a global movement based on a perversion of Islam which we have to confront, and we have to confront it globally."
I frankly admire both Bush and Blair, as courageous politicians, with open minds, doing their best within the limits of what is politically possible in their respective spheres. They are both towering figures, in comparison to the little men who oppose them. We won't know what trouble is, until the little men replace them.
I continue optimistic about what can be done, should we summon the will to do it. I have written repeatedly that a robust and unified Western response to "Islamofascism" could fling it quickly onto the trash-heap of history, to join Nasserism and Baathism and other earlier manifestations of Arab nationalism and socialism. Smack it hard, without apology.
My pessimism is founded in the fear that this robust and unified response cannot be mobilized. We have a huge fifth column in the West, and it is not the Muslim immigrants. They become radicalized only because our "victim culture" encourages them to nurture their grievances. Yet most, despite temptation, remain good, decent people, doing their share of the West's work.
Our real enemy is within us, in the immense constituency of the half-educated narcissists pouring from our universities each year -- that glib, smug, liberal, and defeatist "victim culture" itself, that inhabits the academy, our media, our legal establishment, the bureaucratic class. The opinion leaders of our society, who live almost entirely off the avails of taxation, make their livelihoods biting the hands that feed them, and undermining the moral order on which our solidarity depends.
© Ottawa Citizen
PING!
David Warren has it right.
"Mr Bush, much the less eloquent of the two.."
Mr Bush's speeches have been far better than Tony Blairs.
"Our real enemy is within us, in the immense constituency of the half-educated narcissists pouring from our universities each year -- that glib, smug, liberal, and defeatist "victim culture" itself, that inhabits the academy, our media, our legal establishment, the bureaucratic class. The opinion leaders of our society, who live almost entirely off the avails of taxation, make their livelihoods biting the hands that feed them, and undermining the moral order on which our solidarity depends."
Well-stated!
A must read....
Aw, those Commie professors are just doing their job, and raking in mom and dad's hard earned bucks, too!
Since the alternative would be to say that Ahmadinejad, Zawahiri, et al. do speak legitimately for Islam, I don't see why anyone should object to the term "Islamofascist".
What I don't understand is why anyone thinks the Iranian Monkey and te rest of the IslamoWhackos are not correctly representing Islam.
The Saudi's Wahibi Islam is being taught in America in mosques across America which are largely paid for by teh Saudi's.
For Libroids, that means with American money extorted by the Saudi's.
That's the point... Islamic facists DO NOT want democratic rights and complete religious freedom. They want the whole world to be ruled by an oppressive Islamic theocracy with forced conversion to Islam for all unbelievers.
Ping!
Tony is better at off the cuff pressers and the like. Helps to be in the Brit parliament to hone such skills. I was specifically referring to their prepared speeches. I find Bush to be more inspiring.
And yes, Tony's socialism is doing britain no favors.
The problem is the solidarity within Islam that forces those who might not wish to strap on explosives and blow their neighbors up to offer at least the support of silence to the homicidal maniacs who claim to speak in the name of their religion. Silence is acquiescence, and in the absence of open rejection from the main bodies of Islamic clerics these men from Ahmadinejad to Zawahiri really do speak for Islam.
The failure here is twofold - first, from suicidal Western cultural critics who, in a pretense of fairness, consistently marginalize their own culture, and second, from Moslems who take the attitude that crazy as the lunatics may be they're still Moslems and hence are to be supported in the face of the Unbeliever.
That approach to solidarity itself has more in keeping with fascist and communist doctrine than it does with history. (Warring Moslem cities in Spain routinely used Christian mercenaries and allies, and vice versa, for example.) In Marxian doctrine this is dealt with as class solidarity, and one of the attractions of the Islamist movement to Marxist theorists is its similarity to international class struggle and the identification of the Moslems as an oppressed class. That is a gigantic blind spot and the explanation, I suggest, for the support on the part of the left for a doctrine whose victory would break the left utterly. That is the reason the left supports these fanatics - they hate the rest of us more.
We did not start this war. In WWII we were in a fight for survival. The greatest acts of terror were carried out by the RAF and the United States Army Air Corp. The Brits burned Dresden to the ground. The United States fire bombed Tokyo and other major cities of Japan. This terror worked and broke the back of the enemy. The nukes dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were minor terror raids as compared to our fire bombing. It worked! They lost, we won.
We are fighting this war on the terms laid down by the enemy. George Patton sure as hell did not ask Rommel what tactics he could and could not use. Patton understood that the war machine of the enemy must be destroyed and the civilian population was what feed, clothed and made the tools of war for its army. The civilians were thus legitimate targets. When the enemy knows he will lose his wife, his children, his country and his life he will not oppose you.We are in a fight for the survival of western civilization
SCHOLARS FOR 9/11 TRUTH ASSAILED
Members and movement attacked from several directions
Madison, WI (PRWEB) September 9, 2006 --- Three professors who are members of Scholars for 9/11 Truth have been threatened with the loss of their positions for their research and teaching about the events of 9/11. Other attacks are coming from national magazines, such as TIME and U.S. NEWS, which have cover-stories this week suggesting that those who believe 9/11 involved a conspiracy may need psychological counseling. In addition, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Popular Mechanics have published pieces intended to bolster the official account of 9/11.
“This flurry of activity suggests that the government is becoming desperate in its efforts to keep the truth about 9/11 from the American people,” said James H. Fetzer, the founder and co-chair of the society. “But I don’t think it’s working.” Fetzer finds attacks on faculty members, including Kevin Barrett, a humanities instructor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Bill Woodward, a professor of psychology at the University of New Hampshire, and Steven Jones, a physics professor at Brigham Young University and the society’s co-chair, especially disturbing.
“According to the government, 9/11 is ‘the pivotal event of the 21st century,’ which changed everything”, he observed. “So it obviously deserves to be studied. College and universities are the institutions that undertake the study of significant historical events. The very idea that faculty should not be studying the events of 9/11 verges on the absurd,” he remarked. “And since the official account-that the events of 9/11 involved 19 Islamic fundamentalists hijacking four commercial airliners and perpetrating terrorist acts under control of a man in a cave in Afghanistan-involves a conspiracy, it is impossible to study 9/11 without dealing with conspiracy theories.”
Fetzer thinks the administration wants to suppress serious research on 9/11 because the official account cannot withstand scrutiny. “What the government has told us is just fine if you are willing to believe impossible things,” he observed. “Its truth requires violating laws of physics and engineering that cannot be violated and cannot be changed.” He offered a recent piece from NIST that attempts to resolve “frequently asked questions” as an illustration. “We have posted it on our web site at st911.org along with several critiques. I invite anyone to review that exchange to determine if the official account has any basis in science. It does not.”
An article from Popular Mechanics that has been turned into a book doesn’t fare any better, he observed. Since there is no objective foundation for the official account, there is no ground to suggest that skeptics of the official account need psychological counseling. “Rationality is the tendency to accept, reject, and hold-in-suspense beliefs on the basis of logic and evidence,’” Fetzer stated. “Given what we know now, those who continue to defend the government’s account are the ones whose beliefs cannot be justified by logic and evidence, not the critics. The situation abounds with ironies.”
“Sometimes I wonder if the general public realizes the government has been lying to us about 9/11 from the beginning.” He cites the recent acknowledgment from the FBI that it has “no hard evidence” connecting Osama bin Laden to 9/11 and the President’s response during a press conference that Saddam Hussein had “nothing” to do with 9/11. Only this week a Senate Intelligence Committee report explained that Saddam not only was not collaborating with bin Laden but opposed him. “These were reasons we were given for going to war,” he said. “If the government has been lying about them, we already know the government has been lying about 9/11.”
Scholars, a non-partisan society of students, faculty and experts dedicated to exposing falsehoods and revealing truths about 9/11, includes physicists, mechanical engineers, civil engineers, pilots, and aeronautical engineers among its members. “We have no funds and no budget but are doing this because we believe the American people are entitled to know the truth about their own history. Even I find it difficult to believe that the American government could have attacked the American people and killed 3,000 civilians to promote its political agenda, but that is where the evidence leads.”
Contact information:
James H. Fetzer, Ph.D.
Founder and Co-Chair
Scholars for 9/11 Truth
(608) 835-2707 (home)
http://www.d.umn.edu/~jfetzer/
http://www.scholarsfor911truth.org (st911.org
The author has it precisely backwards. The ideology of the enemy is based on a refusal to reconcile Islam with modernity, and it leads them to attack the West because they (correctly) believe that Western cultural and economic influence will impel Islamic societies to make such adaptations.
Thus, the correct term for them is "Islamic Fundamentalists".
I guess the public announcement by Osama that the raids were much more successful that he had anticipated do not mean anything? The author of this offal is a MOONBAT at the minimum but most likely a bloody damn liar.
What I don't understand is why anyone thinks the Iranian Monkey and te rest of the IslamoWhackos are not correctly representing Islam.
Because it doesn't.
There are Muslim members of this board who hold the same patriotic and conservative political views as you. Yet, they would consider themselves "subjects of Islam".
Worldwide, such Muslims are clearly a minority -- perhaps no more than 10% of Islam's billion-and-a-half constituency. Similarly, the Islamofascists are also a minority within Islam -- probably no bigger than a minority than those who value freedom and democratic institutions.
The remaining 80% represent the Islamic equivalent of what some on this board refer to as the "sheeple". While a much larger segment of society than in the U.S., in Islam, as in the U.S., that means uninformed and largely ignorant -- neither a committed libertarian nor necessarily a radical.
These Islamic "sheeple" are "up for grabs". Bin Laden understands this -- recall his "stronger horse" analogy? And so do Bush and Blair -- who have carefully avoided making war on Islam or the national populations. Instead, they have made war rather specifically on a.) the Taliban and then b.) Saddam Hussein.
That this approach can achieve success is obvious: Electoral participation in Iraq (and Afghanistan) topped 70%. The "sheeple" who are "up for grabs" responded to the opportunity.
Why make enemies of a billion-and-half Muslims when you don't have to in order to win?
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