PING!
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....
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.
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.
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 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.
Nailed It!
Moral Clarity BUMP !
This ping list is not author-specific for articles I'd like to share. Some for the perfect moral clarity, some for provocative thoughts; or simply interesting articles I'd hate to miss myself. (I don't have to agree with the author all 100% to feel the need to share an article.) I will try not to abuse the ping list and not to annoy you too much, but on some days there is more of the good stuff that is worthy of attention. You can see the list of articles I pinged to lately on my page.
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The problem that most Westerners do not understand, and apparently neither does Mr. Warren, is that in Islam. there is NO differentiation between the political and the spiritual.
Good article, unexpected ending, but makes sense. I almost laughed out loud at the last paragraph which would be hard to explain at 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."
Amen to that and they all need a severe a$$ kicking!
(No more Olmert! No more Kadima! No more Oslo! )
bump
We need a Churchill for this Age.
"We won't know what trouble is, until the little men replace them." Actually, the contrast of leadership from Bush to the feckless degeneracy of the previous eight-year sleaze merchant and his sycophancy who soiled the Oval Office and Oval Office sink IS QUITE stark and bodes an education when the little men who worship the previous degenerate and defended his criminal, degenerate, and immoral behavior return to power over us ... since they defended and gave approval to his degeneracy, we can know they will behave at least as badly, never as morally as President Bush. Their current lie campaign undermining the war is also an educational tool, for adults.
You know, Tolik, between this, the broader culture wars, all the criticism of the president's efforts to protect us from catastrophe, and all the efforts to undermine American tradition and civilization, at some point, when can we say that we can no longer consider people in this 5th column as fellow Americans, as we've traditionally thought of the term. To me, they're as much foreigners as anyone in China -- their thinking and character is at least as alien to me, irredemably and irreperably so. I know Romanians abroad with whom I have more in common, and who have more love of America's culture and tradition, than so many libs. As far as I'm concerned, America today is at least two different countries masquerading as one. The big question is when and how the two will be reconciled, and at what cost -- or whether they can be.