A Brief History of Islamic Terror

Prof. Lewis has a selected chronology of Arab/Islamic terrorist attacks. This “abbreviated list” is an overwhelming statement illustrating the duration, range, and commitment to war with the West. And it underscores how long we’ve buried our heads in the sand.

Jihad at YouTube

The following is a message plus the response I received yesterday from a fellow YouTube user, Crusader18:

"Yes My Dear Pimsghost,
The have pulled 3 of my videos down in 24 hours. YT it seems is run by either Muslims or Dhimmis(Liberals) and the censorsghip is happening. I have attached the Video that I want flagged as innappropriate. "koferi" Put up by 'Jihad4u' as hateful a deathmonger as there is on youtube. Youtube pulls down my Vids as fast as I put them up. They Ignor the Flaggings that I do on Jihadist Propaganda videos and any attempts to have my grievences heard. They have pulled vids that were harmless; 60yr old Bugs Bunny Cartoon, Southpark Mohammad(even though there was no picture or cartoon of Mohad)
They(the handchoppers and YT decide what I and we can post or not. Right now I have a more than a dozen that say...: Rejected (content inappropriate) That were viewed (in some cases) THOUSANDS OF TIMES! Yet this one I posted at the same time as the 2 latest taken down
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfP3MK0y-aw
REMAINS! The most amazing thing about this is...Many of my "rejects" are up on YT already by other Users!!! Same name, same file same discriptions same tags...(I copyed them to test a theory) POOF! There's stay, and mine get yanked or denied outright...The same clips. They can, will, and do F**K with people who they don't agree with. If you have an email address to share, I will send you Clips you can either Post or view.(I would post them to test) I am also sending this additional call to arms that follows...(Please Send the following, and resend it. The video doesn't even have a "confirm" screen yet.)
Kind Regards
Crusader18

Subject:
Islamists on YouTube...They get our Videos Pulled Yet Their Hate and Blood filled garbage Videos remains. Flag This 'Cult of Death' porn for what it is...Inappropriate! Here's the plan:Flag this video as Inappropriate: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyymEhCSqQE
Pass it on to all your friends. have them pass it to there friends in 3 cycles we're at 10s of thousands of flags and then...On to the next. We do this until one by one they are denied access to post this stuff. It's called Interdiction...DO THIS!!! Together, WE can DO THIS. We can as free users of OUR INTERNET, INTERDICT this ONE SITE and DENY ACCESS To the ISLAMISTS...PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PASS THIS ON AND ON AND ON>>>>>>>>>>>
This is your Clarion Call To Do What You CAN DO TO FIGHT THEM.
Thank you ALL,
Crusader(CRUSADER18)
BTW- I wish to read replies to this request from people I've never even heard of before. We start with one. When it's GONE, we go on to the next. But first, we start with the one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyymEhCSqQE"

I must add that some Brit has flagged all of my videos and is prepared to fight us "racists", despite the amount of videos devoted to Islam and the Palestinian cause, one which is UNFLAGGED and shows a military vehicle and personel being hit by a bomb, where you clearly see the soldiers blown to bits. I found it by chance, following the trail of muslim radical users and flagging their videos, or trying to. All subject to YouTube approval, of course. My simple VLOGs have apparently been flagged as inappropriate. Between the Dhimwits and the Jihadis, there is a war to get all anti-jihadi videos (and users) kicked off the site, while the videos of Israeli and American troops being blown up remain, as well as video homages to Palestinians which include supposedly "inappropriate" material. Like I say, me discussing Dhimmitude has been flagged. Soldiers being blown up? Unflagged. Very rotten and biased happenings at what is one of the main video hosting sites online.

So, before it gets yanked, and in the spirit of the "Question of the Day" of how to destroy an ideology along with my Ali Sina idea, I'm posting the funniest "humiliate the jihadis" video on YouTube. This is SystemF's incredibly hilarious "Samira RIP", about his "brave mujahadin" camel Samira and her untimely death. This just cracks me up.

The Koran Versus Mein Kampf

A recent comment thread over at Pedestrian Infidel compared Herr Hitler's Manifesto from over 80 years ago, "Mein Kampf", to that "holy of holies" to Muslims, the Koran. Commenters have noted the remarkable similarities between the two, and indeed, the resemblances are more than skin deep and are worth examining in more detail. A closer look at the facts reveals that Islam (not 'Islamism') and Nazism are two kindred ideologies with many, many commonalities.

Let's start with titles. The very title of Herr Hitler's tome means "My Struggle" in English. One could even entitle this book "My Jihad" and this Islamic term would have the same precise meaning. "Kampf" in a Nazi ideological context and "Jihad" in the Islamic one are almost identical. That in itself goes a long way to explaining why 'Mein Kampf' is still such a best seller in current times all over the Islamic World, including in supposedly 'moderate' Islamic states like Turkey.

But the similiarities between the Koran and Mein Kampf don't just stop there. Far from it. Fellow blogger and ally Freedom Fighter over at his/her blog Joshua Pundit has come up with an exceptional, enlightning list of how alike Islam and Nazism really are:

Mein Kampf- States that Germans are the superior race of mankind and that Germany is destined to rule the world , and dominate all other races and nations.

The Q'uran-States that Islam and Muslims are the superiors of mankind and that Islam is divinely mandated to rule the world and dominate all other races, creeds and nations.

...

Mein Kampf-Says that the German State is to have control over every aspect of life. Says all individuals must submit to the State.

The Q'uran-Says that Islam and Sharia is to have control over every aspect of life. Says all individuals must submit to Islam.

...

Mein Kampf-Says that Germans have the duty to claim their divinely appointed place in the world by whatever means necessary. Puts loyalty to the Volk (the race) above all other ethical considerations.

The Q'uran-Says that Muslims have a duty to wage Jihad and to advance Islam's domination over the world (Dar al Islam and Dar al Harb) by any means necessary. Places loyalty to fellow Muslims (Umma) and Islam above all other ethical considerations.

...

Mein Kampf-Mandates that men are superior to women and that women's place should be limited to procreation, the kitchen and the home.

The Q'uran-Mandates that men are superior to women and that women's place should be limited to procreation, the kitchen and the home. (Admittedly, the Q'uran goes quite a bit farther than Mein Kampf on this topic)

...

Mein Kampf-Says that homosexuals are 'race traitors' and should be condemned to death. (Many, in fact were murdered in the concentration camps).

The Q'uran-Says homosexuals are unholy to Allah and should be condemned to death

...

Mein Kampf-Sets out a detailed model for world conquest, including rules for how conquered peoples are to be suppressed and dominated by the German race. States that the wealth, resources and property of subject peoples belongs to Germans by right and the right to life for subject peoples is dependent on Germans. States that
non-Germans have no legal or civil rights.

The Q'uran-Sets out a detailed model for world conquest, including rules for how conquered peoples are to be suppressed and dominated by Muslims. States that the wealth, resources and property of subject peoples belongs to Muslims by right and the right to life for subject peoples is dependent on Muslims. States that non-Muslims have no legal or civil rights. (in truth, a lot of this has its basis in the Hadith and the Sunna, but both derive essentially from what's in the Q'uran, along with all the other aspects of Sharia).

...

Mein Kampf-Divides the world into 'German land' and enemy territory. States that land with Germans living in it or land that once had Germans ruling it rightfully belongs to Germany, and Germany is entitled to get it back by any means necessary.

The Q'uran-Divides the world into 'Dar al Islam' (Muslim ruled land) and enemy territory (Dar al Harb). States that land with Muslims living in it or land that once had Muslims ruling it rightfully belongs to Dar al Islam, and Muslims are entitled to get it back by any means necessary.

...

Mein Kampf-Blames the Jews for society's ills and says that they will be exterminated.

The Q'uran-Blames the Jews for society's ills and says that they will be exterminated. ("On the day of Judgement the rocks and trees will call out 'O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me! Come and slay him!")

Islam and Nazism. Mohammed and Hitler. As plain as day, they are cut from the same cloth.

Do The Jihadis Consider Denmark Islamic Territory?

Bernard Lewis gave a talk the other day on the troubles the Western world is having with Islam. Here, he proposes a very good question with regards to the anger in the Muslim world over the Jyllands-Posten cartoons:


What was much more at issue was another ban, and that is on insulting the Prophet, which is, of course, an offense. This raises a number of interesting questions that I think are of direct relevance to the whole issue at the present time.

Insulting the Prophet is an offense in Muslim law. This raises two issues: one of substantive law, the other of jurisdiction. Muslim jurists discuss this at some length, and there is a considerable body of case law concerning it in Muslim states.

The first point of disagreement: What is the range of jurisdiction of Muslim law? And here you have two opinions. According to the Shi'a and a minority among the Sunnis, Muslim law applies to Muslims wherever they may be in the world. A Muslim who commits an offense against Muslim law, wherever he may be in the world, is subject to Muslim law and must therefore be punished in accordance with Muslim law.

The majority Sunni view is that Muslim law only applies in countries under Muslim government. What happens outside is no concern of the Muslim authorities. One distinguished jurist makes his point with an extreme example: A Muslim traveling in the lands of the unbelievers commits robbery and murder. He returns to the lands of Islam with his loot. No action can be taken against him or against his loot because the offense was committed outside the jurisdiction of Islam, and it is therefore up to the juridical and legal authorities of the infidels to take action, if they can and will.

Here you have two different opinions relating to an offense committed by a Muslim. That is not the case for the Danish cartoons. This is an offense committed by a non-Muslim. And here the plot thickens. This is discussed by all of the juridical authorities only in the case of a non-Muslim subject of a Muslim state. If a non-Muslim subject of a Muslim state says or does something offensive to the Prophet, he is to be tried — accused, tried, and if necessary, punished. The jurists on the whole tend to take a rather mild view of this offense. They say, well, he is not a Muslim; he doesn't accept Mohammed as the Prophet; we know that.

So saying that Mohammed is no prophet does not constitute this offense. It has to be more specifically insulting than that. And, as I say, there is an elaborate juridical literature and case law on this subject.What is never discussed at all — it is never considered — is an offense committed by a non-Muslim in a non-Muslim country. That, according to the unanimous opinion of all of the doctors of the holy law is no concern of Islamic law, which brings us back to the case of Denmark.

Does this mean that Denmark, along with the rest of Europe is now considered part of the Islamic lands, and that the Danes, like the rest, are therefore dhimmis, non-Muslim subjects of the Muslim state?


It would seem the Jihadis think so.

A Tale of Two History Conventions

Last January the American Historical Association had its annual conference. Scott Jaschik provided a review of how military historians faired with the academics who consider them court historians:

When historians gathered this weekend in Philadelphia for the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, military historians organized a session to talk about their unusual situation right now. Panelists included historians who work in academe and those who work in the military — all of whom said they face credibility issues. Those in academe must contend with those in the military who think they are scandal-mongers or irrelevant, and with academic colleagues who question whether they are sufficiently critical of the military. And scholars in the military — even those with solid publication records — face questions from academics about whether they are legitimate.

Members of all of those audiences turn to military history hoping that it will “offer a redemption story,” and most of the time it doesn’t, Stoler said. “I tell people, if you want a redemption story, go to church, go to synagogue.”... [Heh]

John Lewis, professor of history at Ashland University, provides "a report from the front" on the recent conference of The Society for Military History:

From the outset the conference set an utterly different tone than one hears at America's largest historical enclave, the American Historical Association. The difference starts with the membership: the AHA is almost totally academic, while the SMH has a large number of historians working directly with military units, either in uniform or as civilians. The opening speaker at the SMH said two things that I have never heard at the AHA: he praised our "passion for facts," and he urged us to write history always "with practical value for today." The purpose of history, I heard repeatedly at the conference, was to place modern events into an historical context, and to offer people—civilians, officers and soldiers—a means to better understand the present, and to plan for the future.

People not involved in academia may not understand how refreshing this was to me. At the AHA, outright hostility will usually greet such claims. I have sat on history panels where the first thing said is "there are no facts—only interpretations [cute, that's Nietzsche]; and there are no lessons—only the contemplation of complexity." I have been in job interviews where the committee members' eyes glaze over when you even mention political, intellectual or military history. To them, everything is the subjective creation of gender history, "queer" studies, how the average man lived, or the "history" of oppressed peoples. It's all generally disgusting, irrelevant to understanding human events, and downright boring.

The Greeks and Romans knew that the purpose of learning history was to live a better life today. In the world of today's academics, this is all but forgotten. To hear it stated as a matter of fact at a professional conference was like a breath of fresh air. I do hope they accept my paper proposal next year....

Crossposted at The Dougout

Why the Music Died

Guest Editorial by Edward Cline

Today, one often hears the question asked -- sometimes despairingly, sometimes jeeringly -- that if classical music is so wonderful, uplifting, and timeless, why is it no longer being composed? The stock answers are numerous, but unconvincing.

One is that classical music is peculiar to a period of European history dating approximately from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century, and thus is not the “voice” of our age. But that classical music remains valued by so many people in this age belies this assertion.

Another argument claims that classical composition has “evolved” beyond harmony, tonality, and melody to a “new plateau” of atonality. A variant of this argument charges that the public “ear,” so habituated to the traditional forms of musicality, suffers from a sort of evolutional, tonal lag because it has not kept pace with the ever-evolving musical avant-gard, purportedly representative of an advanced species of humanity. Thus, the ear must be trained or “conditioned” to plumb the reputed depths of jumbles of random sounds, or, in some cases, no sounds at all.

This is the complaint of the modern artist who sneers that the public cannot appreciate his abstract rendering of, say, Perseus and Andromeda, as a canvas of blots, drippings, and sprinkled-on metal shavings. The public, with the notable exception of an aesthetically superior minority, is philistine, perhaps even artistically “reactionary”; it is confined to a reificatory, bourgeois aesthetic prison, and insists that art be -- Gads! Can you credit it? -- intelligible and that music be compatible with its inchoate psychology.

Modern “formal” music, like modern art, is devoted to addressing a “higher” consciousness, using a “logic” that transcends syllogisms, proportion, time, space dimension, sense perception, and other Euro- and/or logo-centric “constructs.” In short, reality. It requires that listeners revise their expectations, discard the “prejudice” of the various centrisms, and passively receive logically ineffable droplets of pure essence, or pure being -- or deliberately unintegrated sense data.

Among the many demerits of the politically correct Webster’s II New Riverside University Dictionary (1994), is its definition of music: “The art of arranging tones in an orderly sequence so as to produce a unified and continuous composition.” This definition is a step backward from “The science or art of incorporating intelligible combinations of tones into a composition having structure and continuity,” which is the definition found in Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary (1969). The Riverside definition replaces the key term intelligible with orderly, which can mean virtually anything, and the term structure with unified, which can also mean virtually anything. One can imagine that the next edition of the Riverside will shed the self-conscious air of its ambiguous qualifiers and offer an au courant, fashionably “deconstructed” definition: “The art of arranging tones in a sequence to produce a composition” -- which, of course, could be applied equally to Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 5” or to the gruntings and squeals of a pig sty.

A musical composition is an identifiable sum of its parts. A composition that has no structure, that seems to fly apart, or worse, seems to be notes and rhythms randomly flung into the air to fall where they may on a blank music sheet, has no sum, no identity, and no theme but chaos and madness. A composition of jumbled sounds “represents” merely the modernist fixation with pseudo-aesthetics and artistic fraud.

In her explanation of the purpose and demands of music, novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand wrote:

“It is in terms of his fundamental emotions -- i.e., the emotions produced by his own metaphysical value judgments -- that man responds to music….The theme of a composition entitled ‘Spring Song’ is not spring, but the emotions which spring evoked in the composer….Liszt’s ‘St. Francis Walking on the Water’ was inspired by a specific legend but what it conveys is a passionately dedicated struggle and triumph -- by whom and in the name of what, is for each individual to supply.” 1

It was fashionable among early twentieth century composers to write melodic music punctuated by stretches of dissonance. Ralph Vaughan Williams, Aaron Copeland, Charles Ives, and Virgil Thompson all interspersed orchestrated “folk” melodies with dissonance. Even Edward Elgar, in his later work, resorted to the practice. They all helped to make madness and the irrational respectable. Copeland’s “Symphony No. 3,” for example, uses his well-known “Fanfare for the Common Man” as a melody around which he weaves screeches, drum rolls that herald nothing, and other chaotic noise. And none but the musicians who must play it can remember the full score of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio.”

“Don’t set out to raze all shrines -- you’ll frighten men,” says Ellsworth Toohey, the critic and arch-villain in Rand’s novel, The Fountainhead. “Enshrine mediocrity -- and the shrines are razed.”2 Toohey offers that advice in the course of explicating, for one of his willingly duped victims, his method of inculcating and promulgating collectivism in men’s souls. He could have added: Elevate incompetence, and competence is irrelevant; sanctify the irrational, and the rational is emasculated; praise noise, and music is silenced. The principle behind Thomas Gresham’s law, that bad money will drive out the good, is equally applicable to art and music, especially in a culture that is in a state of philosophical disintegration, and in which the destroyers are blithely sustained by the destroyed. Indeed, the idea that our culture, in its present state of anarchy, could generate classical music, seems almost oxymoronic.

“Doctors have this theory that if you play classical music for infants, they’ll understand complex relationships, like math. They don’t know what effect rock-and-roll would have. Well, we figure the world could do with one fewer accountant.”

This message was spoken by a post-adolescent male voice in a smarmy drawl in an ad for a popular radio station, accompanied by a series of jerky, time-lapse close-ups of a smiling infant rolling its head back and forth on a pillow in seeming enjoyment of the dissonant “rock” being played in the background. The commercial’s message is clear: It is not necessary for anyone to understand “complex relationships like math,” or to develop much skill in any field of mental labor. It is okay to raise a child to be a cognitive troglodyte, unable to raise his consciousness beyond the immediately perceptible, impatient with music that demands conceptual integration or that addresses a soul he may never recognize he possesses, or could have possessed, indifferent or hostile to anything that “makes sense.”

Whether or not there is any scientific truth to the theory that a particular genre of music can aid in (or arrest) a child’s mental faculties, the ad implicitly endorses the stunting of children’s minds. Accountant doubtless is used as a generic pejorative for all professionals who deal in facts, which includes the universe of Western science and technology that allows the intellectually slothful to exist in relative opulence and without having to exert much mental effort. The ad is distinctly anti-mind.

Anyone who regularly attends classical music concerts must be familiar with the practice of conductors or music directors of inserting “new” (or even old) atonal compositions between “traditional” ones in a program. An orchestra might begin with, say, Mozart’s “Impresario Overture,” end with Prokofiev’s “Classical Symphony,” and sandwich in between them something like Peter Warlock’s “Capriole Suite.” The practice ensures that concertgoers hear something of the “new plateau” genre whether they want to or not. And they will hear it, chiefly because most concertgoers believe it would be rude to rise en masse, leave the hall, and return when the noise has subsided. Modern “formal” music is played to audiences held hostage by their own civility.

If an orchestra were to advertise an all-Warlock, or an all-John Cage, or an all-Schoenberg concert, attendance would be embarrassingly thin. Why conductors or music directors continue the practice of subjecting their audiences to aural torture is a matter of conjecture. Perhaps they feel duty-bound to be “fair” to the newer composers; perhaps they feel obligated to play the compositions of government- or foundation-subsidized artists.

The last possibility has some interesting implications. How many orchestras remain wholly supported by private donations and receipts, free of the pressures exerted in by the byzantine mazes of public arts funding bureaucracies? Very few. That they must resort to this brand of extortion underscores the bankruptcy of what they foist upon their audiences.

Surely conductors know the difference between Camille Saint-Saëns’ “Phaeton” and Fritz Kreisler’s “String Quartet.” They must suspect that people attend live performances for many reasons, but that voluntary submission to what amounts to an enervating, auditory Rorschach test is not one of them. Whatever rationalizations have been offered by defenders of the practice, it is as purposeful as art galleries exhibiting kitsch or non-art together with genuine art. The unstated purpose of these exercises is to “enshrine mediocrity,” to subvert and destroy values, to undercut man’s capacity to formulate or sustain values, and to introduce doubt in their minds about the values they do hold.

One regularly exposed to this practice, if he does not maintain the conviction that what is being committed is a fraud, will begin to think: “Perhaps there is something here, something important about these lead pipes welded together to make a stick man. It’s right there next to Canova’s “Cupid and Psyche.” Perhaps I’ve missed the boat, and shouldn’t be so smug (or certain) about these things.”

This individual will not stop seeing the stick man as a bunch of pipes welded together, nor will he begin doubting the artistic value of the Canova, but he may begin to doubt the evidence of his senses, the certainty of his mind. Some part of his implicit certitude concerning right and wrong, good and bad, beautiful and ugly, reality and fantasy, will turn to mush, the certitude progressively softened by the miasma of a subjectivist, value-negating artistic nihilism.

This is an instance of retrogression, of the flaunting of primitivism as merely a “cultural difference.” Among this country’s black youth the results of this value negation have been especially sad. The enormity of the evil perpetrated on them by their parents and teachers defies description. “Cultural separatism” shares the same corrupting end as atonal “formal” composition: to be both A and non-A; that is, to live in a country whose high standard of living is made possible by Western values, but to hold conscious values that are hostile to or inimical to the West and civilized living.

Walter Grimes, reporting on a highly publicized debate between August Wilson, the Pulitzer-winning black playwright and Robert Brustein, drama critic for The New Republic, wrote: “Mr. Wilson tried to explain that his insistence on a black theater was not limiting.”3

“Why is white experience assumed to be universal, he asked, and black experience somehow particular? Why are black artists expected to become universal by transcending race and moving beyond black themes?”

Grimes added:

“Black Americans, Mr. Wilson said, want to enter the American mainstream, but not at the price of shedding their African identity. Black artists have a duty to preserve and promote the thoughts and values of their ancestors, including their African ancestors. ‘If we choose not to assimilate…this does not mean we oppose the values of the dominant culture, but rather we wish to champion our own causes, our own celebrations, our own values.’”

Mr. Grimes did not broach such questions as: What is a “black theme”? What is it that Mr. Wilson wishes to perpetuate? Is it only black “angst”? It is merely “white” experiences that the playwright wants segregated from the mainstream, or is it Western values in general? Are the concepts of individual rights and independent minds too universal or too peculiarly “white” to apply to blacks? How can one support individual freedoms, yet uphold a tribal (i.e., collectivist) consciousness at the same time?

“Separatism” may be achieved, but an “ethno-culture,” burdened with such phenomena as “Ebonics” in language, will not send probes to Mars, invent open-heart surgery, or grow corn. The great black musicians who contributed to American culture, e.g., Scott Joplin, Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, and Louis Armstrong, have apparently been disowned in favor of the malevolent “dissing” and droning of “rap.” Armstrong and company are now no more revered among Afro-centrists than are Thomas Sowell, J.C. Watts, Walter Williams, or Ward Connerly among thinkers, economists or educators, black or white.

Composers of film scores inherited the mantle of classical music composers. There is little distinction between what moved the latter and what can inspire the best creators of film scores: a story, a legend, an image, a tableau, a play, a need to express some inner conviction or truth. Once, much film music approached the symphonic or classical level. Many scores by composers such as William Walton, Arthur Bliss, John Barry, and Miklos Rozsa are as evocative and memorable as any opus from the nineteenth century, and can stand alone apart from their original inspiration. Walton’s score for Henry V, Maurice Jarre’s for Lawrence of Arabia, and James Horner’s for Glory come to mind as instances of what is possible.

The best film scores were those written for grand-scale, larger-than-life epics. But such epics are no longer being produced. Great music cannot be written to dramatize triteness, or about psychotics, functional illiterates, criminals, perverts, predatory aliens, whales or dinosaurs. And great music cannot be indefinitely appropriated to accompany and elevate the depiction of the superficial, the witless, the stupid, or the banal, such as in Woody Allen’s Manhattan.

The preferred and broadening cesspool of subject matter of most filmmakers today cannot serve as the genesis of magnificent, or event pleasant music. Popular films have become little more than vehicles for “special effects”; their stories are superfluous appendages, flimsy excuses to exhibit the technological repertoire of their computer graphics artists and incendiary experts. “Serious” films today, such as Love! Valour! Compassion! and Female Perversions (dealing, respectively, with homosexual relationships and feminist existentialism), are not rich material for great music, either. Film scores are written now to be heard and promptly forgotten.

A word about bass in contemporary popular music. Were this a separate article, its title could well be “Technology in the Hands of Barbarians.” The stress on “mega” bass (of 120 decibels or more, crowding the 180 decibel range of a NASA rocket launch) is especially revealing, for it confesses an attempt to compensate for vapidity of content in what passes for contemporary popular music. Bass, once considered a single musical element, has come to dominate “pop” music because this type of music requires the least amount of thought or imagination by either its composers or listeners. Its continual “thumping” -- in popular music and even in television commercials -- is used to arrest one’s attention, deaden thought, and metaphorically beat listeners to a stupefied pulp. On dance floors and in bars, it imposes a nihilistic gestalt on everyone and everything it touches. It is not joy or happiness or even sorrow that this kind of bass seeks to evoke, but a temporary state of annihilation.

Bass is also employed now as a weapon against civilized existence by those who install expensive “mega bass” amplifiers, “woofers,” and speakers in their vehicles. It is easy to name the motive of the owners of these throbbing machines: pure, unadulterated malice. The blasts that emanate from these vehicles are distracting not merely because of their volume; their peculiar, offensive, intrusive nature penetrates one’s consciousness as a disruptive, often painful force. It is not joy that the perpetrators of the “mega bass” phenomenon wish to share with random passersby or residents, but hatred and the chance to torture without physically touching anyone. What such creatures are saying is: We’re a revolting nuisance, but we’re here, we’re pumping up the volume, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

“Rap,” of course, cannot even be considered as music. Taking together its belligerent tone, its monotonous, metronomic beat, obscene and homicidal “lyrics,” and confrontational delivery, it is simply a species of malevolence.

Students attending the best music schools are no longer taught how to compose “classical” music. These schools, such as the Peabody in Baltimore, the Curtis in Philadelphia, and the Julliard in New York, are turning out talented soloist musicians, but their philosophy of composition is governed -- if modern “formal” music is any kind of gauge -- by the likes of Arnold Schoenberg, or worse. Consider the spirit of the nineteenth century, and one will understand the reasons why so much great music was written in that era. Consider the spirit of our time, and one will grasp the significance of music as a litmus test of general cultural well-being or decay.

A culture takes its cues from the top -- from the universities, from the intelligentsia, from the trendsetters of ideas. And if the message from the top is that anything goes, then all that is good will go. The rubbish, bile, and nihilism that pass for music today cannot be legislated out of existence. Conservatives such was William Bennett, the former Secretary of Education, have proposed silencing the barbarians and frauds and nuisances, but even if they could be repressed or muffled, the appearance of a new Verdi, Brahms or Chopin will not be the consequence.

What is true of politics is true of aesthetics. Just as a free nation will collapse into statism when the most rational elements of the political philosophy on which it was founded and sustained are subverted or negated by elements of their antipodes, the best in aesthetics will vanish when the irrational, the atonal, and the unintelligible are given equal time and equal approbation.

The sad truth is that we should not expect greatness in music to emerge from a decaying, rudderless culture.


1 Ayn Rand, “Art and Cognition,” in The Romantic Manifesto (New York: New American Library).
2 Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1943), p. 691.
3 William Grimes, “Face-to-Face Encounter on Race in the Theater,” New York Times, January 29, 1997, Sec. C, p. 9.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.

* Revised. Originally published in The Social Critic, Summer 1997

Crossposted at The Dougout

The looters and the creators

A recent post at Gates of Vienna creates such a dissonance about objective reality and its nature, that it requires further comment here.

The post concerned the teacher's union vote in Britain to boycott Israel.

Israel since the invasion by every surrounding nation on the day it was born, since the day it's political and religous refugees invited their arab neighbors to co-education together, firing off the Abu Musa riots and deaths of 1919 and 1920, has been the subject of a targeted isolation, boycott, and planned death and destruction by arguably the second largest religious population on the planet. Some 1.3 billion vs 6 million. Yet we see the 6 million painted successfully as the overbearing oppressors, agressors and evil whelps of satan, the sons of apes and pigs, defilers of God, despoilers of Islam, ravagers of water in the desert, and yet still too many miss not only the objective JOKE on gravity (the ultimate objective reality), but also it's connection to Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and others and it's certain effect on us.

Adding to this is the Ellsworth Toohey column of the year in the NYT by Roger Cohen decrying that the world has "stopped buying the american narrative" , and lists reasons like we have been in war all but 14 years since 1945 (i.e. the COLD WAR, as war?)

The forces which have chosen to be in oppostion to us today have more in common than a founding document thought by some to be immutable and perfect.

They are imbued with the heritage of the Huns. Looters, raiders and despoilers all, they can achieve little, invent almost nothing, and manufacture primarily the arrogant conceit that their heritage has been stolen by 'other' at their expense, and are always ready to collect the interest on their investment, the will to destroy in nihilistic fury at those who create.

Why?

Continue reading "The looters and the creators" at Villagers with Torches »

PLO cartoon shows child urinating on Statue of Liberty

The Green Lady is desecrated in a bigoted cartoon put out by the PLO/Hamas. As told in the following, from Israel National News (and Palestinian Media Watch, which has a whole list of PA cartoons that denigrated the Statue):

A Palestinian Authority child is depicted urinating on the Statue of Liberty in the May 25th issue of Al-Risala, a Hamas weekly newspaper, reported the Palestinian Media Watch.

In this week’s cartoon, the Statue of Liberty is holding a book entitled “Democracy”, but according to the Palestinian Media Watch, PA media has consistently targeted the Statue of Liberty in the past.

The Statue of Liberty, also known as Lady Liberty, is an internationally-recognized American symbol of freedom and democracy. Such ideas are an anathema to the PA; at a rally in March 2006, the newspaper Al-Hayat Al Jadida accused the West of “trying to penetrate Islamic youth with dubious things such as the ideas of democracy”.

Hamas is by no means the only PA party blasting the United States using caricatures, however. Newspapers linked to PA President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party have printed many such venomous cartoons.

Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Al-Quds and Al-Ayam newspapers have all pictured Lady Liberty as a terrorist, an arsonist burning down the world, a prostitute, and a prisoner of U.S. security agencies, among others.

The Palestinian Media Watch monitors Palestinian Authority publications, including news media and schoolbooks, among others. To see the PMW website, click here.

Let us be clear here: these are not friends, any more than the House of Saud are. They are as anti-American and anti-French as they are anti-Israel, and they are also utterly anti-democracy.

What's Wrong With Europe?

Flemming Rose is more than a provocative publisher of cartoons. Consider this:

Europe today finds itself trapped in a posture of moral relativism that is undermining its liberal values. An unholy three-cornered alliance between Middle East dictators, radical imams who live in Europe, and Europe's traditional left wing is enabling a politics of victimology. …

Europe's left is deceiving itself about immigration, integration, and Islamic radicalism … It is a narrative of confrontation and hierarchy that claims that the West exploits, abuses, and marginalizes the Islamic world. Left-wing intellectuals have insisted that the Danes were oppressing and marginalizing Muslim immigrants. … Left-wing commentators decided that Denmark was both racist and Islamophobic. Therefore, the chief obstacle to integration was not the immigrants' unwillingness to adapt culturally to their adopted country (there are 200,000 Danish Muslims now); it was the country's inherent racism and anti-Muslim bias. …

Dictatorships in the Middle East and radical imams have adopted the jargon of the European left, calling the cartoons racist and Islamophobic. When Westerners criticize their lack of civil liberties and the oppression of women, they say we behave like imperialists. …

These events are occurring against the disturbing backdrop of increasingly radicalized Muslims in Europe. Mohammed Atta, the 9/11 ringleader, became a born-again Muslim after he moved to Europe. So did the perpetrators behind the bombings in Madrid and London. The same goes for Mohammed Bouyeri, the young Muslim who slaughtered filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam. Europe, not the Middle East, may now be the main breeding ground for Islamic terrorism. [Emphasis mine.]

What's wrong with Europe?

Read the rest.

Nugent Rocks!

Ted Nugent is a bow-hunter. He hunts, he kills, he eats, and he uses the skins.

In short, he is a man.

Some pussy from the UK paper, the Independant (maybe they ought to rethink the name of their paper, huh?) interviewed Ted Nugent the other day. Here are the bloody results.

From No Pasaran:


Q : "What do these deer think when they see you coming?" I ask him. "Here comes the nice guy who puts out our dinner? Or, there's the man that shot my brother?"

A : "They're only interested in three things: the best place to eat, having sex and how quickly they can run away. Much like the French."


I'll bet you the pussy who was doing the interview found himself strangely attracted to Ted at that very moment.

Saudi student once taped a recording of a Jewish school in Maryland

With the recent news of the Saudi Buscapists, there's also an older story that needs focus too. From the Boston Globe (H/T: Soccerdad):

WASHINGTON -- The FBI is investigating a Saudi college student and his American wife who recently videotaped a Jewish school in Baltimore and said they sent the footage to Saudi Arabia, according to law enforcement officials and community leaders who know about the case.

The Saudi man, who came to the United States on a student visa four years ago, and his wife were seen videotaping an Orthodox school for girls, Beit Yakov, on Oct. 26 and fled after witnesses wrote down their automobile's license plate number, officials said. Law enforcement officials were contacted and later interviewed the couple, who said the video was intended for the man's parents in Saudi Arabia.

The couple has not been charged, and law enforcement officials have declined to identify them.

Federal and local law enforcement officials emphasized that they have not uncovered any reason to believe the couple was casing the school.

A spokesman for the US Department of Homeland Security said no new national terrorist alerts have been issued about possible threats to Jewish institutions, considered attractive targets for anti-Semitic groups.

But recent terror attacks on Jewish synagogues in Turkey and the fact that the Baltimore couple fled have raised enough concern that FBI agents are investigating. The inquiry has been broadened to Saudi Arabia, where the FBI is trying to recover the tape, and to the woman's home state, Utah, the officials said.

[...]

Abramson said authorities reported that the man and his wife, a Muslim convert, were not initially asked for a copy of the tape by local authorities because they had no legal grounds to seize it. But he said officials at the US Embassy in Saudi Arabia are trying to help the FBI recover it as part of the investigation.

"The tape that he had used ended up not being seen by local authorities," Abramson said. "It ended up in Saudi Arabia." He added that officials said the Saudi end of the investigation has been delayed somewhat, in part because American officials there have been focused on the aftermath of recent terrorist attacks on a housing complex in the Saudi capital of Riyadh.

Jewish institutions around the world have stepped up security significantly in recent years. Officials said suicide attacks on Nov. 15 at two Jewish synagogues in Istanbul and two bombings at synagogues in Tunisia last year have led to additional security precautions.

Facinating, how the authorities didn't make a serious effort to get a warrant to confiscate the tape. And I wouldn't be surprised if the House of Saud didn't cooperate in getting the tape back.

I'm guessing that this was part of a plot to kidnap some child brides for an up and coming Mohammed, is that it? To do with them what that false prophet did to Ayisha? This is very disgusting indeed.

Syrian Ambassador To UN: Israel Started World Wars I and II

Yesterday on the floor of the United Nations, the ambassador of Syria (gentleman/monkey in a suit that he is) accused Israel of having started both World Wars I and II.

If one ever needed confirmation that this newfangled 21st century version of anti-Semitism is not anti-Zionism, but is indeed the same old bigotry, then here it is.

ISRAEL WAS NOT A STATE DURING THE TIME OF WW'S I AND II.

So, how is it possible that they could have started major world wars?

What a fucking joke. But, nothing is too stupid to seem legitimate in the minds of our fellow-Earth dwellers, the Islamofascists:


New York Sun: A verbal brawl erupted at the Security Council yesterday as it debated the subject of terrorism. During the skirmish, Syria accused Israel of starting World Wars I and II, as well as “contemplating” a third world war.

The anti-Semitic outburst by the Syrian representative, Ahmad Alhariri, as well as allegations by his Iranian colleague, Ahmad Sadeghi, countered comments from Israel’s U.N. ambassador, Dan Gillerman, who said both Syria and Iran are part of an “axis of terror” that would pit them against a group of anti-terrorism “allies” in a “World War III.”

Both Syria and Iran are listed by the State Department as terrorist-supporting regimes.

Secretary-General Annan released a statement on the exchange after Lebanon requested a cease-fire. Diplomats considered the statement even-handed, but it failed to mention a Security Council resolution that called on all Lebanese militias, including the most well-organized, Hezbollah, to be disarmed by the Lebanese government.

“Iran uses Hezbollah to fight its war by proxy,” Mr. Gillerman told the council yesterday, speaking during a speech at a periodic session evaluating international counterterrorism efforts.

“We hold not only the government of Lebanon fully responsible for all terrorist activity initiated from its territory,but also hold responsible the governments of Iran and Syria for harboring and supporting Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations.”

The “axis of terror is alive and active,” Mr. Gillerman said. “Leaders of Hamas meet regularly with, and have been offered financial assistance by, the president of Iran. The very same president who calls for the annihilation of another member state denies the Holocaust and is attempting to develop the nuclear capabilities to perpetrate the next one.”


Yes, very true. And, it's long past time that we wipe the Islamofascists off the face of the Earth.

Iran anticipates an invasion? I don't think so

Iran, apparently anticipating an American invasion, has quietly been restructuring its military and testing a new military doctrine that calls for a decentralized, Iraqi-style guerrilla campaign against an invading force.

Iran's military planners are acutely aware that a military confrontation with technologically more advanced U.S. armed forces would be rapid and multifronted, unlike the static and slow-paced 1980-88 war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. In December, more than 15,000 members of the regular armed forces participated in an exercise in northwestern Iran's strategically sensitive Azerbaijan border provinces that focused on irregular warfare carried out by highly mobile army units, according to the official MENA news agency. A second exercise was conducted in the majority-Arab province of Khuzestan in September, according to the Iranian press, aimed at quelling insurgencies in areas subject to ethnic unrest and prone to foreign influence. Involving a reported 100,000 troops, the exercise provided an example of how the Islamic Republic would respond to further disturbances in the strategic, oil-rich province that has been the scene of a year-old terrorist bombing campaign. Iranian officials, including the interior and the intelligence ministers, as well as several religious leaders, have repeatedly blamed the disturbances on British forces occupying nearby southern Iraq.

At the same time, a European military attache in Tehran told The Washington Times that the Revolutionary Guard is moving away from a joint command with the ordinary army and taking a more prominent role in controlling Iran's often porous borders, even as it makes each of Iran's border provinces autonomous in the event of war.

No way the US Army and Marines are going in with a conventional invasion high tech or not.

Continue reading "Iran anticipates an invasion? I don't think so" at Villagers with Torches »

The kill 'em all theory gains ?

1)ABC NEWS

KABUL, Afghanistan May 31, 2006 (AP)— Afghanistan's parliament has approved a motion calling for the government to prosecute the U.S. soldiers responsible for a deadly road crash that sparked the worst riots in Kabul in years, officials said Wednesday.

2) Boston Globe

May 31, 2006

THE RIOTING provoked by a traffic accident Monday in Kabul signifies more than an Afghan version of road rage. Legitimate grievances were being vented, however much the rioters' anger may have been exploited by political factions and common thieves. This being a season of renewed Taliban and Al Qaeda attacks, and of retaliation by US and NATO forces that has caused unintended civilian casualties, all parties that want to prevent Afghanistan from lapsing back into a failed state must take seriously the popular anger on display Monday in the Kabul riots. The people's fury has several sources.

The US Army truck that careened down a hill on burned-out brakes, crashing into Afghan vehicles, provoked a violent response because similar incidents have happened all too often. Whether from nervousness or callousness, foreign military forces have repeatedly sideswiped Afghans' cars, speeding off without concern for the damage or injury they may have caused. These incidents pluck at the Afghan sense of honor.

or why do they hate us? Traffic? Entropy? Because they can? Because we're US

Continue reading "The kill 'em all theory gains" at Villagers with Torches »

Springtime In Paris: "Youths" Attack Police Station

In Paris, in springtime, the youths are full of vim and vigor. And who can blame them? After all, Paris is one of the most romantic places on Earth:


Second night of rioting in Seine Saint Denis (the infamous 9-3). The French preSS is carefully talking about several incidents and putting the whole thing down to unsolved social issues (left over from the previous round of burning and looting). Last night's action saw a police station attacked by a mob.

The night before a mayor's home was attacked.

Last night's official toll: 4 police injured, 5 arrests.


Ah, to be young again, in Paris. Montmarte, the Trocadero, the Eiffel Tower.

You know, in France, they kiss on Main St.

Ooh la la.