Sunday, February 22, 2015

Comments of the Day

Mark Steyn:
"So please don't insult Neville Chamberlain by comparing him to Obama. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, because conspiracies are generally a comforting illusion: the real problem with Obama is that the citizens of the global superpower twice elected him to office. Yet one way to look at the current "leader of the free world" is this:

If he were working for the other side, what exactly would he be doing differently?

...in between such eccentric side spectacles as Marie Harf, star of the hilarious new comedy Geopolitically Blonde, explaining her jobs-for-jihadis program, and the new hombre in charge of the planet's mightiest military machine having his woman felt up on camera by Joe Biden. Now there's a message to send to the misogynists of Burqastan about what happens when you let the missuses out of their body bags."

And Steyn quotes Roger Kimball:
"ISIL is not 'Islamic.'" Really? Was the Ayatollah Khomeini "Islamic?" How about Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Erdogan: is he "Islamic"? A few years ago, Erdogan told the world that the phrase "moderate Islam" is "ugly" because "Islam is Islam." Democracy, he said, is just an express stop on the train whose destination is Islam...

The Saudis, the biggest and richest Sunni nation? They torture bloggers for "insulting Islam," stone adulteresses, maim thieves, and treat women like chattel. Do they represent Islam?

... If the Islamic State isn't "true Islam", is the Taliban, our "partners for peace" in Aghanistan? Is "true Islam" the Iranian mullahs, our "partners for peace" in the Persian Gulf and beyond? How about the Houthi? They're our Iranian partners for peace's partners for peace in Yemen, and they were awfully sporting to let our diplomats flee without beheading them."

... "Islam has been woven into the fabric of our country since its founding," says the President. You might think that Islam has been entirely irrelevant to "the fabric of our country" for its first two centuries, and you might further think that Islam, being self-segregating, tends not to weave itself into anybody's fabric but instead tends to unravel it - as it's doing in, say, Copenhagen, where 500 mourners turned up for the funeral of an ISIS-supporting Jew-hating anti-free-speech murderer.

But President Obama knows better than you. So he organized a summit dedicated to creating and promoting a self-invented phantom enemy. Conveniently enough, the main problem with "violent extremists" is that its principal victims are Muslims. No, no, I don't mean the thousands of Muslims being slaughtered, beheaded, burned alive, raped, sold into sex slavery, etc, etc, in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Nigeria, and so on. The Muslims most at risk are right here in America. Just ask Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson:

"We in the administration and the government should give voice to the plight of Muslims living in this country and the discrimination that they face. And so I personally have committed to speak out about the situation that very often people in the Muslim community in this country face. The fact that there are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world and the Islamic faith is one about peace and brotherhood."
This final point is perhaps the most important observation of all:
"I have quoted before my old friend Theodore Dalrymple on the purposes of lies in totalitarian societies:

In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.

We are at war with a depraved enemy, but we cannot be allowed to assert our moral superiority even to head-choppers, rapists, slavers and immolators. Thus the priority of Barack ("Hey, how 'bout those Crusades?") Obama has been to undermine our sense of probity, and make us not merely equivalent to but worse than our enemies. That was the purpose of this last week of Official Lies."

The perpetual liars of this administration are convinced that they can change reality to reflect their lies, if they can repeat them often enough and loud enough. Note that nearly 50% of the US population now approves of Obama again. Perhaps the nation was truly destroyed without us even noticing the degree of its intellectual and moral rot.

Read the whole thing. This is one of Steyn's best articles.

5 comments:

Robert Coble said...

PART I:

"Islam has been woven into the fabric of our country since its founding," says the President.

The statement is factually true, but is another example of Islamic kitman.

What does the U.S. Marine hymn have in it?

From the Halls of Montezuma
To the shores of Tripoli;
We fight our country's battles
In the air, on land, and sea;


The line "To the shores of Tripoli" refers to the First Barbary War, and specifically the Battle of Derna in 1805.

Link: Marines' Hymn

So, you ask, what's the connection between the United States and its founding, and Islam?

Glad you asked!

Let's consult Wikipedia:

Link: Barbary pirates

Piratical activity by Muslim populations had been known in the Mediterranean since at least the 9th century and the short-lived Emirate of Crete. Despite the animosity generated by the Crusades, the level of Muslim pirate activity was relatively low. Instead, in the 13th and 14th centuries pirates from Christian states, particularly from Catalonia, were a constant threat to merchants who traded by sea. It was not until the late 14th century that Tunisian corsairs became enough of a threat to provoke a Franco-Genoese attack on Mahdia in 1390, also known as the "Barbary Crusade". Morisco exiles of the Reconquista and Maghreb pirates added to the numbers, but it was not until the expansion of the Ottoman Empire and the arrival of the privateer and admiral Kemal Reis in 1487 that the Barbary corsairs became a true menace to shipping from European Christian nations.

. . .

During the American Revolution, the pirates attacked American ships. But, on December 20, 1777, Morocco's Sultan Mohammed III declared that the American merchant ships would be under the protection of the sultanate and could thus enjoy safe passage into the Mediterranean and along the coast. The Moroccan-American Treaty of Friendship stands as the U.S.'s oldest non-broken friendship treaty with a foreign power. In 1787 Morocco had been the first nation to recognize the new United States.


. . .

Until the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, British treaties with the North African states protected American ships from the Barbary corsairs. Morocco, which in 1777 was the first independent nation to publicly recognize the United States, in 1784 became the first Barbary power to seize an American vessel after the nation achieved independence. The Barbary threat led directly to the United States founding the United States Navy in March 1794. While the United States did secure peace treaties with the Barbary states, it was obliged to pay tribute for protection from attack. The burden was substantial: in 1800 payments in ransom and tribute to the Barbary states amounted to 20% of United States government's annual expenditures.[23] The United States conducted the First Barbary War in 1801 and the Second Barbary War in 1815 to gain more favorable peace terms; it ended the payment of tribute. But, Algiers broke the 1805 peace treaty after two years, and refused to implement the 1815 treaty until compelled to do so by Britain in 1816.

Robert Coble said...

PART II:

And now to the really interesting part, where the United States agrees to subject nation status under control of Muslim states by paying tribute to them.

Link: America and the Barbary Pirates: An International Battle Against an Unconventional Foe

After the United States won its independence in the treaty of 1783, it had to protect its own commerce against dangers such as the Barbary pirates. As early as 1784 Congress followed the tradition of the European shipping powers and appropriated $80,000 as tribute to the Barbary states, directing its ministers in Europe, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, to begin negotiations with them. Trouble began the next year, in July 1785, when Algerians captured two American ships and the dey of Algiers held their crews of twenty-one people for a ransom of nearly $60,000.

So the conclusion in the Muslim mind is that since the United States was once under subjugation to the Muslim world, and had acknowledged that status through tribute payments, in accordance with Islamic law ("once Islamic, always Islamic"), the United States is merely a rebellious subjugated state, and has failed to pay its rightful tribute for all these years.

Perhaps we should add our delinquent tribute payments (adjusted for inflation after 250 years) to the US national debt. Perhaps that would make more sense than spending many more billions in failed "Crusades." After all, the Muslims practice "the religion of peace" and just want to "protect" us from all those who would attack us. Those putative attackers would be those nasty Christian and Jewish nations who have not been civilized, er, subjugated under Islam, I suppose.

Here's an inflation calculator:

Link:
Inflation Calculator


If we just assume that the Muslims are not "greedy, rich bastards" like Christians (usurious pigs) and especially Jews (usurious dogs) and don't condone charging interest, then let's suppose that we just send them the equivalent of the original $80,000 for every year since 1783. That would be close to $1.8 BILLION per year X 232 years or about $418 BILLION.

HEY! That comes out to be less than the 2015 US DoD budget of $495.6 BILLION!

Just think: by contracting out the Defense Department, we can kill two birds with one stone:

(1) We get an immediate first-year savings of $77 BILLION, which could be turned over to the State Department for disbursing through the "Jobs for Jihadis" program.

(2) We no longer have to spend over half a TRILLION dollars for defense EVERY YEAR. Instead, we get off with the bargain-basement price of $1.8 BILLION per year.

After all, our esteemed Dragon fang has assured us that if we will just accept our status as dhimmis, and pay the jizya, we will be protected by the Muslims - and that comes with a money-back guarantee!

Just think of the grand government programs that could be funded in the US with an additional $500 BILLION per year for the politicians to squander, er, redistribute.

Back to the original post:

And now you see the obvious and direct connection (the "factual truth") of the connection to Islam from the founding of the United States of America.

It is left as an exercise for Dragon fang to explain the kitman involved.

Robert Coble said...

Correction on the link to the inflation calculator:

Link:
Inflation Calculator

Robert Coble said...

Another link correction:

Link: America and the Barbary Pirates: An International Battle Against an Unconventional Foe

Stan said...

Hmm. That Obama is some Islamic historian and tactician! And money saver! And to think that I was skeptical...