Posted on 09/13/2006 9:00:08 AM PDT by MNJohnnie
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1700725/posts
The enemy within -- and it's not who you think (David Warren nails Islamofascism's 5th column)
Ottawa Citizen - Canada ^ | September 13, 2006 | David Warren
Posted on 09/13/2006 10:43:18 AM CDT 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.
ping
LOL...libertarians have a sense of humor...Oh, to my suprise!
Classic Tony, calm cool collected, never raised his voice. Perfect delivery.
And on the way they're affecting law with the ACLU and the Islamic Lawyer Organizations. If you knew the increase of muslims in law schools over the last ten years...
They took a poll of Detroit mosque in a study in 2004:
On page 37 of the report is this:
Mosque participants were asked, whether they agree or disagree with the statement, "Shari'ah should be the law of the land in Muslim countries?" Shari'ah refers to Islamic law.
Apply Islamic Law in Muslim Lands
Strongly Agree — 59%
Somewhat Agree — 22%
Somewhat Disagree — 8%
Strongly Disagree — 3%
Don't Know — 8%
If accurate, this is extremely disturbing. It means, in effect, that most survey participants oppose democracy in Iraq and elsewhere in the Islamic world, and want to see Sharia oppression of women and non-Muslim dhimmis instituted throughout Muslim lands.
It also raises questions, unanswered by the survey, about what kind of government these survey participants would like ultimately to see in the United States.
But this is what the press sold it as:
Bagby’s study received fair media coverage and some headlines dutifully reflected the official line:
• Detroit Free Press: “Muslims' goals: Be active, be moderate.”
• Detroit News: “Metro Muslims eschew radicalism: Study shows most hold moderate views, want to integrate.”
• Scripps Howard News Service: “Survey Finds Muslims are Moderates.”
In addition, before the study’s release, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the leading militant Islamic organization in the United States, trumpeted the results on its website; and its spokesman, Ibrahim Hooper, lost no time exploiting the alleged results of Bagby’s study. One article describes him pointing “to a new survey of the views of mosque leaders and congregants in Detroit … as an example of the fundamental moderation of U.S. Muslims.”
---Moderate? 81%?
True, but she probably thought it! LOL!
LOL! I was thinking of the red nose and stupid grin...
Someone should tell Rush about this story too.
ping
I noticed that you're a member of the Delaware Conservative Bloggers Alliance, when I looked up someone I know from my church who is a member of the alliance. ;-)
What did she call them, creeps?
Radical moslems will kill you. Moderate moslems will just let it happen.
Did everyone read #520?
Not when she was there with Moran, but she did call them something when she was talking to Rush. I'll check it out on 24/7 soon.
Two weeks after telling police that her son had been snatched from his crib, Melinda Duckett found herself reeling in an interview with TV's famously prosecutorial Nancy Grace. Before it was over, Grace was pounding her desk and loudly demanding to know: "Where were you? Why aren't you telling us where you were that day?" A day after the taping, Duckett, 21, shot herself to death, deepening the mystery of what happened to the boy.
CNN's Nancy Grace: 'I do not feel our show is to blame'...
I have always detested Nancy Grace. She claims to be a lawyer. Yet, she blames people with no evidence. Now we have a death. I lay the blame on her, She has blood on her hands. Grace is despicable human trash.
Yes, they're a good bunch of folks!
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