O Dwindling Town Of Bethlehem

UPDATED at bottom of post.

The population of Bethlehem used to be over 90% Christian. Now, it 35% Christian and 65% Muslim.

Why?

The media often tries to blame Israel. Here's a quote from the New York Times, for instance:


In the town where Christians believe Christ was born, the Christians are leaving. Four years of violence, an economic free fall and the Israeli separation barrier have all contributed to the hardships facing Palestinian Christians in Bethlehem, one of the largest concentrations of Christians in the region.


But if it is Israel's fault, why is it that the Muslim population continues to surge? Why is it that Christians leave, while Muslims stay and procreate?

Well, WND asked a Christian leader from Bethlehem. Here's what he had to say:


"All this talk about Israel driving Christians out and causing pain is nonsense," a Bethlehem Christian community leader told WND. "You want to know what is at play here, just come throughout the year and see the intimidation from the Muslims. They have burned down our stores, built mosques in front of our churches, stole our real estate and took away our rights. Women have been raped and abducted. So don't tell me about Israel. It's the Muslims."


What do you know? Someguy posted about Bethlehem today too. He recounts the story of how Hamas, who is in charge of Bethlehem, plans to institute the Jizya tax, effectively declaring all non-Muslims second-class citizens.

Then, Someguy makes a brilliant observation:

Here's a question for my readers: Does it strike you as strange that the same people who say that the joint Iraqi-Coalition effort to create a democracy will simply fail at best (if it doesn't result in something worse than Saddam's regime), are the exact same ones who say that a group of people who will not even make the effort to stop the terrorists among them from firing on a kindergarten can live in peace with Israel?

Wow, a devastating question, counselor. Or, should I say, Consigliore?

;-)

The Mistery of the Spanish frigate

This is Spanish frigate Alvaro de Bazan (F-101) , the most modern frigate of Europe. Ita has Aegis system incorporated.

Nobody would have said that it was going to be in the Gulf just now in Operation "Enduring Freedom".

Well, it is.

This Mr. Zapatero, the pacifist....


Oh and, HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL.

We Hold This Truth To Be Self-Evident: Sharia Is The Opposite Of Freedom

65% of Palestinians support terror attacks against the United States and 80% want Sharia law instituted in their land.

Ok, it's time to shut down their hopes and dreams, my friends. Such ideas should not be allowed to turn themselves into an official state:


A poll carried out in the Palestinian Authority shows 65% support for Al Qaeda terror attacks on the United States and European countries - the biggest donors to the PA. The poll comes at a time when US and European funding of the Palestinian Authority is at an all-time high.

With elections due to be held next month and the Hamas terror group gaining significantly in municipal elections and polls, the survey further illustrates the desire of a majority of PA Arabs to establish an Islamic state, similar to Iran.

A whopping 79.9% of Palestinians would like the PA to follow Shari’a - Islamic religious law. Included in the figure are 11.3% of the respondents, who would like to see Shari’a supplemented by the laws of a PA Legislature.

“What is striking is the willingness of Palestinians to turn against even the Western countries upon whom they are so totally dependent in order to progress,” said Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) Director Itamar Marcus.

“Palestinians are not in direct conflict with the US, and certainly have counted on the Europeans as active allies. And yet an overwhelming majority desire to see Europeans and Americans killed by a religion-based terror organization.”


If we were to allow such ideas to become the foundation of a new state, it would mean we do not believe in our own Declaration of Independence:


We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

Islam

I would like to call out every Infidel, as the War on us, The Infidel, has been declared, long ago.

There are many sites that make available quotes from the Koran and other Muslim books, and we must use them.

I have a cross posted at The Fu2rman, but I want to give some other great sources.

FaithFreedom

Prophet of Doom

There appears to be a lot of hatred in Islam - if you want to read the good stuff read here . Unfortunately our jihadist friends rather prefer these bits.

Edited by j0nz

India to build 2,500-mile barrier to rival Great Wall of China; U.S. also building one

Villagers on Bangladesh border: fence will cut us off from homeland

Indian officials, alarmed by increase in terrorist attacks, plan to fence off West Bengal as part of little-known project to erect steel barrier along 2,500-mile border with Muslim neighbour. Problem India faces: 100,000 of its citizens live on wrong side of fence's path. "Entire villages, schools, temples & mosques lie in what will become no man’s land...”

US Also Building Security Barrier at Mexican Border

With the bill recently approved by the US House of Representatives, 700 mile fence to be built along US-Mexico border.

The Take A Pen! organization has a campaign to remove all the fences in the world!

Read the Details

Infidel Babe Of The Week

Imagine, if you are a Jihadi, being killed by such a babe. Oh, the humiliation.

The intolerance of anything different is getting way out of hand. As if I am surprised.

PALU, Indonesia (Reuters) - A suspected bomb blast rocked a crowded market selling pork in eastern Indonesia on Saturday, killing six people and wounding 45, local media reported. ...

Check out Patrick's post on his blog.

Some articles on Newsweek

I have posted in my blog some articles that have appeared on Newsweek this month that (I think) are very interesting. Some of them are very long -as this post, for which I apologize-.

About the role of women in Al Qaeda:

All the alarms in the West went abruptly off when MURIEL DEGAGUES blew herself off in Iraq.

As an adolescent, she dabbled in drugs, smoked, drank heavily and sometimes ran away from home. “One time I had to go 170km to get her back from the Ardennes,” M Degauque said. She was more interested in boyfriends than studies. “I don’t know how many of them she had.” She found jobs as a waitress and a baker’s assistant, but was accused of stealing from the till. Tragedy then struck the family when Jean-Paul was killed in a road accident.
Muriel moved from Charleroi to Brussels, which has a large Islamic community. She married and divorced a Turkish man, and had a long relationship with an Algerian, who converted her to Islam in 2001. Three years ago she married Issam Goris, who was born in Belgium to Moroccan parents, and followed him to Morocco.

“They told us that they had a house in Morocco and some horses, and a Mercedes and three motorbikes. We never found out whether it was true,” said her mother, who blames Goris for brainwashing her daughter. When Muriel returned to Belgium, her mother no longer recognised her. She had become “more Muslim than Muslim”, she said. “The religion was totally ingrained in her. She only lived for that.”
Initially, she wore a hijab, or Islamic veil, but soon started wearing the head-to-toe chador that leaves the face visible. Finally she wore a burka. She became ever more estranged from her parents. “When we saw them, they imposed their rules. We were at home, but my husband had to eat in the kitchen with Issam while the women ate together in the sitting room. There was no question of putting on the TV or opening a beer,” M Degauque said.

Two articles in Newsweek are about the role that women play nowadays in Al-Qaeda and in Islam:

Never before had any branch of Al Qaeda sent a woman on a suicide mission. Since female bombers first appeared in Lebanon two decades ago, their ranks have come mainly from secular Arab nationalist groups, from Kurdish rebels in Turkey and the non-Muslim Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam fighting the government of Sri Lanka. Only in the past few years did the Palestinian "army of roses" carry out terrorist attacks against Israelis, and the "black widows" strike at the enemies of Chechnya's rebels. Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda in Iraq, Al Qaeda and its offshoots around the world held back. But as he has before, Zarqawi broke the taboos. His strategy is to create images of horror, "to look like he has more capability than he truly has," says Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, the Coalition forces spokesman in Baghdad. Zarqawi recruits where he can, he exploits whom he can and he attacks the softest of targets to get the peculiar kind of publicity he craves. Women are his new weapon of choice.

(...)

The West's exposure to Muslim women is largely based on Islam's most extreme cases of oppression: Taliban-dominated Afghanistan, Wahhabi-ruled Saudi Arabia and postrevolutionary Iran. Under those regimes, women were and are ordered to cover. Many Afghan women are forbidden to attend school, and no Saudi woman is allowed to drive. Yet despite the spread of ultraconservative versions of Islam over the past few decades, these societies are not the norm in the Muslim world. In Egypt, female cops patrol the streets. In Jordan, women account for the majority of students in medical school. And in Syria, courtrooms are filled with female lawyers. "Women are out working, in every profession, and even expect equal pay," says Leila Ahmed, Harvard Divinity School professor and author of "Women and Gender in Islam." "Though the atmosphere in Muslim countries is becoming more restrictive, no matter how conservative things get they can't put the genie back in the bottle."

Still, Muslim women are feeling like pawns in a political game: jihadists portray them as ignorant lambs who need to be protected from outside forces, while the United States considers them helpless victims of a backward society to be saved through military intervention. "Our empowerment is being exploited by men," says Palestinian Muslim Rima Barakat. "It's a policy of hiding behind the skirts of women. It's dishonorable no matter who's doing it." Scholars such as Khaled Abou El Fadl, an expert on Islamic law and author of "The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam From the Extremists," says this is an age-old problem. "Historically the West has used the women's issue as a spear against Islam," he says. "It was raised in the time of the Crusades, used consistently in colonialism and is being used now. Muslim women have grown very, very sensitive about how they're depicted on either side."

As I have posted in my Spanish blog: looks like the women are mistreated in more places than in the countries that they mention in this article. Nobody mentions than in Australia, all the riots took place when a rapist was being judged:

The rapist in question is a Muslim of Pakistani origins. He was accused of several rapes. This man, who was known only as MSK by the newspapers, had began his rapès four days after he arrived in Australian soil.

In front of the court he even reprimanded one of his victims, a girl aged only 14, because he began to deny with her head as she was hearing the accused.

The reality is that the girl was right to move his head, unhappy of what she was hearing.

After swearing on the Koram, MSK declared in front of the Court that if he had raped 4 girls -one of them aged only 13 years- was because the girls did not had any right to say NO:

"They were not covering themselves with the veil, and that is just the same as inviting men to go to bed with them”.

MSK is condemned by now for inciting his three youngest brothers to rape in group to another 2 girls in 2002. He said in his defence that the cultural context was the culprit of the rapings.

The problem is that it is true as you can read in this article in Frontpagemag.com.

But what astonishes me are these words that are quoted by fjordman when treating the group rapes:

The article quoted a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo (note: her name is Unni Wikan) as saying that "Norwegian women must take their share of responsibility for these rapes" because Muslim men found their manner of dress provocative. The professor's conclusion was not that Muslim men living in the West needed to adjust to Western norms, but the exact opposite: "Norwegian women must realize that we live in a multicultural society and adapt themselves to it."

For me, at least, is much more terrible than someone in our own societies think that women (or the raped in general) have their share of guilt in a rape than someone who is an outsider and from Pakistan. The question that arises is: what measures should we apply to this people? (In Spain, a survey -this is a Spanish paper- has shown that 60% of Spanish nationals think there are too many inmigrants, 84,7% that only inmigrants with a job contract should be allowed to enter the country, 79,1% that the inmigrants that commit very hard crimes should be expelled, while 56,1% think that they should be expelled when they commit any crime).

About France: They continue to talk about the "racism" in France:

For now, at least, the fires have died out—but an acrid bitterness still hangs in the air. Ask those on the football pitch behind the high wire fences of Montfermeil. Year after year, coach Kaddor Slimane, a son of Algerian immigrants who grew up in neighboring projects, has seen his teams win their league's sportsmanship award. Yet what does their good behavior mean in the "outside" world, where they are seen through the lens of limitations and stereotypes? "The French are racist," he says. "They just don't want to admit it." Life in the projects isn't so bad when you are a child, says Amad, a 24-year-old community activist who declined to give his last name for fear of racist attacks. "But once you reach a certain age, you're fed up. There's nothing to do except play soccer or hang out," in voiceless exile from the "other" France.

I suggest (as I do in my blog) that you also read this other article: Excuser les rioters.

I don’t know about you, but when-ever I’m out of work, I firebomb a few cars.

"Rage of French Youth Is a Fight for Recognition," read the headline in a Washington Post story. The New York Times’ Craig Smith informed readers that in France "a significant portion of the population has yet to accept the increasingly multiethnic makeup of the nation. Put simply, being French, for many people, remains a baguette-and-beret affair." No, don’t tell me the French actually expect these immi-grant families to assimilate? Incroy-able!

Smith argues that le rampage is roo-ted in "growing inequalities," "dis-crimination" and an "overly aggres-sive police presence in the country’s immigrant-heavy housing projects" -- which, of course, is why immigrant rioters have torched those symbols of inequality and discrimination, syna-gogues and churches, to shouts of "Allahu akbar!" (God is great!) .

About Mrs Anthrax release:

One thing Ammash said did stick in my memory. She stressed that Iraqis remained fiercely proud of their civilization despite decades of violence and deprivation. “This country is Mesopotamia. Ninety-nine percent of the American people don’t know the country they’ll soon be bombing is Mesopotamia,” she said. “This nation has been serving civilization for 6,000 years. We invented the first alphabet … every American who enjoys education owes that to us.”
(...)
When Ammash’s husband, Ahmed Makki Mohammed Saeed, told me in 2004 that he’d been “tortured” while being detained by U.S. authorities, I wasn’t sure whether to believe him. Revelations about U.S. abuses at Abu Ghraib prison had not yet surfaced. And his accounts sounded bizarre: being subjected to hours and hours of earsplitting American rap music laced with profanity and being doused with cold water, then forced to stand for hours in front of a freezing air-conditioner turned up full blast.
Still, the sheer weight of detail suggested to me that he wasn’t making it up. And subsequent tales of torture from other former detainees indicated that he might actually have been one of the luckier ones among them.

Wow, do you see what is implied in the article? They think that Ammash's husband was really tortured and that she is released because of that. (Well, at least is what I think...)

About renditions: it looks like the European governements knew what was happening or at least, they were just practicing the policy of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell". Hmmm, more hipocrisy.

About terrorism:
A Syrian was arrested over the Beirut Bomb that killed Tueni.
The last news on jihadism in Europe.

Plans to 'Top' 9/11 Strikes' (AFP) - - Three Algerians arrested in an anti-terrorist operation in southern Italy are suspected of being linked to a planned new series of attacks in the United States, interior minister Giuseppe Pisanu said Friday (12/23). The attacks would have targeted ships, stadiums or railway stations in a bid to outdo the September 11 2001 strikes by al-Qaeda in New York and Washington which killed about 2,700 people, Pisanu said. The Algerians are suspected of belonging to a cell established by the al-Qaeda linked Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat.

Spain Jails Six Accused of Aiding al-Qaeda (Reuters) - A Spanish judge has jailed six people on suspicion of recruiting Islamic radicals to send as suicide bombers or insurgents to Iraq, Chechnya or Kashmir, a court official said on Saturday (12/24). The six were among 16 people arrested in raids around Spain. Another two people surrendered after learning police were looking for them.

French Parliament OKs Anti-Terror Measures (AP) - France's parliament approved an anti-terrorism bill Thursday (12/22) that will boost the use of video surveillance and allow police more time to question terror suspects. The law will allow mosques, department stores and other potential targets to install surveillance cameras, and it will stiffen prison terms for terrorists and those providing support. It also will enable police to monitor people who travel to countries known to harbor terror training camps, and to extend the detention period for terror suspects from four days to up to six days.

Islamic Flat Earth News Bulletin!

Burton Lamb
by Ali Yayah
Islamic Flat Earth News

The Burton family of England, kidnapped recently by poor suffering Palestinian! People!, it is now known, have been eaten. Muslims, driven to madness by the constant bombardment of Zionist propaganda commercials advertising fast food take-aways, have plunged into a volcano of hatred and eaten the Burton family. The International Red Cross is shipping in Tums and Rolaids as part of an emergency airlift to relieve the further suffering of the Palestinian! People!, the only people on Earth who suffer. The U.N. is supervising the distribution of the medical supplies, and will grant further aid in the form of "bitters" for stomach ailments.

"It's a fuckin' tragedy," stormed one U.N. aid worker. "After all the suffering the Palestinian! People! have had to suffer, now they have to suffer this too. No one else suffers. It makes me want to kill the Jooooos."

We interviewed one of the cooks at the Feast of al-Bur tun and found this amazing story of Palestinian! People! suffering.

"First we cut their throats," said Haj Wadi Jebel, "to purify the infidel flesh; then we sauteed the chunks in a deep layer of olive oil seasoned with garlic and fennel. We used two whole cloves per kilogram for the light meat and four for the dark meat. Once we'd finished the saute, which seals in the juices, we spitted the meat and roasted the pieces over a low charcoal fire on the brazier until it was nicely cooked, a bit crusty on the outside, and tender at the bones. The eyes, brains, and unclean parts we fed to our women, but the better parts we had with rice and fuul, tomatoes, onions, and pita."

Then we rested for a while with our habibi's heads on our laps, stroking their fine faces and singing songs of paradise, until suddenly we felt ill, our bowels cramping, our suffering becoming intolerable. We cried out to Allah: 'Allah, have mercy on our bowels.' But Allah is all merciful, and our pain continued."

The problem, Haj Wadi Jebil explained, was the Zionist death rays beamed into the city of Gaza.

"We will defeat the Zionist plague and drive them into the sea," he said. We will ride giant spiders like those we saw on the television in Iraq, and the Zionists will all die, even if they hide behind rocks and trees. All we must do is rid ourselves of these terrible shits first, Allah willing."

France condemned the Zionist occupiers in the U.N. when word reached them. Said Guy Mange-Merd, head chef of the Sorbonne Academie du Bouffe: "The poor Palestinians! Peoples! have suffered enough. From now on, only the finest Burtons will be sent to Gaza to be prepared by our very own highest class graduands. In memories of the suffering Palestinians! Peoples! I have made this recipe I call Burton le Merd, in honour of myself and the suffering gourmands of Gaza."

The hated Zionists had no comment.

Palstinian! liberation fighters vowed to unleash a further stinking volcano of hatred in the direction of the Zionist entity in retaliation.


http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/

Infidel Howling At The Moon

Howl and howl. Howl at the top of your lungs. When we set off to battle continue to howl. Paint your face, your weapons, and your battlements. Be an otherworldly monster to your enemy.


Pamela says that friggin' ABC has made a deal with Iran to broadcast from their Axis of Evil craphole. Remember, of course, that CNN made a similar deal with Iraq. The deal was, they can broadcast, as long as they don't say anything bad about the dictator or his barbarity.

Really, we need to do ourselves a favor and not patronize ABC anymore.


Some dumb German chick was kidnapped by Iraqi terrorists and then released because the idiot German government thinks that all they need to do keep the terrorists from killing them is to feed them. (Memo to German government: That only makes the beasts stronger.)

So, what did the German hostage do when she was released? Naturally, she donned a burqa and ranted and raved on German TV:

... the rambling, incoherent nature of Osthoff’s answers. Even the heavily edited version (ZDF spokesman: “We wanted to protect Osthoff from herself.”) of the original 15-minute interview was barely comprehensible. Questions were left unanswered and at times Osthoff rambled off into non-sequiturs about how badly she had been treated by her landlord back in Germany. When asked how the kidnapping had been carried out, she was evasive, simply responding:

“I think these details are not interesting. That doesn’t interest anyone. Generally kidnappings are carried out quite violently. People watch a lot of television and realize perhaps that you don’t let yourself get abducted voluntarily.”

What do you think? You think she was really kidnapped? Or, is she in collusion with the Jihadis?

Hmm.


Hamas plans to institue a jizya tax on Christians in the place of Christ's birth.

Can you say "Abomination of Desolation?"


The United States Justice Department has launched an investigation into the leaks of Bush's spying operations.

Someone is busted big time.

You goin' down, baby. Treason anyone?


The Aryan Nations are joining forces with the Jihadis.


Hamas had a children's magazine, and it's telling the kiddies to take back Spain.

Maybe, next election the Spaniards can elect a Hamas member and get it over with, huh?


My man, Yaakov, at Dry Bones has a great cartoon about Spielberg's assassination of history in the movie Munich.


Iranian President Ahmadinejad has called for a commitee to be set up to prove the Holocaust never happened.

It's time to put a missile up that guys butt.


In the Christian world, we make sacrifices for our families. In the Islamic world, they sacrifice their families.

Nothing gets God angrier than the demon Moloch.

Good luck, Pakistan.


And, finally, let's end with some good news. An American kid, of Middle Eastern descent, ran off to Iraq because he wants to serve America and the interests of Democracy by doing immersion journalism. The Greatest Generation is now.

And, the Bush Administration is increasinly confident in Iraq's ability to govern itself. Troop reductions of 14% will happen by March, with another 25% to come by next fall.

More Disgusting Moonbat Nuttiness: "Citizens Against the Troops"

These "pro-peace" people are a nasty lot. Right Wing News reports on one of their websites. Here are a few quotes:

"Above are people from Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, protesting at a dead scumbag's funeral earlier this year. They are heroes, and make a valid point: Dead soldiers are a good thing!"

"The count of dead scumbags rises often. When the body count does rise, we celebrate American stupidity. Remember: A soldier who dies for his country still dies and another dude gets his bitch. We are citizens against the U.S. troops. Donald Rumsfeld is pledging that the number of troops in Iraq will be reduced, but does this mean that those scumbags will be kicked out of the military? Nope. They will continue to live the cushy life at the expense of the taxpayer. Over the holiday weekend, at least three scumbags died. Semper Cry!"

You can read the whole article about them at: Right Wing News.

Don't visit their site unless you have a strong stomach: Citizens Against the Troops. (Normally I would not post a link to a hate site such as this. In this case, however, I think that the more people that actually see how crazy these nutcases are, the better).

(Cross posted on A Deeper Look).

Those Academics Sure Do Love Fascists

[Also posted at Northern Virginiastan]

From Lee Kaplan's December 29, 2005 article "Georgetown's Jihad " (All emphases by Always On Watch):

Never let it be said that the American college educational system ever missed an opportunity to promote the aims of terrorists and their allies when it came to money. Stop the ISM has received notification that the Palestine Solidarity Movement (PSM), the name the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) uses for its member groups in the United States, is going to have its fifth annual conference at a major American university-this time Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

The following announcement was put out to ISM activists in the United States:

Palestine Solidarity Movement
Announcement

Fifth Annual Divestment Conference

("Fifth Annual National Student Conference of the Palestine Solidarity Movement")

Georgetown University

February 17 - 19, 2006

More information to come.

A quick call to President George DeGioia of Georgetown University netted no response or comment from his office or staff about the event. Another call placed to the campus office of communications to verify the event was actually scheduled was also met with no response. According to Fabiola Joubert in the campus Office of Communications, she could not confirm or deny the event and said she had no idea where to find a schedule of campus events for the Washington campus. She referred this reporter to Eric Smulson, campus press officer, who was "in meetings" and "unavailable."

The Palestine Solidarity Movement has held national conferences on major university campuses four out of the last five years, first at UC Berkeley, then U Michigan, Ohio State and Duke University. At the last conference held at Duke University in 2004, Huwaida Arraf, one of the PSM's main organizers, admitted that the Palestine Solidarity Movement works with Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, all illegal terrorist groups per the US state department. That particular event was also found to be an anti-Semitic hate fest which also produced articles in the campus newspaper later attacking Jews in America as a "privileged class." At the earlier event at U Michigan, chants of "Kill the Jews" were heard among the attendees. Divestment from Israel is a major theme, an attempt to hurt the Israeli population and force it to capitulate to PLO demands; in other words, an extension of the Arab boycott against Jews in the Middle East for having their own country. Public reaction to the 2004 Duke event no doubt made finding a venue for another conference difficult which might explain why there was no such conference held at a major university in 2005....

Georgetown's Arab studies department has always had an anti-Israel slant due to wealthy Saudi and Palestinian Arab donors. Middle East Studies professor John Esposito, who frequently speaks as an apologist for militant Islamic groups, is based at Georgetown. He heads Georgetown’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. That fits nicely with the new theme of the PSM...

One of those Saudi donors to Georgetown is the omnipresent Prince Alaweed Bin Talal. Bin Talal was the Saudi sheik who accused Israel of "slaughtering the Palestinians" as he offered a ten million dollar check to former New York Mayor Rudy Giuiliani at Ground Zero of the World Trade Center disaster. Giuliani refused to accept the check. Bin Talal is one of the major financiers of Hamas, having contributed over 400 million dollars to date to the terrorist organization.

That Georgetown would look the other way comes as no surprise. One of Bin Talal's "gifts" to Georgetown University was the second largest one in the University's history-20 million dollars. No doubt after Duke, the PSM had trouble finding an American university willing to host such a venue again, but money talks and Georgetown listens....

Go here to enable links in the article.

Destroying The Past One Life At A Time

MALAYSIA: COURT REJECTS HINDU WIDOW'S CLAIM TO BODY

Kuala Lumpur, 28 Dec. (AKI) - A Indian Malaysian man, M. Moorthy, a mountaineering hero in his country, has been buried under Islamic rites after his Hindu widow lost a court battle on Wednesday about his religious identity. A High Court in Malaysia ruled that it could not override the Islamic or Shariah courts in matters of religious conversion. Moorthy's widow S. Kaliammal has been involved in a tug-of-war with the religious authorities over who should bury her husband, who died last Tuesday after seven years of paralysis.

M. Moorthy, 36, was a Hindu when he became Malaysia's mountaineering hero in 1997 after he completed a climb up Mount Everest together with the first Malaysian expedition to attempt the feat.

He was paralysed during army training in 1998 and slipped into a coma last month, at which time his former colleagues told Kaliammal that her husband converted to Islam in October 2004.

When he died last week, the state's Islamic officials and his family's supporters fought over the body and a Shariah court upheld the claim by Moorthy's army colleagues that he had become a Muslim last year.

His family was not allowed to appear before the Shariah court to dispute the conversion because they are not Muslims. So they turned to a civil High Court who eventually agreed with the government lawyers that the civil court had no jurisdiction over the case.

According to a report in the Malaysian daily The Star, Lawyer S. Kanesalingam, who appeared for the Malaysian Consultative Council of Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism and Sikhism, argued that the Shariah Court had no power to make an order on the case because Moorthy was not a Muslim. He cited Kaliammal's affidavit in which she said that her husband was not professing Islam; that he had carried the palkudam (milk pot) during the Hindu festival of Thaipusam this year and that he was consuming alcohol and non-halal food.

Does this sound like a sincere convert Muslim to you, dear reader?

I'll tell you what it sounds like to me: That he was "converted" to Islam at his death. He was a national hero in a Muslim-majority nation; a man lauded for an indisputible act of skill and daring. In the Muslim mind, a non-Muslim cannot possibly be capable of such deeds.

And so M. Moorthy joins a long list of names that includes Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Jesus and Mary--people who had to be made into Muslims by Muslims because of Islam's utter incapacity to produce people who impress by being the first, the best or, most tellingly, inspire men by their moral rectitude, sacrifice, and service to others to conduct their lives in a like manner.

And speaking of the carpenter from Nazareth, Meryl Yourish isolated another strain of the same disease in a Christmas Day post on this story:

You like? You read rest at Mystery Achievement. You like rest.

The Mind Of Mencia

I was cruising the cable stations tonight, and I happened across the Comedy Central show, Mind of Mencia, featuring comedian Carlos Mencia. In the skit I saw, he was dressed in a black burqa, doing a standup comedy routine.

Yes!

Here's an excerpt, as I recall it:


"I wake up in the morning, and here's my routine to get ready.

Should I wear the black sheet, the black sheet, or the black sheet?"


The camera runs around the room of guffawing Arab men in turbans and robes.

Then, Mencia says,


"My husband is so fat ..."


The crowd of guffawing Arab men in turbans responds,


"How fat is he?"

"He's so fat he needed two bombs to blow himself up."


Oh man, I can't stop laughing. Maybe, Mencia should be the first to win the Golden Balls Award.

Infidel Humor

Introducing The Astute Blogger

The Astute Blogger is one of the first sites I read every morning, and one of the last I look at before I head off to TV land in the latter evening. Reliapundit, the Astute Blogger himself, is a bit of a lone wolf, as far as I can tell. So, it was with profound fear and trembling that I asked him to contribute to our new blogventure here (imagine the Tinmans knees knocking as he approaches the Great and Powerful Oz to ask for a heart.).

Well, I'm glad to say, he has authorized me to use and abuse his posts anyway I want to here at the Infidel Blog Alliance. However, I have to do the posting myself. In other words, I don't get to have the Reliapundit brand name officially associated with IBA.

The thing is, I know he has his reasons for dealing with things this way, and I respect them, so forgive me the jokey manner of this introduction, but I'm just trying to retain a little dignity here. I don't want anyone to think I am Reliapundit's blogbitch.

:)

Anyway, ladies and gentleman, I am pleased to introduce to you, the Astute Blogger. In this installment he is discussing why it is so incredibly stupid of the Germans to appease the Jihadonazis:


MORE PROOF THAT APPEASEMENT IS ALWAYS AN INEFFECTIVE POLICY
Last week, Germany released a jihadoterrorist who had been convicted of murdering a US citizen - and member of the US armed forces - during an airliner hijacking, kidnapping and tense 17 day stand-off in 1985. (More HERE.)

SO WHAT HAPPENS NEXT? DO THE GERMANS GET ANY GOODWILL FROM THE JIHADOTERRORISTS FOR THIS ACT OF APPEASEMENT? No. Of course not. THEY GET MORE TERROR:

BERLIN, Germany (CNN) -- A former German deputy foreign minister and his family are missing in Yemen, German officials said Wednesday, and there are reports that they were kidnapped.

WHY DO YOU ALWAYS GET MORE TERROR BY APPEASING TERRORISTS? Because you let the terrorist know IT WORKS ON YOU! IOW: The Germans are getting what all appeasers get.

I hope this guy and his family are rescued, AND I HOPE THE GERMANS - AND ALL OTHER APPEASERS - LEARN A LESSON: we are fighting a ruthless enemy who must be utterly defeated.

The Concept of Comfort

[Following is my debut contribution to this blog. This is a typically lengthy piece. Further contributions will come out as short precis, giving the reader an introduction from which s/he can turn to at the link. My general concern is with our Left dhimmi fascists' history, a close exmination of how and why we, our Left in particular, came to the general societal ideas we hold. Knowing more about our own ideas, it's likely we can challenge them and revise them as needed, if need be.]
****

"This is the best in the best of all possible worlds."
Carl Leibniz.

"What? Me worry?"
Alfred E. Neuman.

Those who don't have a concept of comfort won't likely attend to the needs of others. Another's discomfort is just so much "So what?" If your own discomfort is normal and unexamined, then the discomfort of others will not register meaningfully with you. Comfort as a concept is new to people. Very few people understand it, fewer still live it. What kind of world do they inhabit? They share the world with you. Should you be concerned?

Those who lack a concept of comfort still have a concept, some of them, of cruelty. Ah, but not all, and not many, over-all. The concept of cruelty is a rationalist concept, and most of the world is beyond that, for good or ill. All of the Islamic world is Irrationalist. All Islamic culture is primitive. It then varies between the psychopathic and the psychotic. How do we deal with that as members of the Modern West? What do, we do short of killing them, to restrain the primitive Irrationalists who haven't even a sense of comfort, let alone a concept of cruelty?

Must we, in self-defence, kill them all?

We begin this installment with pieces of a short review of a history of the concept of comfort. We who live in comfort must assume that all have always lived in comfort to the best of their means, but below we'll see that such is not the case. Comfort is a new concept in Human life. Few actually share it with the majority.


****
Home: A Short History of an Idea
by Witold Rybczynski


Exploration, June 6, 2004

Reviewer:Erika Mitchell (E. Calais, VT USA)

This book is an exploration into the meaning of the word "comfort" and its place in the home. Rybczynski begins the volume with an examination of the Sixteenth Century painting by Durer "Saint Jerome in His Study". He describes each of the objects and furnishings visible in the paining in turn, noting that they are not particularly conducive to comfort or reflective of individuality. Rybczynski goes on to describe how this painting may be representative of the era in which it was painted, how houses at the time had many occupants and were spaces where people lived communally, but not necessarily as a family in the present sense of the term. He argues that in the Sixteenth Century, the nuclear family as a residential unit was non-existent, since children were sent away to live and work with others at a young age, and households always included many unrelated servants or apprentices. It was only later, as the concept of the nuclear family became more established that the need for privacy came to the fore, and private and public spaces began to be differentiated within the house. Later developments in technology, especially plumbing, ventilation, and lighting also came to influence housing design. One of the themes of the book is how the field of interior design has often been faced with the conflict between what looks good and what feels good. Rybcynski stresses that often the style of a design wins out, leaving the residents with the very least in comfort (to the point of having to carry their toothbrushes to and from the bathroom for lack of proper storage there, for instance).

[....]

The book is academic in style, although quite accessible and engaging for the general reader. Sources are listed in the extensive endnotes, and there is an index. ****

Rybczynski, if I recall rightly nearly 20 years later, offers evidence that the Dutch were the first to consider the concept of personal comfort, it being part of the newly rich merchant class pose to have objets d'art and things useless in the home, keeping in mind the Roman sumptuary laws of roughly 1,000 years before. Most people lived lives that were literally hard. As a concept, comfort was lacking. Today in the Modern West the concept of comfort is so deeply ingrained in the culture and the mind of the average man that the idea of it being a recent custom, one that few grasp, is alien and alienating. We assume too much when we assume that everyone wishes for comfort. Most have no idea of what comfort is. If they don't understand that, and if we don't understand them, then we will have no understanding of our battle with Islam and our own dhimmi fascist Left.

We can dismiss the Utilitarian view that people act to increase pleasure and to decrease pain simply by looking at women's shoes. Comfort is not the big issue we might like to think it is. Knowing what comfort is we might opt for it, but that is not a universal assumption we can make. Muslims do not, as a rule, care about comfort. It is not part of their culture and world-view. Given that, you can be sure they do not care about your comfort.

Comfort, to a certain extent, is a social good. Those who concern themselves with their own comfort will often have a sense of empathy, and they will tend to your comfort if they can. A society of comfort won't as likely turn to torturing you. It won't be a culture of cruelty. But there is a problem with comfort. When comfort becomes a fetish it turns to self-indulgence and apathy. Some will not give up their comfort for anything, not even for their own comfort. Not even to save their own lives.

There are comforts of all sorts, ideologies being one. There is the comfort of terrible certainty, such as dhimmitude. There is the comfort of hatred. There is the comfort of self-annihilation.

We in the affluent West might find that once we are comfortable in our own lives that we suffer from pangs of guilt at the discomfort of others. We might feel the need to tend to their comfort by attending to their unmet needs. Some might tend to the needs of a friend, others might tend to the needs of their communities, and yet others still might tend to the needs of the whole of the world's populations. Some tend to the homeless, or animals, or birds, or forests, or the Earth Some tend to the needs of their families, some adopt, and some tend to the needs of the entire world and its people. Tending to the comfort of others turns to tending to the needs of others. The needs of others requires that the tender infantalize the tendee. Folks, welcome to the world as kindergarten. "We are the world; we are the children."

We become so sophisticated and comfortable in our lives that we extend our power to give comfort to all, whether they want it or not. Those who would say no are discomforting not only to the suffering of the Earth's peoples but to those who would save and comfort. They say no because they are: bigots, racists, homophobes, Islamophobes, Right wing religious bigots, American Republicans, evil people who care not for the comfort lacking in the lives of Others. The need of the one to comfort devolves into the need too punish those who would make suffer the children.

It's comforting to know in ones heart and mind that one is good, that one is not an evil person, unlike them, those who are indifferent to the suffering of others. And to know that one is good means one must be right and superior to the bigots. One cannot deal with them other than to hate them. The latter cause the suffering of the world's peoples. It's comforting to know that the good people of the West do what they can to extend comfort to the rest of the people. They do so by consuming less, by sharing, by caring. The more one cares and shares and comforts the less others do so. And since one can identify those who are evil and uncaring, one can sort them into a set one is against. One can even go so far as to say those are the people who are the cause of the suffering of others, and one would rightly hate them. Hatred is a lovely addition to the rooms of the the mind of the righteous. Hatred becomes a comfort in itself. But it must be organized, it must be aesthetically pleasing, it must be intelligent: it must be societal.

To help one homeless man is good, but to save all homeless men requires the understanding of homelessness itself, its causes, its cures. One must find those who cause homelessness, combat them, and make new homes for those who have none. One must hate homelessness and those who cause it. And the cause of so many homeless men is the very system of housing that excludes some from homes. One must hate the system itself for being as it is. It's quite comforting to know that greedy landlords in a capitalist system are the cause of homelessness. One can hate the landlord and the system itself. One can give comfort tot he homeless too, if not in ones own home, then in a group shelter where the homeless can be tended, can be comforted, can be medicated.

If one can be found who is oppressed for reasons of accident, through no personal flaw, only by virtue of birth or circumstance, then one must rightly tend to that victim. One must stop the oppression of a person tormented for nothing. And if one is of a group of victims, identifiable as a group member, then one finds comfort in the group, finds the power to increase ones physical comfort and ones societal value by being more than one but one of many. Comes then the comfort of belonging. One group of victims with another group is a movement with power to comfort them.

To comfort a group is better than to comfort merely the one. And from the confines of ones office writing reports is a comfort too. Comfort in hatred of discomfort of other, comfort in doing good for the many, comfort in knowing the causes of evil, these are major comforts. Comfort in the certainty. No more disturbing ambiguity. Now there is certainty that soothes.

Not all care to comfort others, nor do they care. Life is comfortable, and that it becomes circumscribed by the encroachments of others is something one accepts rather than discomfiture oneself by moving against its source. More pot, more beer, more television. That this will all come crashing down is a comfort to the mind too. Utter passivity is a comfort few could hope to achieve. Those who do are possibly blessed. Who'd know? They themselves likely do not know.

Those who do know, and who know with total certainty, they are comfortable. Those who have certainty are beyond all definition of comfort, and if they suffer the tortures of the damned, that is comfort from Heaven. There is no greater. That they will annihilate themselves with volition is a beauty of certainty that makes all other comforts weak and pale.

Those who would comfort the suffering meet the suffering in their glory. The West yawns and rolls over. Everybody's happy and comfortable.

Well, not all of us. Some of us are right nervous about the state of comfort around us. We're not happy with the comfort of others, it being a source of discomfort to us. Some of us recognise that comfort is a lost concept in much of the world, that comfort is not a thing of cushions and velvet. Some of us recognize comfort as a madness. Some even see comforting those who would kill us as wrong. Some even go so far as to argue that making the many uncomfortable is a good thing, even if their discomfort is hard.

Cushioning the circumstances of the psychotic does nothing for the good of the people at large. In fact, it brings on catastrophe. We might consider examining our approach to comforting others, those who have no modern sense of comfort to begin with. We might look at the world as something more than an upgradable homeless shelter. We might profitably give up our comfortable assumptions about the needs of others and examine their needs objectively. They might not require our comforts but our wrath.

To assume that all require material comfort is to dismiss the lives of the many who have no such immediate concern. Perhaps our better course of action in the tending to the comforts of others is to make them suffer. Perhaps we must relearn the concept of discomfort. In the process we might relearn the concept of the value of others as they are rather than as they should be were they like us. We might discover in the process that we hate them. We might even find that we will kill them. We might find that if we kill some they will come to realize that they must conform to us and our notions of Modernity and well-being, at which point we might live comfortably together.

Rockets pose bigger threat to Israel than nukes

Hezbollah Katyushas: ready to strike
Israeli Towns

Terrorists have recently fired rockets at Israeli towns from Gaza-- a situation that has the potential to become much more serious than people realize due to the opening of Gaza's border with Egypt.

Now there has been a rocket attack from Lebanon:

Northern Border Quiet after Barrage

The spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in Lebanon announced that two of its operatives were lightly wounded Wednesday morning in an IAF strike against their bases in Lebanon. The strike came hours after the northern town of Kiryat Shmona was hit by Katyusha rocket fire.

The IAF confirmed that it carried out an air strike early Wednesday against a base belonging to the PFLP, a small Syrian-backed non-Islamist terror group in southern Lebanon. Wednesday's air raid was the second on Naameh since the Israeli troop withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000.

The PFLP denied that they were behind the Katyusha attack against Israel. Hizbullah likewise denied responsibility.

OC Northern Commander Maj.-Gen. Udi Adam said the IDF knew which of the Palestinian groups was responsible for the attack on Kiryat Shmona. He said the Palestinian terrorist organizations in Lebanon were trying to escalate the violence in the area.

Maj.-Gen. Adam added that he hoped they understood the message, otherwise, he warned, the IDF would help them understand. He stressed that the army's response was balanced, and will continue in the same manner.

"The main message that we passed, and we are trying to give, is that the Lebanese government must take responsibility for what happens in its territory," Adam told The Associated Press. "If Kiryat Shmona residents don't sleep quietly," the northern commander said "then the residents of Beirut won't sleep quietly. This is an unequivocal message."

"This is in response to the firing of projectile rockets last night toward Israeli communities," the IDF said, and noted that it views such attacks with "extreme severity" and holds Lebanon responsible. Complete Article.

Iranian nuclear weapons would, of course, be the most serious threat of all-- not only to Israel but to the entire region. However, it seems pretty clear that Iran does not have nukes at this time.

But terrorist forces in Lebanon do have conventional rockets at this point. What makes them so dangerous is the tremendous number that they have, their mobility-- and their range.

Here is a brief excerpt from an article in The Middle East Quarterly that gives a very clear picture of the dangers involved:

Hezbollah's Strategic Threat to Israel
by Patrick Devenny

In May 2005, as international pressure increased for Hezbollah's disarmament, the group's spiritual leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, announced, "They say [we have] 12,000 rockets ... I say more than 12,000 rockets."It was the first time Nasrallah had ever publicly quantified Hezbollah's arsenal.

The risk of escalation has increased in recent years as internal events in Lebanon become less predictable and as Iranian and Hezbollah activities and interests have come into greater conflict with U.S. and Israeli security concerns. A number of scenarios exist in which Hezbollah might order a missile strike against Israel. As the Iranian government works to develop nuclear weapons, both the U.S. and Israeli leadership may consider a military strike to delay achievement of that capability. Hezbollah may also be tempted to apply its deterrent to Israeli actions in any renewed conflict with Palestinian groups or strike at Israel as it lays a claim to a greater regional role or to Jerusalem.

The Threat
The Hezbollah missile threat to Israel has expanded not only in quantity but also in quality. In recent years, the group's operational artillery reach has grown. Experts and analysts generally put the Hezbollah rocket force somewhere between 10,000 and 12,000 missiles. The heart of this arsenal remains rooted in Hezbollah's massive stocks—perhaps 7,000 to 8,000—of 107mm and 122mm Katyusha rockets, virtually all of which were supplied directly from existing Iranian army stocks.

Of far greater concern to Israel than these antiquated and relatively short-range projectiles are Hezbollah's growing stocks of Fajr-3 and Fajr-5 rockets. Iran began large-scale delivery of the Fajr-3 in 2000 and the Fajr-5 in 2002, with the approval of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Iranian cargo and passenger jets transport the weaponry from Iran to Damascus International Airport where they can be off-loaded by Hezbollah agents and members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The weapons are then trucked to the Bekaa Valley. Other reports suggest some Iranian cargo flights land at Beirut International Airport, providing Hezbollah with a more direct supply route although this process may have changed with the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon and the change in Lebanese government.

The Fajr-type rocket represents a significant upgrade to any threat assessment of Hezbollah. Designed by Iran with aid from China and North Korea, both classes of weapons are fired from mobile launchers, including customized Japanese trucks, and carry 200 pound high-explosive payloads. The Fajr-3 has a range of 25 miles while its more powerful upgrade, the Fajr-5, has a range of 45 miles. Accordingly, the Fajr extends Hezbollah's strike range well beyond Haifa.

Adding the Fajr rockets to the mix, however, raises the threat. Haifa, Israel's third largest city with a population of some 270,000 people, now lies within Hezbollah range. Even a modest barrage of 75 Fajr-5 rockets hitting the city would represent 15,000 pounds of high explosives detonating in the midst of a densely populated cosmopolitan area. The coastal cities of Acre and Nahariya—with populations of 55,000 and 41,000 respectively—might expect an even heavier assault due to Hezbollah's ability to target them with both the Fajr-3 and Fajr-5 models. While the Fajrs are not very precise—the sheer number of rockets at Hezbollah's disposal makes Israel vulnerable.

Any Hezbollah barrage will not likely be random, however. The group's external intelligence service has concentrated recently on targets and trajectory algorithm selection. In January 2005, Israeli security detained Danish citizen Iyad ash-Shua after he was caught filming northern Israeli military installations on behalf of Hezbollah.[9] The arrests of other Hezbollah agents have indicated the group's special interest in fuel refineries and military bases around Haifa.

Credible Defense?
Discovering the missile positions has been a challenge for the Israeli military. While the bulk of the short-range Katyushas are situated in the southern border region of Lebanon controlled by Hezbollah since the Israeli withdrawal of May 2000, the Fajrs are more elusive. Hezbollah has likely pre-selected a network of firing positions close to the Israeli-Lebanese border that would enable rapid launch procedures and accurate targeting measurements. Truck-mounted launchers, though, can be disguised to travel on civilian roads without attracting attention.(cont'd)

More background information:
Why Hizbollah may be the next target for the U.S.
The Lebanese-Israeli border (analysis and photos)

(Cross posted on A Deeper Look).

Vlad The Impaler, Part II

I want to be clear that I am not advocating torturing people en masse in the post below. I put myself in a bad position by declining to comment and make clear my thoughts on the antics of Vlad the Impaler.

Here are my unorganized thoughts on the war we find ourselves in.

As is true of human nature, the nature of warfare does not change as the years go by. The weapons change, the tactics change, and the battlefields change, but war stays the same. Why? Because war is a natural outgrowth of human nature.

Therefore, the thing that beat an enemy a thousand years before Christ, is the same thing that will beat an enemy today.

It is not guns, spears, rocks, or knives that beats the enemy, and, believe it or not, it is not killing the enemy that beats the enemy.

You can never kill every last one of those who oppose you. One thing the Lefties get right is War breeds more enemies. You kill one, and more will show up angry at the one you killed.

We are fighting what we think of as a 21st century war against a medieval enemy. We are using surgical strikes, GPS-mapping, and targeted bombing, all to insure that we kill as few civilians as possible. That is admirable. But, we may find that it also works against us.

We must understand that our enemy in this war has the advantage of being baptised in a Warrior Creed. Islam itself, teaches them to strike fear into the hearts of the infidel. To fight without ceasing, and to die the noble death of a martyr. Warrior Creeds teach that one should not fear dying. Instead, one should fear dishonor, humiliation, and bringing shame upon one's people.

Remember that the Japanese warriors of WWII would take a knife and plunge it into their belly, slicing themselves from groin to chest if they felt they had let their people down.

The Jihadis we are fighting against are no different.

They are Warriors because they were raised in a Warrior Culture. We were not.

Sure, we've got better hardware, but that won't win us the war. What will win us the war is to strike fear into their hearts. To shame and humiliate them.

What brings shame and humiliation upon a warrior?

Think about warrior types that you know. Think about athletes. Think about the most macho human beings you have layed eyes on in our culture. What do they fear? What causes them to lose their minds? What causes them to lose control of their emotions?

Having their manhood called into question in graphic terms. Having their woman taken away from them. Being shown to be weak. Being forced to part with their image of themselves as the most macho men you will ever lay eyes on.

A few days back I posted an excerpt from an article by an Australian Police Detective who seemed to have the right idea. He describes patrolling a Muslim neighborhood, and the fear his fellow policemen felt at having a brick hurled at their police car:


As we drove away in our marked police car, a half-brick bounced on the roof of the vehicle. The driver kept going.

I said, “What are you doing, they’ve just hit the car with a house brick!”

The young constable said, “Oh, they always do that when we drive past.”

The police were either too scared or too lazy to do anything about it. The damage bill on police cars became costly and these street terrorists grew stronger and the police became purely defensive. You see, the Police Royal Commission was about to start and the police retreated inside themselves knowing that the judicial system considered them easy targets. The police did not want to get hurt or attract Internal Affairs complaints.

Call me stupid, call me a dinosaur, but I made sure that day that at least one person in the group that threw the brick was arrested. I began by approaching the group just as that magistrate had lectured me and the other police involved in the Croydon search warrant. I simply asked who threw the brick. I was greeted with abuse and threats.

I then reverted to the old ways of policing. I grabbed the nearest male and convinced him that it was he who had thrown the brick. His brave mates did nothing. By the time we arrived at the police station, this young fool had become compliant, apologetic and so afraid that he kept crying.

You may not agree with what I did, but I paraded this goose around the police station for all the young police to see what they had become frightened of. For some months after that, police routinely rounded up the family whenever it was warranted.


That is what needs to be done to the Jihadis we are fighting. Of course, we are not allowed to broadcast the humiliation of our enemy for the world to see. It is against the Geneva Convention. But, they are allowed to broadcast the beheading of our friends and family, and our media will happily sell commercial time for us to have the privilege of watching.

What kind of sense does that make?

If we do not change our way of doing battle, I doubt that we will win. I think we will, instead, find ourselves in a kind of stalemate, until, eventually, one of their "sleeper cells" detonates a nuclear weapon in one of our cities. And then, we will act like beasts. We would probably retaliate with nuclear weapons and millions, tens of millions, or even hundreds of millions of people will die.

I do not want to see that happen.

And, that is why I brought up the subject of Vlad the Impaler. It seems to me he knew how to strike fear into the heart of his enemy. However, his weakness was that he was truly crazy. He did not go about war with the calm head of a rational being, but instead, like the Jihadis, would turn on anyone who wandered into his path at the wrong time.

We have the advantage of being rational. Now, if we would only also use our advantage in knowing how to thoroughly humiliate an enemy, as we have done time and again throughout Western history.

I am not advocating that we impale tens of thousands of Muslims. But, I am advocating that we do what we need to do to scare them out of their minds. They don't mind dying. It is humiliation that they fear.

If we need to display their gruesome dead bodies for their friends to see, then that might be a better deal than eventually resorting to WMD's, don't you think?

And, if we have to humiliate some top level Al Qaeda terrorists on international television, I don't think that would strip us of every last vestige of our humanity.

We need to get serious, or I fear we will end up being forced to become truly monstrous.

Vlad The Impaler

Vlad III reigned on and off, as Prince of Wallachia, between 1448-1476. He was born, the son of Vlad II, in Transylvania. Wishing to assert his authority in an untamed world, Vlad II had been an early believer in the rallying power of images, and, had thus, used the Dragon, symbol of Order, as the logo of his reign. The people began calling him Vlad Drakul, meaning Vlad the Devil, a name which he seemed to have liked.

When Vlad III ascended to power, he signed his name to documents, Vlad Drakulea, meaning Son of the Devil.

Yes, this Vlad III, or Vlad Drakulea, is the inspiration behind the book Dracula by Bram Stoker. And with good reason, for he seems to have been a blood-thirsty man, both literally, and figuratively. Legend has it, a favorite delicacy was bread dipped in pig's blood. Whether or not that was true, Vlad Drakulea was an extraordinarily cruel ruler. And, guess where he learned much of his cruelty from?

Yes, that's right; the Muslims.

His father's reign as Prince of Wallachia was troubled by the need to balance the competing interests of the Hungarians of the realm with that of the invading Ottoman Empire. Vlad II chose appeasement much of the time, and thus, he was assasinated on the order of John Hunyadi, regent of Hungary.

This left Vlad III with no father, and, as those who assassinated his father did not trust his family, no throne.

In the years leading up to the assassination of his father, Vlad III had lived in Turkey and had familiarized himself with the customs, lifestyle, and military structure of the Ottoman Empire, as well as the language. Thus, when he found himself cut off from his royal lineage he turned to the Turks to help him successfully regain what he believed was rightfully his.

His reign was troubled from there on in. All told he gained and lost the throne three times, spending some years in prison during one fall from grace. One constant, though, was his reputation for cruelty. One of his nicknames was Vlad Tepes, which meant Vlad the Impaler.

The process of impaling an enemy is particularly gruesome. This, from Wikipedia is not for the fainter flowers among us:

Impalement was Dracula's preferred method of torture and execution, which he had learned in his youth as a prisoner of the Turks. It was and is one of the most gruesome ways of dying ever imagined.

Dracula usually had a horse attached to each of the victim's legs as a sharpened stake was gradually forced into the body. The end of the stake was usually oiled and care was taken that the stake not be too sharp; else the victim might die too rapidly from shock.

Normally the stake was inserted into the body through the anus and was often forced through the body until it emerged from the mouth. However, there were many instances where victims were impaled through other bodily orifices or through the abdomen or chest.

As expected, death by impalement was slow and painful. Victims sometimes endured for hours or days. Dracula often had the stakes arranged in various geometric patterns. The most common pattern was a ring of concentric circles in the outskirts of a city that constituted his target. The height of the spear indicated the rank of the victim. The corpses were often left decaying for months.


Vlad was known for many of the other cruel punishments he levied on his subjects. He would cut out the genitals of women who committed adultery. He once invited a large group of the sick and the lame to a big banquet, and at the culmination of the banquet, put the question to them, "Would you like to live with no care in the world?" When they answered in the affirmative, he had the doors locked and the building burned to the ground. There were no survivors. He then told his court that he had done what he had done, because he didn't want weak people in his land.

One lesson he seemed to have learned from the Turks was the hudna. For after just a few years of aligning himself with the Turks in order to establish his power, he turned on them.

The most famous scene of Vlad's life came in a battle against the Ottoman forces of one Sultan Mehmed II. Here is a description:


In the beginning of 1462, Vlad launched a campaign against the Turks along the Danube river. It was quite risky, the military force of Sultan Mehmed II being by far more powerful than the Wallachian army. However, during the winter of 1462, Vlad was very successful and managed to gain many victories.

To punish Dracula, the Sultan decided to launch a full-scale invasion of Wallachia. Of course, his other goal was to transform this land into a Turkish province and he entered Wallachia with an army three times larger than Dracula's.

Finding himself without allies, Vlad, forced to retreat towards Tirgoviste, burned his own villages and poisoned the wells along the way, so that the Turkish army would find nothing to eat or drink.

Moreover, when the Sultan, exhausted, finally reached the capital city, he was confronted by a most gruesome sight: thousands of stakes held the remaining carcasses of some 20,000 Turkish captives, a horror scene which was ultimately nicknamed the "Forest of the Impaled."

This terror tactic deliberately stage-managed by Dracula was definitely successful; the scene had a strong effect on Mehmed's most stout-hearted officers, and the Sultan, tired and hungry, admitted defeat.


Now, see, I know you were thinking to yourselves, "Since when does Pastorius do history?" The answer, of course, is rarely. But, this one is rather important, isn't it?

I'm not going to comment further. Talk among yourselves. Can't wait to hear what you have to say.

Every Picture Tells A Story

One of the reasons most commonly put forth for giving Jerusalem to the Palestinians as their capital is the supposed religious significance it has for Muslims as their third holiest city, with the Al-Aqsa Mosque as an important center for Muslim religious practice. Judging by the images that follow (taken in 1877), it doesn't seem that this was always the case:




As Smooth says:

How odd. Weeds do not go untrampled in a highly trafficked area, do they? Buildings in use do not go without repair, do they?

Based upon these pictures, the tale of the importance of al Aqsa in terms of importance and holiness should be re-written to represent the truth, not the fiction each of you have been spoonfed.

Yeah, especially when you compare them with pictures of a mosque that IS highly trafficked. Say, for example, the Hassan II Mosque in Casablanca:




Nope, no weeds there! Looks just like it did when I took a tour of it five years ago during a port visit to Casablanca. Trust me, you coulda eaten off of the ground, and we still had to take our shoes off before going inside the mosque itself.

Intrigued? Then read the rest at Mystery Achievement. And make sure you also check out Smooth Stone, a most excellent blog, and without whose assistance this post would not have been possible.