Freedom is never free! -- 4th of July Tribute

Have you ever wondered what happened to the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence?
Five signers were captured by the British as traitors and tortured before they died.

Twelve had their homes ransacked and burned.

Two lost their sons serving in the Revolutionary Army, another had two sons captured.

Nine of the 56 fought and died from wounds or hardships of the Revolutionary War.

They signed and they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.

What kind of men were they?

Twenty-four were lawyers and jurists. Eleven were merchants, nine were farmers and large plantation owners; men of means, well educated. But they signed the Declaration of Independence knowing full well that the penalty would be death if they were captured.

Carter Braxton of Virginia, a wealthy planter and trader, saw his ships swept from the seas by the British Navy. He sold his home and properties to pay his debts, and died in rags.

Thomas McKeam was so hounded by the British that he was forced to move his family almost constantly. He served in the Congress without pay, and his family was kept in hiding. His possessions were taken from him, and poverty was his reward.

Vandals or soldiers looted the properties of Dillery, Hall, Clymer, Walton, Gwinnett, Heyward, Ruttledge, and Middleton.

At the battle of Yorktown, Thomas Nelson, Jr., noted that the British General Cornwallis had taken over the Nelson home for his headquarters. He quietly urged General George Washington to open fire. The home was destroyed, and Nelson died bankrupt.

Francis Lewis had his home and properties destroyed. The enemy jailed his wife, and she died within a few months.

John Hart was driven from his wife's bedside as she was dying. Their 13 children fled for their lives. His fields and his gristmill were laid to waste. For more than a year, he lived in forests and caves, returning home to find his wife dead and his children vanished. A few weeks later, he died from exhaustion and a broken heart.

Norris and Livingston suffered similar fates.

Such were the stories and sacrifices of the American Revolution. These were not wild-eyed, rabble-rousing ruffians. They were soft-spoken men of means and education. They had security, but they valued liberty more.

Standing talk straight, and unwavering, they pledged: "For the support of this declaration, with firm reliance on the protection of the divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other, our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor."

They gave you and me a free and independent America. The history books never told you a lot about what happened in the Revolutionary War. We didn't fight just the British. We were British subjects at that time and we fought our own government!

Some of us take these liberties so much for granted, but we shouldn't.

So, take a few minutes while enjoying your 4th of July Holiday and silently thank these patriots. It's not much to ask for the price they paid. Remember: Freedom is never free!

It's time we get the word out that patriotism is NOT a sin, and the Fourth of July has more to it than beer, picnics, and baseball games.

. . . Author Unknown

Why Not Call It Sedition?

Sedition right under our nose.

Watch video link below and see that the Islamists in Chicago, the hometown of our islamist supporting president who has no problem with Muslims proposing the taking over of America.

Red Skelton Pledge of Allegiance

Red Skelton did this Pledge of Allegiance many years ago. It should replayed in every school every 4th of July.

Some Not So Dumb Questions….

I’d like to have answers to these and why they were not considered as solutions to some of the problems we face today. I won’t hold my breath.

Yes, dumb questions – then again maybe not so dumb -- maybe just common sense.

First: Why not give the $850 million dollars of stimulus money directly to the people?

We have approximately 250 million people in this country. Let’s say a third of that population belongs to families. 250 million divided by 3 = about 84 million families. Divide $800 billion by 84 million families and you get about $9600 per family. Some of that will be used to pay off debt by the family but a lot would be used to purchase things, thus stimulating the economy directly.

Yeah, I know. One answer is that the government doesn’t give a crap about helping on controlling. But I wonder if there are economic reason – not political.

Second: We’ve spent less than 10 percent of the allocated stimulus money. Why?

BHO cried that if we didn’t stimulate the economy IMMEDIATELY we would have a disaster of unprecedented proportions. Yet, we have spent less than 10 percent of the $800 billion dollars allocated.

Has the Administration or Congress second thoughts? Did China more or less threaten to not buy the hundreds of billions of dollars of our stimulus debt? Or has it been just pure incompetence on the part of the bureaucracy?

Third: Why not give citizenship to illegal aliens if the serve in the US Armed Forces?

This is an idea right out of Robert Heinlein’s’ book Starship Troopers.

If an illegal alien enlists for 4 years (I did – not for 2 years at the time because I enlisted with a special arm of the Army – the Army Security Agency. This would be a special enlistment too) and is discharged honorably, he or she gains immediate citizenship.

You would think by serving four years honorably in the Army it would make a good citizen out of them. One plus is that they would have to learn English to serve properly.

There you go. Anyone have any answers?

Time for Some Common Sense on North Korea

During the Cold War with the USSR, NATO knew that there was little chance of repelling a Warsaw Pact invasion of Europe against an overwhelming number of conventional enemy forces. The Warsaw Pact armies greatly outnumbered NATO in just about every category of weapon and number of troops.

Yet, we were able to keep the big Russian bear out of Western Europe. And we did it with one simple threat.

If the USSR invaded Western Europe, we would use tactical nukes against their conventional forces. I know because I was one of those in US Army Europe that had the keys to the nukes and waited, 24/7, for the order to release them to NATO. And we had no reservations on using them.

The threat worked because the USSR knew that if we used tactical nukes they would respond with tactical nukes. Then we would respond with more and bigger tactical nukes quickly escalating to strategic ICBMs—and that would be all she wrote.

The Kremlin knew if a nuke exchange happened, their way of life would just as well end as ours. No winner. All losers.

Now we have a tin horn midget dictator who is blustering about starting a war if we touch his toys. The most obvious way and the one the Allies expect is an attack on South Korea. Specifically leveling Seoul which is a artillery shell distance from North Korea.

This fact has us all shaking in our boots.

But why. Jong is not Ahmadinejad or the Japanese in WWII- both of which are and were willing to commit national suicide.

Jong, and especially his generals, would not like to have their pretty little war toys removed from them. A threat like the one we used against the USSR will work just as well and keep Jong contained in his little asylum to rot.

The threat? Simple. If Jong lobs even one artillery shell at Soul or sends even one soldier across the DMZ, we will respond with tactical nukes to stop them and eliminate the artillery pieces that are suppose to be in the hundreds pointed at Seoul.

Jong is no suicide mania. A maniac, yes. Suicidal no. Or at least his generals aren’t and they want to keep their shiny toys.

So what the hell are we waiting for? Give him the ultimatum. Quit pussyfooting around.

BTW: China won’t respond if we use tactical nukes. They don’t want to lob strategic nukes at us and go to WWIII – at least not over North Korea.

Islamist Victory by 2020?

The holy war against the infidels being waged by al-Qaeda and other Islamic terror formations - will end in 2020 with the defeat of the West, predicts Author Fuad Hussein. His book ‘Al-Zarqawi - al-Qaeda's Second Generation' was published at the end of 2005.

Though a couple of years old, it might be an interesting exercise to see how his predictions turned out. But first, who is Fuad Hussein? As reported by Spiegel Online International, Hussein has not only spent time in prison with al-Zarqawi, but has also managed to make contact with many of the network's leaders. Based on correspondence with these sources, his book details the organization's master plan.

There must be something particularly trustworthy about the Jordanian journalist Fouad Hussein. After all, he has managed to get some of the the most sought after terrorists to open up to him. Maybe it helped that they spent time together in prison many years ago -- when Hussein was a political prisoner he successfully negotiated for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to be released from solitary confinement. Or is it because of the honest and direct way in which he puts his ideas onto paper? Whatever the reason, the result is that a film which Hussein made about al-Zarqawi has even been shown on al-Qaida affiliated Web sites. "That showed me that they at least felt understood," the journalist says.

Hussein explains the seven phases that al-Qaeda hopes to establish to create an Islamic caliphate which the West will then be too weak to fight.

The First Phase Known as "the awakening" -- this has already been carried out and was supposed to have lasted from 2000 to 2003, or more precisely from the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in New York and Washington to the fall of Baghdad in 2003. The aim of the attacks of 9/11 was to provoke the US into declaring war on the Islamic world and thereby "awakening" Muslims. "The first phase was judged by the strategists and masterminds behind al-Qaida as very successful," writes Hussein. "The battle field was opened up and the Americans and their allies became a closer and easier target." The terrorist network is also reported as being satisfied that its message can now be heard "everywhere."

We can say that Phase One has been accomplished. The Islamist propaganda machine has done well in convincing a large portion of the Muslim population into believing the West is waging war on Islam. The misquotes and missteps by the current Administration lead credence to this belief.

The Second Phase "Opening Eyes" is, according to Hussein's definition, the period we are now in and should last until 2006. Hussein says the terrorists hope to make the western conspiracy aware of the "Islamic community." Hussein believes this is a phase in which al-Qaida wants an organization to develop into a movement. The network is banking on recruiting young men during this period. Iraq should become the center for all global operations, with an "army" set up there and bases established in other Arabic states.

One can say they’ve been pretty successful at that. Case in point is the greater threat from home-grown terrorists rather than those infiltrating from abroad.

The Third Phase This is described as "Arising and Standing Up" and should last from 2007 to 2010. "There will be a focus on Syria," prophesies Hussein, based on what his sources told him. The fighting cadres are supposedly already prepared and some are in Iraq. Attacks on Turkey and -- even more explosive -- in Israel are predicted. Al-Qaida's masterminds hope that attacks on Israel will help the terrorist group become a recognized organization. The author also believes that countries neighboring Iraq, such as Jordan, are also in danger.

Some of this has come to fruition. Jordan has experienced al-Qaeda terrorism and Syria is noted for harboring terrorists and their plans for attacking Israel. 

The Fourth Phase Between 2010 and 2013, Hussein writes that al-Qaida will aim to bring about the collapse of the hated Arabic governments. The estimate is that "the creeping loss of the regimes' power will lead to a steady growth in strength within al-Qaida." At the same time attacks will be carried out against oil suppliers and the US economy will be targeted using cyber terrorism.

We’ve seen signs of this. Saudi Arabia is now actively fighting insurgent elements in its country seeking to damage or destroy oil producing facilities and overthrow the Saudi government. Yemen is experiencing an up tick in Terrorist activity. We can only believe that this will get worse and spread to the other oil producing emirates in the peninsula. How successful will al-Qaeda be? Yet to be seen.

The Fifth Phase This will be the point at which an Islamic state, or caliphate, can be declared. The plan is that by this time, between 2013 and 2016, Western influence in the Islamic world will be so reduced and Israel weakened so much, that resistance will not be feared. Al-Qaida hopes that by then the Islamic state will be able to bring about a new world order.

The Sixth Phase Hussein believes that from 2016 onwards there will a period of "total confrontation." As soon as the caliphate has been declared the "Islamic army" it will instigate the "fight between the believers and the non-believers" which has so often been predicted by Osama bin Laden.

The Seventh Phase This final stage is described as "definitive victory." Hussein writes that in the terrorists' eyes, because the rest of the world will be so beaten down by the "one-and-a-half billion Muslims," the caliphate will undoubtedly succeed. This phase should be completed by 2020, although the war shouldn't last longer than two years.

So, how realistic is the 7 phases? The Spiegel article has its doubts.

Nevertheless, there is no way the scenario he depicts can be seen as a plan which al-Qaida can follow step by step. The terrorist network just doesn't work like that anymore. The significance of the central leadership has diminished and its direct commands have lost a great deal of importance. The supposed master plan for the years 2000 to 2020 reads in parts more like a group of ideas cobbled together in retrospect, than something planned and presented in advance. And not to mention the terrorist agenda is simply unworkable: the idea that al-Qaida could set up a caliphate in the entire Islamic world is absurd. The 20-year plan is based mainly on religious ideas. It hardly has anything to do with reality -- especially phases four to seven.

This analysis is wrong. Saying that the plan is absurd because it’s based on religious ideas shows a deep lack of understanding. Ideologies that have a strong belief component – religious or secular – is what drives them to success until they confront an ideology that is as strong and there’s. And over the last year there have been mumblings and debates from the Islamic World of where the next Caliphate will be centered.

As for the ‘Islamic Army’, I have said in posts before that the tactic of terrorism will have to eventually lead to the creation of a regular conventional army if the Islamists want to achieve ultimate victory over the West.

What is interesting is that major attacks against the West are not even mentioned by Fouad Hussein. Terrorism here cannot be ignored -- but it seems these attacks simply supplement the larger aim of setting up an Islamic caliphate. Attacks such as those in New York, Madrid and London would in this case not be ends in themselves, but rather means to a achieve a larger purpose -- steps in a process of increasing insecurity in the West.

In other words, insurgents who use terrorist tactics can not win the war themselves. To do that, like in every war before this, you must occupy enemy territory to win and impose your ideology on the population. That means putting boots on the ground. Like all other wars, there will be a theater of battle. That theater stretches from North Africa through the Middle East through south-central Asia to Southeast Asia and Malaysia. Some Islamic nation or nations will lead the alliance in this war of fronts.

So we are left with an interesting phased development. How well it’s executed is yet to be seen.

The First Stage of Death

In her 1969 book, On Death and Dying, Swiss-born psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross outlined the five stages of grief of someone who is dying: 

• Denial and isolation: "This is not happening to me."

• Anger: "How dare God do this to me." 

• Bargaining: "Just let me live to see my son graduate." 

• Depression: "I can't bear to face going through this, putting my family through this." 

• Acceptance: "I'm ready, I don't want to struggle anymore." 

It seems that the MSM is in stage one: DENIAL. From the Huffington Post. (I'm holding my nose.)

Nine years ago, when FoxNews sprinted past CNN to become America's number one news network, I attributed its ratings gains to the election of George Bush and the triumph of Fox-watching conservatives. I figured conservatives would be savoring their victory while liberals were averting their eyes in disgust. For the next eight years, I measured political sentiment in the United States by comparing the size of the FoxNews audience with the combined size of the CNN/MSNBC audience. In this space, I even predicted, with reasonable accuracy, the percent by which Barack Obama won the election based on the split in the news audience. 

Hmm... Could what follows be a portend of the future? 

Now, seven months after Barack Obama's victory, CNN's ratings have gone down the drain. From May of last year to May of this year, CNN lost 22% of its total primetime audience. MSNBC was down 2%, while FoxNews was up 24%. 

In the key advertising demographic (25-54), Fox was up 31%, CNN was down 37% and MSNBC was down 26%. In hard numbers, Fox had 109,000 more viewers than last year while CNN lost 113,000. CNN averaged fewer than 200,000 25-54 viewers in primetime. Even MSNBC averaged more viewers than that. 

Total day was nearly as bad, with Fox up 24% and CNN down 7%. MSNBC was down 2% in total viewing. Fox is beating CNN almost two-to-one in most categories. 

There's no need to throw any more numbers at you--Fox is gaining, CNN is wilting. Why is this happening when the country still seems about 58-42 in favor of Obama? My best guess is the passion of those who detest Democrats, liberals, and in particular, Barack Obama. 

Yes. Please inform us. Enquiring people want to know.

Conservatives seem so angry at their loss, so ready to blame Obama for all their problems that almost 400,000 more of them are watching FoxNews this year than they did last year. I think they turn to Fox for comfort and confirmation. They need to hear the ranters and ravers tell them that it's not their fault, it's all because of those "Socialist Democrats." I have believed for years that it's "comfort and confirmation" that drove conservatives to talk radio. Now it's television, too. 

I had thought better of the television audience, particularly younger viewers who tended to watch CNN and MSNBC. But even that's gone now--Fox leads in 18-49 year-olds. 

Here are the best excuses I can think of: maybe a lot of middle-of-the-roaders have just tuned out on all the cable news noise. Maybe other people have better things to do with their lives than listen to pandering pundits. 

Including the pandering pundits and supposed journalists of the MSM. 

Maybe more generous souls accept that Obama's doing the best he can in a very tough job, and they don't want to hear the details because they know the stars are not shining on America right now. 

Gawd!! How lame!! 

How about this excuse. The MSM is dying and they are in denial.

AN OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA from Lou Pritchett

Lou Pritchett is one of corporate America 's true li ving legends- an acclaimed author, dynamic teacher and one of the world's highest rated speakers. Successful corporate executives everywhere recognize him as the foremost leader in change management. Lou changed the way America does business by creating an audacious concept that came to be known as "partnering." Pritchett rose from soap salesman to Vice-President, Sales and Customer Development for Procter and Gamble and over the course of 36 years, made corporate history.

 

AN OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA

Dear President Obama:

 

You are the thirteenth President under whom I have lived and unlike any of the others, you truly scare me.  

 

You scare me because after months of exposure, I know nothing about you.

 

You scare me because I do not know how you paid for your expensive Ivy League education and  your upscale lifestyle and housing  with no visible signs of support.    

 

You scare me because you did not spend the formative years of youth growing up in America and culturally you are not an American.

 

You scare me because you have never run a company or met a payroll.

 

You scare me because you ha ve never had military experience, thus don't understand it at its core.

 

You scare me because you lack humility  and 'class', always  blaming others.   

 

You scare me because for over half your life you have aligned yourself  with radical extremists who hate America and you  refuse to publicly denounce  these radicals who wish to see America fail.

 

You scare me because you are a cheerleader for the 'blame America ' crowd and deliver this message abroad.

 

You scare me because you want to change  America to a European style country where the governmen t sector dominates instead of the private sector. 

You scare me because you want to replace our health care system with a government  controlled one. 

 

You scare me because you prefer 'wind mills' to responsibly capitalizing on our own vast oil, coal and shale reserves.

 

You scare me because you want to kill the American capitalist goose that lays the golden egg which provides the highest standard of living in the world.

 

You scare me because you have begun to use 'extortion'= tactics against certain banks and corporations.

 

You scare me because your own political party shrinks from challenging you on your wild and irresponsible spending proposals.

 

You scare me because you will not openly listen to or even consider opposing points of view from intelligent people.

 

You scare me because you falsely believe that you are both omnipotent and omniscient.

 

You scare me because the media gives you a free pass on everything you do.

 

You scare me because you demonize and want to silence  the Limbaughs, Hannitys, O'Relllys and Becks who offer opposing, conservative  points of view.

 

You scare me because you prefer  controlling over governing. 

 

Finally, you scare me because if you serve a second term I will probably  not feel safe in writ ing a similar letter in 8 years.

 

Lou Pritchett 

The Greatest Generation

The ‘Greatest Generation’ that gave so much, to so many, is becoming so few. 

What made this generation so great?

Was it the service and the self-sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of this generation to free the world from fascist tyranny?

Or was it the un-selfish generosity of rebuilding the world after its defeat while making no demands of homage from those who followed and prospered economically, politically, and culturally because of this generation’s sacrifices?

Or perhaps it was the strength steeled during the Depression Years that forged responsible adults and not whimpering victims? 

Or was it the courage to face and defeat a second global tyranny in the form of communism by not bending to the perennial appeasers that were ever present throughout the lives of this generation?

Or perhaps it was the loyalty shown to not just his country but his commitment to marriage and instilling a set of values in children that who in turn cares for those in crisis and need?

All these and more made this generation one of greatness.

The values of self-respect, personal responsibility and the delight in the celebration of the rituals of life are hallmarks of a great generation. 

We will not soon see a generation like this pass this way again.

Mr. Clarke Concerned that We Had a Shocking Response to 9-11

Just yesterday, Richard Clarke of the Washington Post wrote a hand-ringing article on how the Bush Administration overreacted to 9-11. 

Basically, he, like all liberals, can’t see the forest before the tress and are unable to bring themselves to realize that our response to 9-11 was quite measured and very, very retrained. 

 I’ll get into that in a minute. But first let’s have Mr. Clarke pontificate. 

Top officials from the Bush administration have hit upon a revealing new theme as they retrospectively justify their national security policies. Call it the White House 9/11 trauma defense. 

"Unless you were there, in a position of responsibility after September 11, you cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas that you faced in trying to protect Americans," Condoleezza Rice said last month as she admonished a Stanford University student who questioned the Bush-era interrogation program. And in his May 21 speech on national security, Dick Cheney called the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, a "defining" experience that "caused everyone to take a serious second look" at the threats to America. Critics of the administration have become more intense as memories of the attacks have faded, he argued. "Part of our responsibility, as we saw it," Cheney said, "was not to forget the terrible harm that had been done to America."

 

I won’t bore you with the rest of his introduction. Here’s the meat of his issue.

Yet listening to Cheney and Rice, it seems that they want to be excused for the measures they authorized after the attacks on the grounds that 9/11 was traumatic. "If you were there in a position of authority and watched Americans drop out of eighty-story buildings because these murderous tyrants went after innocent people," Rice said in her recent comments, "then you were determined to do anything that you could that was legal to prevent that from happening again."

I have little sympathy for this argument. Yes, we went for days with little sleep, and we all assumed that more attacks were coming. But the decisions that Bush officials made in the following months and years -- on Iraq, on detentions, on interrogations, on wiretapping -- were not appropriate. Careful analysis could have replaced the impulse to break all the rules, even more so because the Sept. 11 attacks, though horrifying, should not have surprised senior officials. Cheney's admission that 9/11 caused him to reassess the threats to the nation only underscores how, for months, top officials had ignored warnings from the CIA and the NSC staff that urgent action was needed to preempt a major al-Qaeda attack.

Thus, when Bush's inner circle first really came to grips with the threat of terrorism, they did so in a state of shock -- a bad state in which to develop a coherent response. Fearful of new attacks, they authorized the most extreme measures available, without assessing whether they were really a good idea.

Shock? Lack of coherent response? 

Well, Mr. Clark, let me tell you how non-liberal most Americans felt after 9-11. It wasn’t debilitating shock. It was revenge! 

I remember it oh so well when my good old friend called me and asked me how I felt about the attacks. I send kill ‘em. He showed his true colors, and like Mr. Clarke, wanted to know what we must have done to them for them to do such a terrible act. 

It was time to sit down and talk. I told him that was insufficient and hung up. 

Now, Mr. Clarke, let me tell you what Bush and Cheney IN SHOCK did not do. What this country and its citizens DID NOT do. 

We DID NOT have incidents where Muslims were attacked on the streets. 

We DID NOT burn down Muslim establishments 

We DID NOT close down Muslim organizations. 

We DID NOT find and export Muslims here illegally back to their country. 

We DID NOT find and send back Muslims preaching hate in this country back to their country for arrest and execution. 

We DID NOT arrest and jail Muslims preaching sedition in this country. 

We DID NOT demand that all Muslims be rounded up and put in concentration camps. 

We DID NOT demand that Saudi Arabia close all its Muslim schools and mosques in this country. 

We DID NOT burn down mosques in cities around the country. 

We DID NOT demand our government nuke Medina or Mecca. 

We DID NOT demand that we nuke Afghanistan. 

You see, Mr, Clarke, Bush and Cheney were successful in restraining the American people from doing what many wanted to do. That kind of measured thinking does not come from reacting in shock. 

Reacting in shock is a liberal trait. An inability to act, caught in the self-imposed restraint of your ideology with your eyes in the headlights like good little sheeple.

Demographic Jihad

The numbers in this video says it all.

Telling Stories of Jihad and Freedom

Every culture has a story or a narrative that it lives by. Throughout history, cultural stories have come into conflict with each other many times resulting in war.

We have three major cultural narratives in conflict today - the secular narrative of freedom loving people, the socialist narrative of Marxism, and the theocratic narrative of Islam. Marxism is hardened in Cuba and North Korea, being slowly diluted in China, and having a comeback in Venezuela. For global impact, neither of these forms of Marxism at this time is overly threatening as a cultural narrative. Outside of the Marxist dictators in Africa and Venezuela, there is no real rush to embrace the Marxist narrative.

Islam, on the other hand, is a different story and the difference between their story and that of ours, the secular narrative of freedom is, well, telling.

But what about the narrative? Why is human freedom to be valued? Why is the rule of law important? Why is representative government a good thing? Why does the individual human being possess such worth? Why should we defend the weak? Why should we care for the orphan, the widow, the sick, and the elderly? When is anything worth dying for? Why do we love? What is our story?

Currently, our story is confused, divided, in disarray and in pieces. Political correctness and the practice of multiculturalism has stymied our efforts to forge a coherent story that we believe and what we show to the world.

And what about Islam?

Islam has one . . . a story, a narrative. In general, Islam's answers to these questions is quite different from the answers given by the West for most of its history. Bernard Lewis may have over-estimated the power of the West's commitment to freedom to overwhelm the attractiveness of the Muslim narrative in what he describes as its "Third Wave."

What’s so attractive about the Muslim narrative? I’m not taking about the militant from of Islam but the socio-political form. The one that’s on the march throughout the world today. And what of this “Third Wave”?

Let’s look at what’s attractive about the socio-political religion called Islam.What makes Islam tick? And what can we learn about it that will help us understand those that adhere to it and learn more about the threat it poses to the civilized world. Muslims claim that Islam is the world’s fastest growing religion. If true; why? What attracts so many converts from around the world to this belief system?

The answer can be found in two concepts: Decidophobia and a thirst for a Path to God.

Decidophobia is the morbid dread of making fateful decisions – an ostrich like defense that drives people to seek refuge from decisions in a religious or ideological conformity. The term was created by Walter Kaufman in his book ‘Without Guilt and Justice”.

The objective of the Decidophobic is to make one major decision, and only one major decision, so one does not have to make another major decision in his or her life ever again. One strategy is to join a religion or a movement. One that has a set of finely prescribed behaviors that circumscribe one’s actions and offers an earthly or heavenly reward for the true believer. If a person is adrift without personal bearings and can not function in a chaotic ethical and moral environment that is perceived to have no absolutes – much like we have today – he or she will seek a belief system that offers a safe haven in this storm of relativism.

Islam fills that void.

It is a strict religion that offers paradise and a sense of meaning in life to those who adhere to the simple pillars of its faith. Islam also presents to its followers a person whose life can be imitated and acts as a blue print to achieve the promise of paradise. But there is another form of ‘religion’ that is just as powerful and offers the reward of paradise here on earth. That is the belief in a strong secular ideology also led by a man to emulate – and even worship - and follow in his footsteps. Examples of these ideologies are Nazism with Hitler and Maoism with Mao Zedong.

Both of these belief systems are the answer to one suffering with Decidophobia. There is even an instruction manual for the Decidophobic that relieves him or her of any future personal decisions. The beliefs revealed and the instructions are clear in their ‘bibles’. Mein Kampf, Mao’s Little Red Book, and the Koran. These belief systems are now the Decidophobic’s community, their country that they dwell within surrounded by fellow citizens of their little nation.

And the word nation is not used lightly here.

Take Islam. The nation of Muslims is the nation of Islam – or the Ummah. Ever wonder why the Islamists are so vehement about nationalism as practiced today? Quite simple. It runs counter to the concept of the nation of Islam. A true Muslim can not be a citizen of two nations at once. Mohammed condemned the concept of nationalism in any and all forms. The jihadist condemnation of the World Soccer Cup is a case in point.

“Claiming that soccer plants the seeds of nationalism, and is therefore part of a "colonial crusader scheme" to divide Muslims and cause them to stray from the vision of a unified Islamic identity, the Jihadist website told readers: "The sad fact of the matter is that many Muslims have fallen for this new religion and they too carry the national flag.”

This might seem silly to us and we degrade those who hold such a looney idea but it fits nicely into Islam’s goal to stop Muslims from straying from their true nation, that of Islam. Which brings up the concept of the Path to God that dovetails perfectly with the Islamist view that the destruction of the secular world is the necessary first step in creating an Islamic utopia on earth.

Why are the Islamists so concerned with the secular view of the world? Yes, we say it’s because it conflicts with our secular story that promotes freedom and democracy and Islam can not coexist with it, etc. etc. But why? What are the religious grounds for this? That is to say, how can secularism be a threat to the Muslim’s path to God?

The Hindus have recognized for centuries four paths - or ways - to self-development and spiritual growth - the Way of Action, the Way of Love, the Way of Knowledge, and the Way of Mind Control or Meditation. Islam uses primarily the Way of Action. In the book entitled ‘The One Quest’ written by Claudio Naranjo, the two approaches to ‘right action’ are the one of discipline, duty, injunctions and restraint; and the other it’s direct opposite, the one of self-expression, self-trust, and unconstraint. In the latter case, freedom itself can lead to the goal of self-improvement of the spirit by providing the greatest opportunity for experience and choice.

Guess which ‘right action’ is the choice of Islam and why it’s current choice of the path to spiritual development will be extremely difficult to integrate into a world filled with the thirst for freedom? Yep – the approach of discipline, duty, injunctions and restraint – the direct opposite of what modern western style culture exhibits today.

Our modern day culture believes that self-improvement – at least in the physical realm - can only be achieved by the greatest opportunity for experience and personal choice, unrestricted by any discipline, duty, injunction or restraint. Taken to extremes, one approach leads to the restriction of everything, the other, the permissiveness of everything.

Clash of civilizations? You bet. Clash of paths to self-improvement? You bet.

The outlook is not good for any kind of integration of the two ‘approaches’. Take the way of action that demands discipline, duty, injunctions and restraint – that is, the removal of any and all physical world distractions (including the female body) and entities (nationalism) that would hinder the true believer’s goal of reaching paradise - and we have the Taliban. Allow freedom to disintegrate into license and we are left with the nihilism of Nietzsche.

One approach leads to a constipated, restricted, dead culture – Islam. The other to the chaos of relativism where moral equivalency, political correctness and multiculturalism prevent the perception of what’s right and what’s wrong. Neither extreme assists both the individual or society’s spirit reach its fullest potential.

Finally, both extreme belief systems, theocratic and secular, are two sides of the same coin. Islam sees religion and the state as one and the same. Their book of beliefs dictates how society should function. Secular extremism like Nazi Germany and Maoist China operated the same way. The leader’s belief and the function of the state were direct results of the ‘bibles’ of Mein Kampf and the Little Red Book.

Now what about the Third Wave of Islam? Bernard Lewis writes:

The first wave dates from the very beginning of Islam, when the new faith spilled out of the Arabian Peninsula, where it was born, into the Middle East and beyond. It was then that Muslims conquered Syria, Palestine, Egypt and North Africa — all at that time part of the Christian world — and went beyond into Europe. There, they conquered a sizable part of southwestern Europe, including Spain, Portugal and southern Italy, all of which became part of the Islamic world, and even crossed the Pyrenees and occupied for a while parts of France.

The second wave was conducted not by Arabs and Moors but by Turks and Tartars. In the mid-13th century, the Mongol conquerors of Russia were converted to Islam. The Turks, who had already conquered Anatolia, advanced into Europe and in 1453 they captured the ancient Christian citadel of Constantinople. They conquered a large part of the Balkans, and for a while ruled half of Hungary. Twice they reached as far as Vienna, to which they laid siege in 1529 and again in 1683. Barbary corsairs from North Africa went to Iceland — the uttermost limit — and to several places in Western Europe, including notably a raid on Baltimore (the original one, in Ireland) in 1631.

The third wave is taking a different form: terror and migration. The subject of terror has been discussed frequently and in great detail. What I want to address here is the other aspect, which is of more particular relevance to Europe today — the question of migration.

Where do we stand now? Is it third time lucky? It is not impossible. Muslim immigrants have certain clear advantages. They have fervor and conviction, which in most Western countries are either weak or lacking.

It’s not that our story is weak, but how we practicing it.

[Muslims] are self-assured of the rightness of their cause, whereas we spend most of our time in self-denigration and self-abasement. They have loyalty and discipline, and perhaps most important of all, they have demography. The combination of natural increase and migration that is producing major population changes could lead within the foreseeable future to significant majorities in at least some European cities or even countries.

Our challenge today is to reach back in time and tell the coherent beneficial story that freedom loving people have fought for and attained over the last several centuries.

But we also have some advantages, the most important of which are knowledge and freedom. The appeal of genuine modern knowledge in a society that, in the more distant past, had a long record of scientific and scholarly achievement is obvious. They are keenly and painfully aware of their relative backwardness and welcome the opportunity to rectify it.

Less obvious but also powerful is the appeal of freedom. In the past, in the Islamic world the word freedom was not used in a political sense. Freedom was a legal concept. You were free if you were not a slave. They did not use freedom and slavery as a metaphor for good and bad government, as we have done for a long time in the Western world.

But the idea of freedom in its Western interpretation is making headway. It is becoming more and more understood, more and more appreciated and more and more desired. It is perhaps in the long run our best hope, perhaps even our only hope, of surviving this developing struggle.

The one place where we can most definitely lose the war on terror is on the battlefield of ideas. Who would believe that a combination of pure hatred and medieval superstition would provide the most appealing ideology of the 21st century?

What is our counter? The ideology of freedom, obviously. But do we really believe in it anymore? That is hard to believe on a continent which in the previous century was ravaged by the deadly poisons fascism and socialism, where everybody now seems to know what they are against (America, Jews, capitalism, immigrants, whatever), but there is little left to unite us when we are forced to decide what we are fighting for.

We need to affirm what we are fighting for and not just against.

Secular Blasphemy writes:

The one place where we can most definitely lose the war on terror is on the battlefield of ideas. Who would believe that a combination of pure hatred and medieval superstition would provide the most appealing ideology of the 21st century? What is our counter? The ideology of freedom, obviously. But do we really believe in it anymore?

Or do we believe in what Janis Joplin said, “Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.”

Before we get to that point, I hope we can tell our story in ways that will halt and push back the strong global story of the Islamists.

 

Never Forget

Recipe for an Islamist Global Insurgency

On our last Friday's Gathering Storm Radio Show we discussed with Mr. Frank Salvato whether we were winning the war against Islamism. He said, we were not. We were losing the real jihad. The jihad not covered by the MSM. The real jihad misuderstood by the majority of the free world.

The political jihad - or what's known as the 'soft' jihad. They are using a very succcesful recipe for world domination which is one part intimidation, one part infiltration, one part disinformation and two parts of the appeasing and apologizing of the ‘useful idiots’.

But Foehammer’s Anvil has one just as good.

1 ) Create an atmosphere of fear.

2 ) Squash free speech through that fear.

3 ) Alienate Western democratic governments from their own people through the paranoia surrounding terrorist events and the culture of fear.

4 ) Alienate the Jews from the world until such time that Israel can be destroyed, especially through “world” bodies like the United Nations and by fomenting anti-Semetism in the West.

5 ) Squash the will of the American and European people to fight the jihad longterm by using the “Death by 1000 Cuts” strategy in Iraq and wherever else it can be maintained perpetually using martyrs, Al Qaeda, etc. Use terrorism, sectarian violence, open jihad and “good cop, bad cop” strategies.

6 ) Populate all nations with as many Muslims as possible and slowly usurp their populations, especially in low-Western birth nations throughout Europe. Increase the Muslim birthrate whenever possible and especially marry non-Islamic women and “revert” them as a priority.

7 ) Lobby for changes to laws in all nations to better serve the jihad through the perpetuation of myths like “Islamophobia.” Ally with the far Left to accomplish this whenever prudent. Fabricate and instigate media events in order to sway public opinion also (i.e. the US Airways Imams).

8 ) “Revert” first the lowliest elements in Western nations like their criminals and ill-educated, then once the “culture of fear” sets in, perpetuate further “reversions” to Islam through political overtures like those used by Ahmadinejad in his letters. Use college campuses, too, and prey upon the young, liberal idealists who are especially ignorant of the teachings of the Qur’an but will quickly drink up the fight for the “enlightened barbarians” from the Middle East.

9 ) Kill as many of the stubborn “polytheists” that are left over as necessary in order to further the ends of 1-7 and especially #8. Use of WMDs, poisons, outright murder — as long as the “good cop, bad cop” strategy can be maintained by the ruling Islamic leaders to keep the world entangled in political red tape, it’s all fair.

10 ) Mix well and repeat.

11 ) Be patient.

12 ) Islamic victory.

Quo Vadis America?

I’ve been thinking. A dangerous thing, I know. 

I’ve been at this blogging thing for a few years now; many other have been at it much longer. I started out like all of us, I guess, with the idea that by educating others to the threat from Islam we could gain their support. After all, it was Einstein who said history was a race between education and catastrophe. 

In my opinion, this race will be won by catastrophe. 

Looking at what we have elected to lead us and the MSM becoming the propaganda arm of that leadership, I have come to the conclusion that there is little we can do now to ‘educate’ what’s left of the masses. 

So, we wait for the catastrophe. 

The issue then is Quo Vadis – which way does this country go after that. 

Let me segue for a moment and compare today with the decade before WWII.  That decade began with the American public having little interest in the current political problem in Europe and Asia. Who cared if some nutcase by the name of Hitler and another nutcase by the name of Tojo were making insane remarks about the Third Reich and the Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Most Americans didn’t care what happened in Austria, Czechoslovakia or some place called Mongolia. 

They weren’t our concern in the early days of the 1930s. We had our own problems namely the Great Depression. 

But over the years, as Americans were polled and they began to be educated by the events in Europe and in China, public opinion slowly changed. But an Administration that knew the nature of the enemy – fascism – and knew it would have to be confronted someday did not have the popular support to enter the war against the German and Japanese regimes. 

That all changed on December 7^th, 1941. After that date our country found its voice and as one, went to war to defeat the global threat to freedom. 

Now fast forward 70 years. 

Today, instead of a growing understanding of the threat facing us, the general public is growing less knowledgeable to the threat to their freedoms. And instead of an Administration that sees the threat, we have one that ignores it. 

Over the 10 years from 1930 to 1940, America moved towards recognizing the threat. Over the last 10 years, America has gone in the opposite direction and has learned to ignore the threat – even after 9/11. 

So what happens when the inevitable catastrophe occurs? 

America can go in one of two ways. 

In the 1930s, we learned that our freedoms were at risk from tyrants and we had a government that saw that risk and acted on the cry from the public “Remember Pearl Harbor!” The general public demanded action. Demanded retaliation. Demanded that their freedoms be protected. 

And the government complied. 

I fear that this will not be the response when our catastrophe occurs - one that kills tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of Americans. I fear the response to public demand for action, retaliation and protection will go unheeded by the current leadership with their own idea of who the real enemy is. And when the public see that their leadership will not take the proper action, many will take that action upon  themselves. 

The response from such leadership we have today would be to turn on those carrying through on the necessary action to protect our freedoms. It will use the constitutional ‘crisis’ to impose draconian restrictions on our freedoms to protect the ‘victims’ who perpetrated the biggest bloodbath in American history. 

There will be a choice and a choice will have to be made. 

Will the current Administration respond as its predecessor did 70 years ago? Or will it turn on its citizens because deep down inside they refuse to recognize the enemy and fail to protect us from it. 

Quo Vadis America?

 

Getting a Handle on the Terror War

Those in the know are quite aware that our political and military leaders either refuse to understand or don’t understand and the true nature of our enemy and the many different tactics they employ. Every once and while a light bulb goes off in some corner of the political-military-think-tank universe and they flirt with a way to go about confronting our Islamist enemy.

Such was the case of a Georgetown University professor.

Defeating terrorism - or at least battling it back to pre-9/11 levels - takes both brawn and brains, a Georgetown University professor said Friday. Yet so far, the United States has only used half that equation - the brawn of military muscle - in its war on terror, leaving the country just as vulnerable to attack as it was when al-Qaida blindsided the United States 5½ years ago, said Bruce Hoffman, keynote speaker Friday at a daylong seminar on religion, violence and terrorism at Case Western Reserve University.

So far so good. The professor understands militant jihad in the form of terrorism and on the battlefield is only a part of the overall strategy of multiple types of jihad that the Islamists are using against us.

He said the United States must pause now and thoroughly study the enemy - its motivation, its strategy, its culture, its strengths and weaknesses - to battle it on fronts that extend beyond a battlefield.

Ah! He understands. It’s not just the acts of terrorism that need to be defeated but the ideology that drives it as well.

Now, every time the U.S. kills part of al-Qaida, it simply regrows, Hoffman said.

Every time a terrorist plot is broken up, new al-Qaida operatives tinker with the plan to make it stronger so they can attack again, he said. Just as the United States knows it can't kill every terrorist, terrorists know they can't kill every Westerner. Instead, Hoffman said, terrorists are trying to use fear to undermine the pact between governments and their people, all the while planning to launch bigger and more sensational attacks.

Exactly! You don’t achieve victory by defeating the enemy on the battlefield. Those are just battles won. You achieve victory buy destroying their ideology at its roots and prevent it from re-surfacing again.

Unfortunately, the professor did not follow through on his argument by identifying the “motivation, its strategy, its culture” of our Islamic enemies. He failed to list actual examples of the tactics used by the Islamists everyday in the non-Muslim world like:

Ø Terminate America's freedom of speech by replacing it with statewide and nationwide hate-crime bills.

Ø Nominate Muslim sympathizers to political office to bring about favorable legislation toward Islam and support potential sympathizers by block voting.

Ø Yell ''foul, out-of-context, personal interpretation, hate crime, Zionist, un- American, inaccurate interpretation of the Quran'' anytime Islam is criticized or the Quran is analyzed in the public arena.

Ø Encourage Muslims to penetrate the White House, specifically with Islamists who can articulate a marvelous and peaceful picture of Islam. Acquire government positions and get membership in local school boards. Train Muslims as medical doctors to dominate the medical field, research and pharmaceutical companies. (Ever notice how numerous Muslim doctors in America are, when their countries need them more desperately than America?) Take over the computer industry. Establish Middle Eastern restaurants throughout the U.S. to connect planners of Islamization in a discreet way.

Ø Reading, writing, arithmetic and research through the American educational system, mosques and student centers (now 1,500) should be sprinkled with dislike of Jews, evangelical Christians and democracy. There are currently 300 exclusively Muslim schools in the U.S. which teach loyalty to the Quran, not the U.S. Constitution. In January of 2002, Saudi Arabia’s Embassy in Washington mailed 4,500 packets of the Quran and videos promoting Islam to America's high schools – free of charge. Saudi Arabia would not allow the U.S. to reciprocate.

Ø Nullify America's sense of security by manipulating the intelligence community with misinformation. Periodically terrorize Americans with reports of impending attacks on bridges, tunnels, water supplies, airports, apartment buildings and malls.

I await the day when one of our leaders stands up and identifies the multiple types of jihads that the Islamists are using against the non-Muslim and moderate Muslim world.

• Litigation Jihad
• Education Jihad
• Cultural Jihad
• Demographic Jihad,
• Economic jihad
• Institutional Jihad
• Media jihad
• Financial jihad
• Criminal jihad
• Thuggery Jihad.

Hopefully, the event that will bring such leaders forward will not be the result of 100,000 innocent Americans dead.

Offend Someone Online - Go To Prison

This from your friendly neighborhood Leftist fascist. Why isn't Rep Snachez shouted down for this kind of crap?

Oh, that's right. She's from California. Link here.

At a time when freedom of speech is already under attack like never before, a shocking new bill in the U.S. House of Representatives would make it a felony to offend someone online.

A felony.

Under this new law you would not just be slapped on the wrist and have to pay a fine.

You would go to big boy prison.

While most free speech activists have been watching the recent "hate crimes" bill, this much more insidious piece of legislation has received almost no notice whatsoever.

Just take a look at what H.R. 1966 actually says.....

Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person, using electronic means to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.

Whoa.

So if you offend someone on Facebook you could go to federal prison for two years?

Yup.

If your blog insults someone and causes them to feel bad you could go to prison for two years?

Yeppers.

If you are in a bad mood one day and you send fire off an angry tweet on Twitter that you maybe should not have you could go to prison for two years over it?

Yes indeed.

Are you starting to get the picture yet?

Talk about an attempt to chill free speech.

So if someone reads something that you have written and it makes them feel bad they can take it to the feds and have them come get you?

That is a very, very frightening thought.

The reality is that the government is increasingly trying to control even the very small details of our lives. They are even increasingly trying to control what we say and what we think.

Freedom of speech is one of the cornerstones of a free society. If we are not free to express ourselves without the fear that someone will be offended, then what freedom will we really have left?

The reality is that if we do not stand up to this, the United States of America will quickly become overrun with politically-correct "commissars" who are eager to throw anyone who disagrees with them in jail for "hate crimes" and "thought crimes".

Things are already out of control in the United Kingdom. Did you know that there are actually undercover officers in some areas of the U.K. that sit in bars and restaurants listening for anyone who might say something offensive or racist?

You may laugh, but the United States is quickly heading down that road.

Tracking a Terrorist Nuclear Attack

A group of nuclear weapons specialists issued ominous warnings before members of the U.S. Congress that terrorist groups like al-Qaida could launch a massive nuclear attack on the United States and currently there is little to deter or defend against such a strike.

Sidney Drell, an arms control specialist and physicist at Stanford University, told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee the United States has entered, what he calls, a "dangerous time."

"I view us on the precipice of entering a new and more dangerous nuclear era with the spread of technology, which means, in particular, the enrichment of uranium, which makes it possible for more societies to enter the nuclear club," he said. "That raises the danger of nuclear weapons getting in the hands of terrorist groups and others unrestrained by the norms of civilized behavior as we know it and therefore these weapons become more likely to be used."

"If we discover that a country has purposely transferred fissile material or a nuclear weapon to a terrorist group, we ought to be telling them in advance that we will treat them as though they were the one who launched the attack and they should expect devastating retaliation," he added.

All well and good. But how would you know what country fissile material or a nuclear weapon came from? Though our first response would be to nuke someone – anyone – the reality is that we couldn’t take such drastic action without confirming where the nuclear material came from.

There is a way and it was used to some extent in a Tom Clancy novel The Sum of All Fears.

The procedure is called Nuclear Attribution.

Since the beginning of the atomic age, the fear of a retaliatory attack has kept many a nuclear nation from getting too close to the launch button. But with nuclear terrorism now the paramount threat and rogue regimes able to peddle the necessary ingredients on the black market, the classic deterrence of reprisal is no longer an adequate defense.

That’s led security experts to devise a new strategy: Hold states directly accountable for leaks or illicit sales of fissile material. How? Nuclear attribution.

Using sophisticated techniques such as radiochemical analysis, scientists can determine the isotopic fingerprint of elements like uranium and plutonium, even after they have been used in a detonated bomb. Then, by isolating telltale trace contaminants and using traditional law-enforcement methods, analysts can narrow down the range of original sources, providing in the process a kind of “birth certificate” for nuclear material. They could then know whether the material used in a bomb might have come from, say, North Korean or Iranian facilities.

The information needed for such an investigation has been going on for some time.

For a decade, an informal international working group of scientists and law-enforcement personnel have been meeting to share forensic techniques. The methods, however, are only half the equation. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the European Commission, and the United States have been gathering databanks of “nuclear fingerprints” from different sources, against which they can match forensic samples. Having a thorough log of the world’s fissile material would be an invaluable tool in fighting nuclear terrorism.

We inform the nuclear nations that we will track the nuclear attributes of the bomb or nuke materials in the case of a dirty bomb back to its source and respond to that country or countries accordingly. Such an announcement, in the case of North Korea, was actually made by President Bush.

Directly after North Korea tested a nuclear bomb, President George W. Bush invoked nuclear attribution directly when he warned that “the transfer of nuclear weapons or material by North Korea to states or non-state entities would be considered a grave threat to the United States, and [it] would hold North Korea fully accountable of the consequences of such action.”

But there's a rub.

But in order for attribution to be truly effective, states will have to work together to develop policies that hold accountable all states with nuclear facilities, not just rogue regimes in Pyongyang or Tehran. What happens, for instance, if the material used in a nuclear terror attack is traced back to France or Russia? Even countries that aren’t charter members of the “axis of evil” don’t always adequately track or report lost, stolen, or smuggled nuclear materials. Eighty percent of seizures of nuclear material cannot be matched with recorded thefts, according to the IAEA. But for nuclear attribution to work as a deterrent, all countries, even the United States, must be held liable for the harm done from their wayward nuclear material.

That doesn’t mean that Moscow or Paris should be blown up in retaliation for a nuclear blast set off in the United States by terrorists. But countries could be held legally responsible for monetary damages. The families of victims can be compensated and properties rebuilt. The cost would be enormous but repaid over time. Such a policy would not be entirely without precedent—consider Libya’s payments for the 1988 airline blast over Lockerbie, Scotland—but it would be an incentive for states to keep their nuclear stocks more secure, or avoid nuclear capabilities altogether.

So is nuclear attribution the solution to deterrence?

But the prospects for this kind of multilateral coordination may not be bright: Countries are loath to give up their own nuclear information, including how they may have covertly obtained data on other countries’ programs.

The currents state of deterrence is no longer effective now that rogue regimes and terrorist organizations may get nuclear weapons for their use. Though not perfect, nuclear attribution of a new form of deterrence. But deterrence doesn’t work if you don’t state ahead of time your intentions. Time could be running short. It’s a national security policy issue that should be addressed now.

Once Upon a Time in America

As the threat to our culture and civilization from an evil and decadent ideology progressed at a rapid pace, the MSM, celebrities and anti-war organizations spread their disinformation and plied their appeasing trade.

From the main stream media: "The most ominous event in the history of the American Government has been the sudden rise in the power and authority of the executive will.”

From a celebrity: “It is not the duty of the United States to police the world.”

From an anti-war organization: Americans naturally wish security and peace for the rest of the world, but it is not entirely within their powers to bring these things about.

What year are these quotes from? 2001? 2002? 2007?

Nope. 1940

• Garet Garrett wrote the first quote in the Saturday Evening Post, October, 1940.
• Charles Lindbergh, the celebrity, said this in his testimony in Washington in1940.
• Quoted by the America First Committee in 1940 - and anti-war organization.

Just a year later, Pearl Harbour was bombed.

Did these appeasers learn from their misinterpretation of events? Did they publicly admit that they were wrong? Did they shuffle their feet and apologize for the additional deaths they caused by preventing the government from committing the country earlier to the war effort?

On December 11, 1941 the America First Committee leaders met and voted for dissolution. In the statement they released to the press was the following:

“Our principles were right. Had they been followed, war could have been avoided. No good purpose can now be served by considering what might have been, had our objectives been attained...”

Now that’s ballsy.

So when it’s finally clear that we are at war with a malicious ideology that even a blind man with a cane can see it, the liberals, democrats, appeasers and apologist will still say – “We didn’t do enough to avert war.”

As they say, proven wrong, a fanatic redoubles his efforts.

Taking the Jihad Temperature - A Gathering Storm Special Series – APPEASEMENT – Part 8

If you throw a frog into boiling water, he will jump out. If you put it in cold water and slowly turn up the heat, he will not notice the rise in temperature and will eventually boil.

The Islamists are boiling our frog and though this blog and hundreds like it record almost daily the rise in the Jihad temperature, unless we see how far and fast the temperature has risen, we will not know how far along our boiling has progressed.

So, the Gathering Storm will be posting only once a week but these weekly posts will take the Jihadist temperature by looking back at news and events over the last two years. Over the next several weeks in the areas of intimidation, infiltration, disinformation and those appeasers and apologists who either knowingly or unknowingly advance the Jihad agenda, the Gathering Storm will show how far our frog has been boiled.

By seeing the boiling water around us, we can see how far the boiling has progressed.

The good news is that we are noticing that the water is getting warmer. There is a glimmer of awareness here - a glimmer of hope there. But we have a long way to go.

Here’s this week’s look back at the rising Jihad temperature of APPEASEMENT !! And remember – this is just a sampling of Jihadist Appeasement. More to follow.

Storm Track Appeasement: Boiling the Infidel Frog

We all know the cliché of boiling a frog. You don’t throw it into boiling water. You slowly heat it up as it doesn’t realize it’s boiling into he’s dead.

Same goes for Britain today and the USA tomorrow.

Foot baths for Muslim students at Michigan universities? Muslim cabbies in the Twin Cities who refuse to carry seeing-eye dogs? The FBI and other government agencies taking sensitivity training from radical Muslim organizations? You think we’ve lost the plot over here? Take a look at British submission to Islamofascist demands and threats, as that once great nation succumbs to creeping dhimmitude.

It has reached the point that in mid-April, the British Foreign Office instructed the Royal Navy not to return pirates to jurisdictions sporting sharia law (such as Somalia) for fear that their human rights will be violated. They have even been discouraged from capturing pirates, because the freebooters might ask to be granted asylum in Britain, a request with which the UK might have to comply under international and European Union human rights law.

??!!??!!

This for a Navy that almost singlehandedly defeated piracy in the early 19th century, and a nation that retained the death penalty for this scourge of the high seas until the late 20th century.

Welcome to Britain today.

Another recent outrage involves special handling of a traffic violation. Seems that a Muslim driver was stopped by police while speeding between two homes in the north of England. When he appeared in court, he explained his high speed – over twice the speed limit – was necessary to accommodate his two wives. His explanation was accepted, and he was allowed to keep his license.

Sick to your stomach yet? Here’s’ more.

That comes fast – very fast – on the heels of a decision by the British government to grant full spousal benefits to multiple wives. It won’t affect more than an estimated 1,000 individuals. And it mercifully won’t affect the indigenous Christian, Hindu or Jewish population, as traditional bigamy laws apply. Britons may rest easy, as it will only cover multiple wives married in a jurisdiction that practices Sharia law, such as Pakistan or Saudi Arabia.

Swimming periods at pools restricted to Muslims only; the establishment of a BBC Arabic language station staffed by Arab broadcasters and managers with track records of being anti-American, anti-Israel and anti-Western; the refusal of female Muslim medical students to wash their arms as that practice might reveal the forbidden flesh between wrist and elbow; an attempt by a national union of university lecturers to call for a boycott of Israeli academics; and, a local Council ban on pig-themed toys, porcelain figures and calendars on workers’ desks because it might offend Muslims.

The article goes on to say …

Why is this important to us? Because the ZaNuLabour Party’s tendency to pacifism and appeasement, and its devotion to political correctness, victim ideology, cultural relativism and liberal guilt is shared by our own Democrats.

Look for more of it in Britain, and don’t be surprised when it arrives full force here in America.

Well – it’s here.

Creeping Sharia has covered John McCain’s home states race to join the ummah before. This time it’s terrorist founded, Saudi-funded, unindicted co-conspirator to a terror funding case, CAIR leading the charge!

For a primer, read Sharia Alerts: Arizona which includes headlines such as these:
- AZ court rules Muslim food must be served in Arizona jails
- Turning Arizona schools into Muslim madrassas
- Phoenix airport succumbs to sharia - installs Islamic foot baths for Muslims
- Phoenix imam states Muslims want sharia in US
- Mesa resident denied raising funds for terror-linked group
- New $5M Islamic center to break ground

And Muslim Leads Opening Prayer of Arizona House of Reps.

And now this.

Phoenix Airport Allows Special Clothing For Somali Muslim Janitorial Workers.

Who wears the pants at Sky Harbor airport?

Not 30 Somali women who fought for the right to wear skirts on the job, and won.

The Muslim women balked at a planned policy change by their employer, GCA Services, (that’s GCA’s logo pictured above), that would have forced them to wear pants and a tucked-in shirt as they did their janitorial duties.

They’d been previously allowed to wear skirts; pants are too immodest for them.

After discussions between GCA managers, airport officials, the Arizona chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Somali Association of Arizona, it was agreed the 30 women could wear black skirts and aprons in addition to a white shirt. Their right to wear the Muslim headscarves known as hijabs was never in question, says Hakim Osman of the Somali Association of Arizona.

Osman says that after hearing of the women immigrants’ concern when GCA announced plans for a new uniform late last year, he wrote the company a letter asking for “reasonable accomodations.”

The change was supposed to take effect on August 21, but never did, Osman says. Which is good, because the Somalis would have refused to wear pants on religious grounds, he says.

Most Muslim women choose skirts or a dress instead of pants, which are considered immodest, says Osman.

Update: Dhimmi Watch has posted on this story -

After all, it reinforces a precedent that has already been set in other contexts: when Islamic practices are at variance with American ones, it is the American ones that must give way. What will be the outcome of following that precedent over a period of years?

Good question. I bet we’ll go the way of Britain above.

Storm Track Appeasement: More Mental Stupidity from the UK

If you’re a Muslim convicted of a crime the UK you can bet your bottom dinar that you will demand accommodation in your punishment. After all – Isn’t that what multiculturalism is all about. Certain cultures unequal and above the law of others?

A benefit cheat attempted to avoid doing unpaid work in the community on religious grounds.

Over several years mother-of-three Noreen Shah claimed more than £10,000 in benefits without disclosing up to £20,000, stashed in a secret bank account, to Watford Borough Council.

Shah, of Longspring, North Watford, has no previous convictions and was told she would not go to prison, but that the court was looking to impose a punishment in the form of a high level community order, or what used to be known as community service.

But Dacorum Magistrates Court’s bench, chaired by Sandra Caldwell, was informed that because of Shah’s religious beliefs the proposed community order could cause “difficulties” if she had to work alongside men.

Can you see a non-Muslim say this? She would be laughed at and dispatched forth with.

The full-time mother, whose husband was in court to support her, is very active in the Watford community carrying out voluntary work especially in furthering the children’s Islamic education, said her defence.

Indoctrination, you mean.

The report also recommended a curfew, but the court was told that was not “appropriate” with the Muslim festival of Ramadan approaching.

Mr Bashir said there would be nighttime activities in the local mosque that she would miss out on.

How many more excuses can this broad come up with?

Rashid Choudhrey, one of the trustees of the Watford Mosque attended by the defendant, said after the case he knew nothing in the Islamic faith to prevent Shah carrying out unpaid work alongside men.

“Islam does not forbid her. My understanding is that if you commit a crime, you take the punishment,” he said.

“If you are that religious you should not commit the crime anyway. If you are that God fearing, why would you want to take money away from other people that need it?”

Because it’s the tax infidels must pay to Muslims. It’s not stealing – it’s their due!

Get a FREE TRIAL COPY of the The Gathering Storm eBook which includes the Forward by Walid Shoebat, Introduction, and first 50 pages of The Gathering Storm eBook. And sign up for my free WEEKLY STORM REPORT and receive a synopsis of the most important weekly news revealing the intimidation, infiltration and disinformation tactics used to soften-up the non-Muslim world for domination.

Taking the Jihad Temperature - A Gathering Storm Special Series – DISINFORMATION Part 8

If you throw a frog into boiling water, he will jump out. If you put it in cold water and slowly turn up the heat, he will not notice the rise in temperature and will eventually boil. 

The Islamists are boiling our frog and though this blog and hundreds like it record almost daily the rise in the Jihad temperature, unless we see how far and fast the temperature has risen, we will not know how far along our boiling has progressed. 

So, the Gathering Storm will be posting only once a week but these weekly posts will take the Jihadist temperature by looking back at news and events over the last two years. Over the next several weeks in the areas of intimidation, infiltration, disinformation and those appeasers and apologists who either knowingly or unknowingly advance the Jihad agenda, the Gathering Storm will show how far our frog has been boiled. 

By seeing the boiling water around us, we can see how far the boiling has progressed. 

The good news is that we are noticing that the water is getting warmer. There is a glimmer of awareness here - a glimmer of hope there. But we have a long way to go. 

Here’s this week’s look back at the rising Jihad temperature of DISINFORMATION !! And remember – this is just a sampling of Jihadist Disinformation. More to follow.

Storm Track Disinformation: Useful Idiots for Islam or Just Plain Stupidity?

In case you missed it, Christiane Amanpour of CNN is doing a three part series called ‘Gods Warriors’ – an exercise in moral equivalency. I know you’re not surprised.

Coming to the defense of this blatant piece of Liberal disinformation that compares the most extreme practitioners of Christianity and Judaism with the extreme Islamists who routinely blow up innocent men, women and children is Tamron Hall who seemed to suggest that Christians and Jews could be next to emulate Muslim terror tactics.

From NewsBusters.

Earlier today, Hall had watched the segment on Jewish extremists. Scarborough called CNN on its moral relativism.

JOE SCARBOROUGH [Note: speaking very much tongue-in-cheek]: I'm sure we're going to find that there are Jewish and Christian organizations, international terror networks, that are set on the destruction of entire civilizations as we find in the Muslim world.

View video here.

SCARBOROUGH: The way they're promoting this, they're promoting this as "God's Warriors." And there is a moral equivalency argument here, that somehow there's extremism in all religions, and somehow it's all equal. It is the Rosie O'Donnell argument that we should be just as nervous with Christian extremism as Muslim extremism.

HALL: I don't think that's what they're implying. I don't think that. I can't speak for . .

SCARBOROUGH: It's certainly what it looks like in the advertisements.

A bit later:

SCARBOROUGH: There is a big, big difference between me believing that Scientologists don't have the way to heaven, and me going out and blowing up Scientology centers. And that right now is what separates Muslim extremists from Christian and Jewish extremists.

That's when Hall took her argument one giant step further . . .

HALL: But is it fair to ask the question "how long does that separation exist?" Because you never know who the next [terrorist] group [will be]. I'm not saying that [a few additional unintelligible words]."

Ding Dong. Ding Dong.

Not to be undone, Michael Hodges wrote an article about the positive impact that Islam would have on London.

Writing in the entertainment paper TimeOut London in June, TimeOut editor at large Michael Hodges imagined an Islamic London. London under Sharia law, Hodges wrote, would be healthier: “the Muslim act of prayer is designed to keep worshippers fit, their joints supple and, at five times a day, their stomachs trim.” It would be sober: “Forbid alcohol throughout the country, and you’d avoid many of the 22,000 alcohol-related deaths and the £7.3 billion national bill for alcohol-related crime and disorder each year.” It would also be ecologically sound, and Islamic education would raise “general levels of discipline and self-respect among London’s young people.”

Meanwhile, “application of halal (Arabic for ‘permissible) dietary laws across London would free us at a stroke from our addiction to junk food, and the general adoption of a south Asian diet rich in fruit juice, rice and vegetables with occasional mutton or chicken would have a drastic effect on obesity, hyperactivity, attention deficit disorders and associated public health problems.”

Ding Dong. Ding Dong.

As Robert Spencer mused, “Religious bigotry would disappear as Jews, Christians, and – probably — Hindus became protected dhimmis under the benevolent rule of Islamic law.” How nice.

It boggles the mind that a leftist would write about the good that could be brought by imposing a state religion. Aren’t these the same people who will rage against anything Christian at every turn? Aren’t these the same people who would have us removed anything Christian from every square inch of public property? Yet here he goes out of his way to find good in a untenable situation.

Every bad thing that Christians have ever been accused of, has actually been done ten fold by Islam; yet this nut wants to encourage the adoption of Islam as a state religion.

Storm Track Disinformation: Are Muslims the Biggest Threat to Western Civilization? Uh! Uh!

The liberal mind can’t seem to prioritize reality. Their attempts at seeing everything as being relative prevents them from seeing one threat being worse than another. It explains why to liberals, global warming, free healthcare, and poverty are equal or worse than the threat from Islamo-fascism.

So what IS the greatest threat to Western Civilization according to one blogger?

The concern on the right about the Muslim threat to Europe, overlooks the inconvenient truth that in the UK out-of-control youths - most of them white and ‘Christian’ - are responsible for a lot of the vandalism and violence. The threat to ‘civilization’ isn’t coming from Muslims of Asian origin. It’s coming in part from a resurgence of British yob culture, fueled to some degree by xenophobic nationalism. It would be pushing it to overplay the link between yob culture and the far right. Many of these kids are just acting out for the sheer hell of it - but a percentage are racist and anti-immigrant.

So, he sees the growing response to the Islamafication of Europe by ‘Christian’ thugs as a threat to the very civilization they wish to defend. Now, I’m not defending thuggery by any group but when the leadership of a country continues to ignore attempts by Islamists to impose Islamic law upon non-Islamic countries and allow the slow erosion of Western values and culture by committing national suicide, there will be groups of people who will one day take matters into their own hands.

In a recent survey of Muslim youth cited in the Guardian 31% said they felt “completely” British, 27% said they felt “a lot” British. A great many British youths of Muslim background do indeed see themselves as Brits and their gang activity is more often than not a response to neighborhood threats, or at least the perception of threat.

31% Completely? 27% a lot? Wanna take bets on how many of the Christian youth see themselves as British? And is the threat from Christian gang youth or is it really a threat to their attempt at Islamatizing the UK community.

Manzoor Moghal, of the Federation of Muslim Organizations, takes the view that British born Muslim youths have assimilated the worst of British culture. A BBC news report quotes him as saying - "They are following the norms of the youth culture of this country. Then because they come from a different racial group things do tend to acquire a racial complexion."

What? What norms? Getting back to British born yobs. They have no problem assimilating. Oh, and what about the Islamic influence?

Great care needs to be taken when attempting to brand Muslim youth violence as Islamist inspired. A lot of these young guys are "Muslim" in name only. Many of them couldn't quote from the Qur'an if their life depended on it. To try and classify them as Islamist sympathizers is absurd. To even get to first base as an Islamist you have to at least know the rudiments of Islamic teachings.

So to be an Islamist you need to quote the Koran. That’s rich. Al you need is some radical imam to quote it to you. And where does he think they pick up these rudiments of Islamic teachings?

And then he trots out that old liberal standby for why we have unhappy people.

The recent rioting in France was immediately pegged by some right wing pundits as a form of European jihad. This is way off base also. The riots were triggered by factors relating to discrimination, unemployment and a sense of hopelessness.

I and others have written about this troublesome future for Europe. If the European leadership does not face up to the threat to Western Civilization and ACT, the choice just may well be one between Islamo-fascism and the neo-fascism, or yobs, that the blogger wrote about.

So according to his post there is a reason for Muslim violence in the UK and it has nothing to do with ideological beliefs.

Ironically, a lot of the Muslim youth violence that right wingers like to pretend is Islamist inspired, often comes down to Muslim youths imitating the yob culture they find around them in UK cities. Who can blame them? If I was a young Muslim encountering gangs of local yobs I would get together with my buddies and fight back. Isn’t that human nature?

Yep. Muslim violence in the UK is just some local street gangs imitating yobs. So you see, the Islamic threat is solved! Stop the Christian UK youth from rumbling in the jungle and all will be at peace with Muslims in the UK.

Don’t laugh. That will be the exact response from the political leadership when civil war breaks out in Europe between the Muslim and non-Muslim populations.

It will be the non-Muslim’s fault.

 

Storm Track Disinformation: Islamic Taquia or Muslim Confusion?

Ever since 9-11 Muslim have said that everything had changed for them in America. But was that change discrimination by non-Muslims or by their own motivation to return to their faith.

First the alleged discrimination.

Back in July of 2005, USA Today ran an article about how workplace discrimination towards Muslims has increased since 9-11. BUT, as I wrote in a post a couple of weeks ago:

Muslim employment discrimination cases are rising at an alarming rate. The number of judicial opinions that were formerly issued in an entire decade are now coming out in a single month. Meanwhile, the rate of successful Muslim employment discrimination claims remains extremely low. In fact, the total number of judicial opinions in which courts have affirmed Muslim employment discrimination is 12. That is not a typo - the total count is a single dozen, in U.S. history. How many total claims? Around 300 resulting in court decisions. I believe that this astounding fact shows that there is a growing effort to perpetuate the myth that Muslims in the U.S. are treated poorly. The more interesting question is why this type of religious discrimination claim is on the rise. Perhaps we should look to the Muslim civil rights organizations for answers.

Then this piece of weird news. There have been quotes by young Muslim-American women who said that after 9-11 they felt they had to put on the hajib to show her solidarity with Muslims.

Rather than wrapping herself in an American flag, however, Azadeh Zainab Sharif, a Muslim student at San Francisco State University who grew up in San Diego but lived for several years in her father's native Iran, decided it was time to bring her religious identity out in the open. After 9/11, she began wearing a hijab, the scarf worn by many Muslim women around the world.

For Sharif, now 22, putting the scarf on coincided with her spiritual awakening as a devout Muslim, but it was also a reaction to what she perceived as growing fear among Muslims in this country.

What’s wrong with that picture? She fears for Muslims in the country so….she does her best to dress like one?!

Self-proclaimed Muslims fly planes into our buildings, claim to do it for Allah and the first thing a young Muslim-American woman does is put on a symbol that identifies herself with the motivation for the terrorists? Would a Japanese-American the day after Pearl Harbor prance around in a kimono?

Then there was this short video clip promoting a segment on BridgesTV - the all Muslim cable channel that is working its way into American households across the country. In a running segment called ‘It’s My Country too’, a Muslim rock band member laments the changes in non-Muslim attitudes towards Muslims in America.

In the short clip, he says that before 9-11 he would attract thousands of Muslims in Central Park to his concerts. Now none will come.

Why? He doesn’t say. Is he hinting that a Muslim audience would be attacked in some manner? Or perhaps, rock music is not halal and his audience has voluntarily withdrawn their support for his band now that after 9-11 they, like the young Muslim-American woman, have had a “spiritual awakening as a devout Muslim”.

He goes on. He says he’s fears a religious conflict in a country (America) that he loves as much as Pakistan. Again, here’s one of the prime reasons why Muslims can not adapt or assimilate into the countries they emigrate to. Their dual loyalty. Where in most cases, freely admitted, the loyalty to the Islamic nation – or Ummah – takes precedence.

Am I wrong or is there something screwy here?

Storm Track Disinformation: "It Is Not Easy to Defeat Islam, But It Is Easy to Live With It."

“Islam and the Living is Easy”

My apologies to Porgy and Bess.

According to OSCE Chairman Miguel Angel Moratinos, that’s what he advised the residents of Western countries which had Muslim populations. OSCE stands for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Of course, if you’re a regular follower of the anti-jihadist movement in the blogospher, you know that to live easily with Islam – is easy. Just do what Islam means – submit and you shall have peace.

And the bull gets even deeper from Mr. Moratinos.

The delegates were attending a conference on how to fight intolerance and discrimination against Muslims. Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa warned that the current situation contained "the seed of a long-term confrontation" between the West and the Muslim world, cautioning against acts such as creating caricatures of the prophet Mohammed.

He still doesn’t get it. The Mohammed cartoons were an expression of our right to free speech and if he is going to hang his entire argument on intolerance against Muslims on one of our basic rights, than Muslims are going to have a hard time being tolerated.

Then we have this myth which continues to propagate.

Several speakers referred to the tolerant coexistence of Muslims, Christians and Jews in Cordoba while Spain was under Moorish rule more than half a millennium ago.

Here’s the truth of Moorish Spain and what follows is the reality of living easily with Islam.

The Muslim Brotherhood has laid down its first detailed political platform, which would bar women and Christians from becoming president and establish a board of Muslim clerics to oversee the government, reminiscent of Iran's Islamic state.

The platform has dismayed secular reform activists who have cautiously hoped the Brotherhood was becoming more moderate and who supported the movement in the face of an unprecedentedly tough government crackdown against it.

Or how about this kind of ‘easy living’.

A fatwa issued in August 2007 by the secretary-general of the Assembly of Muslim Jurists in America (AMJA), Dr. Sheikh Salah Al-Sawy, states that marriage between a Muslim woman and a non-Muslim man is forbidden and invalid, and that children born of such a union are illegitimate.

"Marriage between a Muslim woman and a non-Muslim [man] is forbidden and invalid – that is a consensus among Muslims.

Get that? The consensus of Muslims. They'll never feel welcome in non-Muslim countries when spokesmen like this clown represents Islam.

A [Muslim] woman who has taken the liberty [of marrying a non-Muslim man] has removed herself from the fold of the Muslim community – and one who has done so knowing that it is wrong, has done something strictly forbidden, and has committed an open [act of] abomination that may hurl her into the abyss of heresy and apostasy.

Polish up those stones.

Isn’t life easy with Islam?

Storm Track Disinformation: This is What Passes As Academic Thinking in the West

A blog for students engaged in doctoral studies in the field of human rights, called PhD studies in human rights, posted and article entitled “Muslim World Journal of Human Rights” (Now there’s a contradiction in terms) in which it links to an article by Barb Rieffer-Flanagan, entitled "Improving Democracy in Religious Nation-States: Norms of Moderation and Cooperation in Ireland and Iran". Quite a mouthful but your thesis has to sound impressive for the pinheads in academia to hold any water.

At any rate, you read that right. She’s comparing Ireland to Iran! And get this. She posits that the same process that transpired in Ireland between Protestants and Catholics could be used to move Iran towards civil rights in that country.

And you wonder why academics have no clue as to what’s really happening in the world. I’d love to be on her thesis committee.

Many in the human rights community have expressed concern about the illiberal religious political system found in Iran today. However, Iran is not unique in its illiberal religious nationalism. Some contemporary liberal democracies in the West also have a history of illiberal religious nationalism. The English and later the British discriminated against Catholics in various ways. The Irish also have a history of discrimination against Protestants and inequality towards women which was based on a deep seated illiberal Catholic nationalism.

Moral equivalency between good and evil run amok. This deluded moonbat is actually comparing the act of discrimination by Catholics and Protestants to the burning of churches, beheading of apostates, hanging of homosexuals and stoning of adulterers.

In all of these cases moderation and liberalization occurred over time. An interesting question is whether moderation over time might be repeated outside of Europe, especially in religiously based nations in the Middle East.

Hey Barb? I think you need a remedial course in world history. Islam does not and can not allow moderation. It is the word of Allah written down verbatim by Mohammed to all Muslims.

When looking especially at the evolution of Ireland we notice that: economic prosperity spread throughout the population, the perception of a threat from the United Kingdom declined, European norms were spread within Ireland, and there were scandals within the Catholic Church.

Did you catch the indoctrination she parroted? A literal laundry list of Leftist philosophy. And economic prosperity improved civil rights. Isn’t that the mantra of the Left? Muslims in the Middle East hate the infidel because Muslims are economically disadvantaged?

And here’s the brainwashing showing through again.

If the external threats to Iran were removed and economic prosperity was to spread, as corruption and scandals came to light, we might expect that Iran may begin to moderate its political system.

Right. Like the average Iranian isn’t aware of the corruption of the Mullahs. Iranians live in a totalitarian theocracy and are just too scared to do anything about it.

Dream on, lady, dream on. And remember she may be teaching your kid in college someday.

Storm Track Disinformation: The Language of Jihad

I’ve been waiting to see the analysis of the letter from the 138 Muslim leaders call for common ground with Christians before I blogged on it. Many of the Christian leadership and political pundits shot from the hip and said this was a peaceful overture to non-Muslims and perhaps the beginning of a dialogue of peace between Muslims and non-Muslims.

To bad it ain’t so.

The reason is that we are dealing with an alien culture to our own. One that speaks its own language, has its own pedagogy, and except for a few non-Muslim scholars on Islam like Robert Spencer, it’s a language that the non-Muslim world ceases to understand.

Some say Muslims don’t say what they mean. That there words are a type of lie, or what Muslims call ‘taqiyya’. Though Muslims are permitted to lie and misdirect non-Muslims with their words, they, more often than not, mean exactly what they say. It’s just that the meaning of many of their words is very different from those of non-Muslims.

And the recent letter proves it.

First a personal experience as told by Robert Spencer. He was riding in a cab to some lecture he was doing years ago and saw that the cab driver was middle-eastern. He asked the driver if he was a Muslim. He said yes. Spencer asked why Muslim suicide bombers kill innocent people. The cab driver replied that it was against the Koran to kill innocent people – except if they’re Jews. To Muslims, the word innocent does not apply to everyone. There is a pecking order of innocence.

All Muslims are innocent. People of the Book – aka, the Bible - who welcome Islam either through conversion or submission are innocent. Infidels or those that refuse to accept Islam are not innocent – except the Jews. They’re damned if they do and dammed they don’t.

So let’s look at that letter and see what it really says.

One of the best analyses comes from Phyllis Chesler.

May I suggest that you share the following three points with Christians and Jews (People of the Book) and of course with Muslims whom you may know. These points were made by a Christian student of the Qur’an, “Steve Chambers,” (a pseudonym), who has self-published a book entitled “Jihad On Us All. The Roots and Branches of Islamic Militancy” (and is available through Amazon online). One ex-Muslim and one Christian Qur’anic scholar who do not wish to be named agree with his points.

POINT ONE: The very title of the letter, “A Common Word between Us and You” comes from the Qur’an. Here’s a fuller quote, from 3:63-66:, which says: ‘people of the book, let us come to a common word between us and you that we will worship none except Allah, that we will associate none with him, and that none of us take others for lords besides Allah. ‘if they turn away, say: ‘bear witness that we are Muslims. People of the book [i.e., Christians and Jews], why do you dispute about Abraham when both the Torah and the Gospel were not sent down till after him?’

In other words, the Qur’an - Allah - is saying that the Qur’an’s view of Abraham, including his having been prepared to sacrifice Ishmail rather than Isaac, is correct and the Torah and New Testament are wrong because they were written by human, not through explicit divine revelation. In fact, this verse comes from a later chapter which “abrogates” (nullifies or overturns) earlier more conciliatory chapters and precedes the last chapter or two which call for “offensive jihad” against the “People of the Book.”

TWO: The Letter appears to follow a very ugly and dangerous precedent in Islamic history. Just before Mohammed’s death, he supposedly sent audacious letters to the heads of the three main empires of his day and region - the Persians, Egyptians, and Byzantines. His message: convert or be conquered. All three emperors supposedly laughed him off. Their empires were all conquered by Muslim jihadists.

THREE: The similarities between the religions are not as important as the differences. “Love thy neighbor” does not appear in the Qur’an, except when that neighbor is Muslim. Nor does, “turn the other cheek.” But “submit to Islamic rule or die” does. The Muslim clerics state: “As Muslims, we say to Christians that we are not against them and that Islam is not against them - so long as they do not wage war against Muslims on account of their religion, oppress them and drive them out of their homes.”

Let’s look at those three phases. On the surface non-Muslims would say that, or course, we shouldn’t do those things. But those three phrases are a veiled political statement of Muslim reality today. Waging war against Muslim is in reference to Iraq and Afghanistan. Should we have not gone into Afghanistan after 9-11 to wipe out the jihadists there who claimed responsibility for it? After all, it was OBL, a Muslim, who declared war on us.

And who is oppressing who? Muslims can practice their religion freely in non-Muslim countries but that is not reciprocated in Muslim countries. By constantly whining about being oppressed they seek to gain accommodation and appeasement from the non-Muslim societies to move their agenda forward of Islamitizing the world.

As for driving Muslims out of their homes, this a veiled attempt at capitalizing on the lies of the Left who say our soldiers terrorize innocent Iraqi citizens in their homes.

This is a grotesque bit of taqiyya, (theologically permissible propaganda) not to mention a total misrepresentation of Christian attitudes towards Muslims. After all, in Muslim countries Christians are systematically being driven out, while in Christian countries in the West, Muslims are rapidly increasing.

Here’s another analyses of those phrases from Freedom Fighter’s Journal.

The scholars state: “As Muslims, we say to Christians that we are not against them and that Islam is not against them - so long as they do not wage war against Muslims on account of their religion, oppress them and drive them out of their homes.”

In other words, we Muslims are not against Christianity, so long as Christians don’t do any of the myriad things we Muslims are hard-wired to regard as “waging war against” us. This is often repeated by apologists of Islam who maintain that Islam, the religion of peace, only resorts to war in self-defense.

Robert Spencer explains just “how elastic and essentially meaningless the concept of fighting only in self defense” actually is in Islam.

By way of example, he records the answer to an inquiry about offensive jihad given by South African mufti Ebrahim Desai, who confirmed that, since “the primary responsibility of the Muslim ruler is to spread Islam throughout the world…if a country doesn’t allow the propagation if Islam to its inhabitants in a suitable manner or creates hindrances to this, then the Muslim ruler would be justified in waging Jihad against this country…If the Kuffar [unbelievers] allow us to spread Islam peacefully, then we would not wage Jihad against them.” (The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the Crusades).

Spencer concludes the concept has no boundaries at all:

That constitutes a sufficient provocation? Must the defending side wait until the enemy strikes the first military blow? These questions have no clear or definitive answers in Islamic law, making it possible for anyone to portray virtually any struggle as defensive without violating the strict canons of that law. But this also renders meaningless the oft-repeated claims that jihad warfare can only be defensive.

As we’ve seen, Muslims can justify defensive warfare over slights including a non-belligerent Christian leader addressing a Christian audience (Benedict at Regensburg), in a Christian nation and making mention of some failings of Islam, or the insupportable cartoon riots when the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published drawings of Mohammed--neither of which remotely entailed waging war on Muslims nor driving any from their homes: (but of course, many found themselves “oppressed” by being forced to share a planet with people holding contrary opinions about the Prophet!).

Any abused enabling wife will tell you that her black eyes are not the fault of her husband for being a brute, but her fault for always doing things that drive him crazy. If she would just give him what he needs to remain peaceful, he's as harmless as a lamb.

And what does the Vatican think of this letter after studying it over the last week or so?

The top Vatican official for Islam has praised a novel Muslim call for dialogue but said real theological debate with them was difficult as they saw the Koran as the literal word of God and would not discuss it in depth.

Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, in an interview on Friday with the French Catholic daily La Croix, also said Christians would have to discuss curbs on building churches in the Islamic world in the dialogue advocated by 138 Muslim scholars in the appeal.

His interview, coming after mostly positive comments by other Catholic Islam experts, signaled the world's largest Christian church wanted a serious dialogue with Muslims that did not avoid some fundamental issues dividing the religions.

"Muslims do not accept that one can discuss the Koran in depth, because they say it was written by dictation from God," Tauran said. "With such an absolute interpretation, it is difficult to discuss the contents of faith."

The fact that Muslims can build mosques in Europe while many Islamic states limit or ban church building cannot be ignored, he said. "In a dialogue among believers, it is fundamental to say what is good for one is good for the other," he said.

Right. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. At least they have their heads screwed on straight and can see through the taqiyya of the imans.

Those are examples of the rising Jihad temperature of for this week. When seen in groups like this, the slow boil becomes obvious.

Next week a look back at the rising Jihad temperature of Islamist appeasement!!

Get a FREE TRIAL COPY of the The Gathering Storm eBook which includes the Forward by Walid Shoebat, Introduction, and first 50 pages of The Gathering Storm eBook. And sign up for my free WEEKLY STORM REPORT and receive a synopsis of the most important weekly news revealing the intimidation, infiltration and disinformation tactics used to soften-up the non-Muslim world for domination.

 

Taking the Jihad Temperature - A Gathering Storm Special Series – INFILTRATION Part 8

If you throw a frog into boiling water, he will jump out. If you put it in cold water and slowly turn up the heat, he will not notice the rise in temperature and will eventually boil. 

The Islamists are boiling our frog and though this blog and hundreds like it record almost daily the rise in the Jihad temperature, unless we see how far and fast the temperature has risen, we will not know how far along our boiling has progressed. 

So, the Gathering Storm will be posting only once a week but these weekly posts will take the Jihadist temperature by looking back at news and events over the last two years. Over the next several weeks in the areas of intimidation, infiltration, disinformation and thoseappeasers and apologists who either knowingly or unknowingly advance the Jihad agenda, the Gathering Storm will show how far our frog has been boiled. 

By seeing the boiling water around us, we can see how far the boiling has progressed. 

The good news is that we are noticing that the water is getting warmer. There is a glimmer of awareness here - a glimmer of hope there. But we have a long way to go. 

Here’s this week’s look back at the rising Jihad temperature of INFILTRATION !! And remember – this is just a sampling of Jihadist Infiltration. More to follow.

 

Storm Track Infiltration: Keystone Cops in AZ - Do You Feel Safe Yet?

Federal authorities have accused a former engineer at Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station of illegally taking software codes to Iran and downloading details of control rooms, reactors and designs of the nation's largest nuclear plant.

Officers arrested Mohammad "Mo" Alavi, 49, in Los Angeles this month and charged him with one count of violating a trade embargo, which prohibits Americans from exporting goods and services to Iran. Authorities say there is no evidence to suggest the use of the software was linked to terrorists or the Iranian government, which has clashed with the U.S. over attempts to develop a nuclear program.

Officials with Arizona Public Service Co., which operates Palo Verde, said the software does not pose a security risk because it doesn't control any of the nuclear plant's operating systems and is mostly used to train employees.

I’m at a loss for words. Authorities say there is no evidence to suggest the use of the software was linked to terrorists or the Iranian government!!!

Let me see. He downloads software that contains details of control rooms, reactors and designs of the nation's largest nuclear plant. He takes off for Iran with the software. It’s used to train plant employees. AND HIS NAME IS ‘Mohammad?!

It gets better.

Authorities said Alavi asked a Palo Verde software engineer to recommend a laptop and help him obtain a user name and password to access the software system. Another employee saw Alavi with that laptop in the simulator room, with a 3KeyMasterand screen displayed. The employee didn't raise any alarms.

Gee. I wonder what the employee’s name was who gave him the laptop and access.

On Aug. 9, Alavi bought a one-way ticket to Tehran, Iran. His last day at the company was Aug. 14. Two days later, he left the country with his wife. In October, authorities say, the software system was accessed from a person using the Palo Verde user ID in Tehran. The software's maker, Western Services in Maryland, had no idea that Alavi had resigned from Palo Verde and did not try to restrict his access, according to a federal affidavit. Nobody from Palo Verde informed Western Services that Alavi had quit his job at the power plant, the FBI said. The nuclear plant did not instruct the software company to remove Alavi's user name or password from the company's Web site.

A Keystone Cop performance if we ever saw one. I hope the fine people of Phoenix where the plant is located are sleeping will tonight.

Since the incident, APS has changed its policy and now requires plant managers to check a box to make sure former employees don't have access to external software systems.

So our security against a terrorist attack that can radioactively poison millions of residents of the Phoenix – from Iran – is a checkbox. Oh, just wonderful.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in February downgraded Palo Verde's rating to the rank of most regulated nuclear power plant in the nation, triggering more rigorous oversight and additional inspections.

Gee. I wonder why?

So, do we feel safer now?

Storm Track Infiltration: Moderate Muslims – Quo Vadis?

What do Muslims want? And why, up to just a couple of decades ago, Muslims in non-Muslims and non-Arab countries lived peacefully with non-Muslims. Why the driving need to force the societies they live in to accommodate to their beliefs and values? Why the recent incidents such as the Muslim cashiers at Target who refuse to swipe pork from customers, Muslim cabdrivers refusing to take customers with alcohol, Muslims demanding a certain portion of the day be put aside to swim at public pools, a Muslim all-girl basketball team demanding that men not be allowed to view their games, Muslims demanding certain hours at a gym be put aside only for them...and the list goes on and on and on.

Why? And why now? Daniel Pipes has noticed the increase.

“The violence by Muslims responding to comments by the pope fit a pattern that has been building and accelerating since 1989. Six times since then, Westerners did or said something that triggered death threats and violence in the Muslim world. Looking at them in the aggregate offers useful insights.”

• 1989 – Salman Rushdie's novel, The Satanic Verses prompted Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a death edict against him and his publishers, on the grounds that the book "is against Islam, the Prophet, and the Koran." Subsequent rioting led to over 20 deaths, mostly in India.
• 1997 – The U.S. Supreme Court refused to remove a 1930s frieze showing Muhammad as lawgiver that decorates the main court chamber; the Council on American-Islamic Relations made an issue of this, leading to riots and injuries in India.
• 2002 – The American evangelical leader Jerry Falwell calls Muhammad a "terrorist," leading to church burnings and at least 10 deaths in India.
• 2005 – An incorrect story in Newsweek, reporting that American interrogators at Guantánamo Bay, "in an attempt to rattle suspects, flushed a Qur'an down a toilet," is picked up by the famous Pakistani cricketer, Imran Khan, and prompts protests around the Muslim world, leading to at least 15 deaths.
• February 2006 – The Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten publishes twelve cartoons of Muhammad, spurring a Palestinian Arab imam in Copenhagen, Ahmed Abdel Rahman Abu Laban, to excite Muslim opinion against the Danish government. He succeeds so well, hundreds die, mostly in Nigeria.
• September 2006 – Pope Benedict XVI quotes a Byzantine emperor's views that what is new in Islam is "evil and inhuman," prompting the firebombing of churches and the murder of several Christians.

These six rounds, Pipes says, show a near-doubling in frequency: 8 years between the first and second rounds, then 5, then 3, 1, and ½. Is it because Muslims are more agitated or perhaps because the non-Muslim world does not counter these intimidations tactics and so it further emboldens the Islamists.

Raymond Ibrahim wrote an article at NRO that might help to explain it.

From a religious point of view, the anti-social behavior of these Muslims can be, if not excused, then certainly understood. They are doing only what their religion commands them to do. And their refusal to compromise on these points demonstrates that adherence to the commandments of Islam is a priority of the utmost importance to them.

That brings me to the two questions that every Muslim must answer when living in the West if we are to know if they are here to assimilate into the new culture or eliminate it. If you were a true Muslim – moderate or otherwise – you would answer ‘Yes’ to the following two questions:

• Which nation do you owe allegiance to? The country you live in of the ummah?
• Do you adhere to the I Law or the secular laws of your country?

If their answers are:

• The ummah
• Yes

You are talking to a real Muslim. I was brought to task by some of my liberal friends saying I was simplifying the problem too much and any moderate Muslim would not admit to such answers.

Well ….Guess what? The New York Times spilled the beans when they reported an interview which they claim are two true Muslim moderates. You know, the law-abiding, deeply religion, good neighbor that lives next door. They seek a ‘middle ground’ of moderation – with us and our freedoms in the middle.

Here’s one of the moderate’s answer to the question I pose.

“Every Muslim who is honest would say, I would like to see America become a Muslim country,” he said. “I think it would help people, and if I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be a Muslim.

There’s your answer. A true Muslim must work to Islamatize the societies they live in.

There are countless verses and traditions, in fact, that make it clear that Muslims are to be in a constant state of animosity toward non-Muslims, waging war through tongue and teeth in order to spread Islam, and, when finally in a position of superiority, discriminating against those who refuse to convert (see, for example, 3:28, 5:73, 5:17, 9:5, 9:25, etc).

The solution to the Muslim problem is not to engage in conversations of accommodation but to make it clear that this is our culture that has hundreds of more years of history and struggle towards freedom than theirs and these are the values and mores that we intend to live by. If Muslims can’t, then they need to find those societies that are willing to be subjugated by them.

Storm Track Infiltration: The Swedish Jihad

It’s no news to the anti-jihadi movement in the bloggospher that Europe is slowly being Islamiztized and being prepared for absorption into the coming Caliphate. Some European countries see the danger of Muslim demographic jihad but are unsure how to deal with it stuck under the boot of their self-imposed multiculturalist socialist agenda.

But one European nation is welcoming their absorption with open arms. Here’s a report to that fact from the European columnist Fjordman writing in a recent Brussels Journal column.

I decided to write this essay following the riots in Malmö this weekend. Malmö is Sweden's third largest city and by far the worst city in Scandinavia when it comes to Muslim aggression. I read recently that an Arab girl interviewed in Malmö said that she liked it so much there, it felt almost like an Arab city. Native Swedes have been moving away from the city for years, turned into refugees in their own country by Jihad, not too different from the non-Muslims in some regions of the Philippines, southern Thailand or Kashmir in India, or for that matter Christian Serbs in Kosovo.

This displacement process is one of the tactics Islamists use to turn chosen areas of a country into a little Islam ruled by Sharia law.

I wrote two years ago that if the trend isn't stopped, the Swedish nation will simply cease to exist in any meaningful way during the first half of this century. The country that gave us Bergman, ABBA and Volvo could become known as the Bosnia of northern Europe, and the “Swedish model” will be one of warning against ideological madness, not one of admiration. I still fear I was right in that assessment.

And it seems the Swedish leadership is quite comfortable with Fjordman’s assessment.

Jonathan Friedman, an American living outside Malmö, mentions that the so-called Integration Act of 1997 proclaimed that “Sweden is a Multicultural society.” Notes to the Act also stated that “Since a large group of people have their origins in another country, the Swedish population lacks a common history. The relationship to Sweden and the support given to the fundamental values of society thus carry greater significance for integration than a common historical origin.” Native Swedes have thus been reduced to just another ethnic group in Sweden, with no more claim to the country than the Kurds or the Somalis who arrived there last Thursday. The political authorities of the country have erased their own people's history and culture.

To what extent has Sweden given up its national identity?

Jens Orback, Minister for Democracy, Metropolitan Affairs, Integration and Gender Equality from the Social Democratic Party said during a debate in Swedish radio in 2004 that “We must be open and tolerant towards Islam and Muslims because when we become a minority, they will be so towards us.”

This is a government that knows perfectly well that their people will become a minority in their own country, yet is doing nothing to stop this.

On the contrary. Pierre Schori, Minister for immigration, during a parliamentary debate in 1997 said that: “Racism and xenophobia should be banned and chased [away],” and that one should not accept “excuses, such as that there were flaws in the immigration and refugee policies.” In other words: It should be viewed as a crime for the native population not to assist in wiping themselves out.

This essentially is what you get when you declare your culture irrelevant to please the gods of multiculturalism and political correctness or when your culture is racked with guilt over its previous history.

And how do the young Muslims see self-dhimmification?

Feriz and Pajtim, members of Gangsta Albanian Thug Unit in Malmö, explain how they mug people downtown. They target a lone victim. “We surround him and beat and kick him until he no longer fights back,” Feriz said. “You are always many more people than your victims. Cowardly?” “I have heard that from many, but I disagree. The whole point is that they're not supposed to have a chance.” They didn't express any sympathy for their victims. "If they get injured, they just have themselves to blame for being weak," said Pajtim and shrugged.

The wave of robberies the city of Malmö has witnessed is part of a “war against the Swedes.” This is the explanation given by young robbers from immigrant background in interviews with Petra Åkesson. “When we are in the city and robbing we are waging a war, waging a war against the Swedes.”

Funny how the Swedes can’t recognize that they are at war. And they are.

This argument was repeated several times. “Power for me means that the Swedes shall look at me, lie down on the ground and kiss my feet.” The boys explain, laughingly, that “there is a thrilling sensation in your body when you’re robbing, you feel satisfied and happy, it feels as if you’ve succeeded, it simply feels good.” “We rob every single day, as often as we want to, whenever we want to. The Swedes don’t do anything, they just give us the stuff. They’re so wimpy.”

The leftists, peace loving, socialist of the world and the media networks like CNN see themselves not as members of a nation but citizens of the world. And though that might be a noble idea someday, it doesn’t fit with current reality and wishing it so will not make it so.

The Swedish Multicultural elites see themselves first of all as citizens of the world. In order to emphasize and accentuate diversity, everything Swedish is deliberately disparaged. Opposition to this policy is considered a form of racism: “The dominant ideology in Sweden, which has been made dominant by powerful methods of silencing and repression, is a totalitarian ideology, where the elites oppose the national aspect of the nation state. The problem is that the ethnic group that are described as Swedes implicitly are considered to be nationalists, and thereby are viewed as racists……“Instead of increasing the active participation of citizens, the government has placed clear restrictions on freedom of thought, freedom of speech and freedom of congregation.”

All this leads to a kind of mental illness – a kind of national schizophrenia.

Mona Sahlin has held various posts in Social Democratic cabinets, among others as Minister for Democracy, Integration and Gender Equality. Sahlin has said that many Swedes are envious of immigrants because they, unlike the Swedes, have a culture, a history, something which ties them together. Notice how Swedish authorities first formally state that Swedes don't have a history or a culture, and then proceed to lament the fact that Swedes don't have a history or a culture. A neat trick.

Sahlin has also stated that: “If two equally qualified persons apply for a job at a workplace with few immigrants, the one called Muhammad should get the job. […] It should be considered an asset to have an ethnic background different from the Swedish one.”

No surprise here. They need a constant flow of immigrants to prop up their failed cradle to grave socialist state. Sweden’s predicament is also danger to other countries. Roland Huntford ended his book with a warning that this system of soft-totalitarianism could be exported to other countries. He has been proven right since:

“The Swedes have demonstrated how present techniques can be applied in ideal conditions. Sweden is a control experiment on an isolated and sterilized subject. Pioneers in the new totalitarianism, the Swedes are a warning of what probably lies in store for the rest of us, unless we take care to resist control and centralization, and unless we remember that politics are not to be delegated, but are the concern of the individual. The new totalitarians, dealing in persuasion and manipulation, must be more efficient than the old, who depended upon force.”

This is a warning to the United States and the left’s liberal socialist multiculturalists who would be more than happy to impose a Swedish style society on America under the guise of cultural sensitivity and caring for the second half of John Edwards’ “Two Americas”.

Storm Track Infiltration: Indonesian Jihad

Yesterday I did a post on the Swedish Jihad and how Islam has infiltrated that nation placing its feet on the path to dhimmitude. But not only non-Muslims nations are threatened by political Islam. The moderate Muslim dominated countries in Southeast Asia are also the target of the Islamists. A recent documentary by PBS “Struggle for the Soul of Islam: Inside Indonesia,” part of the “America at a Crossroads” series, brings this threat into focus.

Those most feeling the pain and pressure of militant Islam’s rise have been moderate Muslims, many of them horrified by the tactics and goals of their fundamentalist brethren. It is these moderates who are potentially the Western world’s strongest allies in the struggle to contain the radicals. One of the great stages for this struggle is Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country and home to about 210 million Muslims, more than any other nation’s.

These moderate Muslim nations are not Arab – yet are practicing Muslims.

Indonesia is an ancient nation but a fledgling democracy, one that was born after the country’s longtime dictator, Suharto, was ousted in 1998. The demonstrations that drove out Mr. Suharto established freedom and the rule of law, but it was “a double-edged sword,” says Ulil Abshar-Abdalla, an Indonesian Islamic scholar and leader of the Liberal Islam Network. It unleashed many political forces that had long been suppressed. “This freedom is not only for the good guys, but also for the bad guys,” Mr. Abshar-Abdalla says.

This is one of the prime challenges in this war between the freedom of democracies and the tyranny of Islamism and one that we are sorely neglecting. Indonesia like other moderate Muslim nations is at a crossroads. They, like us proven with Iraq, are discovering that democracy doesn’t automatically grant the personal freedoms that much of the West has enjoyed. The establishment of tyranny can be voted in as much as the establishment of individual rights and personal freedoms. Hitler’s Germany is an example in history and many European nations are under the thumb of bureaucratic elitist tyranny of the EU.

 

The “bad guys,” in his view, are fundamentalist Muslims who want to establish an Islamic state, or, as it is expressed on “Struggle for the Soul of Islam” by Abu Bakar Bashir, one of the movement’s leaders, “an Allah-ocracy, not a democracy.” Mr. Bashir, who is described as one of the spiritual mentors of the Bali bombers, is a beatific figure with a white beard and a big bucktoothed smile. “Islam and democracy,” he calmly explains, “can never coexist.”

The Islamist are pursuing their Islamist agenda using thuggery jihad.

Squads of pious youths armed with long sticks launch attacks on “immorality,” sometimes with the tacit cooperation of local government officials. The dynamic is easy to understand. Traditionalists who would never support the establishment of sharia, or Islamic law, are content to let these freelance enforcers, operating under the label of the Islamic Defenders Front, crack down on anything they find uncomfortable or risqué.

One of the most moving interviews in the program is with Inul Daratista, a popular singer and performance artist, whose suggestive dancing — which would hardly raise an eyebrow in the West — has provoked the ire of these unofficial moral guardians. Her shows have been attacked and shut down, and there is a tone of despair in her remarks. “I think some of the authorities are afraid of these radical organizations,” she says. “Soon the people won’t have respect for the authorities. They will respect these groups. Then what will become of Indonesia after that?”

But there is resistence.

The Daratista controversy prompted a bill in the national legislature to ban “pornography,” a term that was defined broadly enough to force all Indonesian women to adopt strict Islamist garb; those opposing it were labeled “pro-pornography.” Among other things the bill prohibited kissing in public for more than three minutes. Against these signs of rising radical strength “The Struggle” also shows many hopeful signs that Indonesia’s mainstream has begun to rouse itself to fight back. For example popular outrage against the pornography bill caused it to be withdrawn. (It is now being redrafted.) Then there is the popular rock band whose songs attack fundamentalism head on, and the group of schoolgirls who, having been forced to wear head scarves and robes, are happy to speak on camera about how much they hate them. “I can’t stand these things,” one girl says, tugging with disgust at the fabric draped over her head and neck.

Now read this because it tells the true story on how to resist the political jihad of the Islamist.

Perhaps the strongest ally in the fight against fundamentalism, the program suggests, is Indonesian traditional culture. Mainstream Islam long ago adapted to the indigenous island culture, and most Indonesians see the radical movement as an effort to impose Arab customs and beliefs. So national pride resists this “foreign” intrusion.

“National pride resists “foreign” intrusion”. There it is in a nutshell - the recipe for a nation, a society, a culture and a people to resist Islamification. Is Europe resisting by protecting its culture from foreign infiltration? Nope. Is America? Not looking good.

Nations and cultures will have to wake up the threat before them. Islamism is a predatory socio-political system under the guise of a religion and it must be confronted and resisted as so.

But warring against this resistance is rampant anti-Americanism. Sidney Jones, an expert on Indonesian terrorism with the International Crisis Group, sees post 9/11 American military policy as a major boon to the Islamists, who have successfully characterized the invasion of Iraq, in particular, as part of a global war against Islam.

“American policy is worsening the situation,” Ms. Jones says.

Perhaps he is right. All of Islam is not our enemy – yet! But if we don’t find ways to engage these current moderate, non-Arab Muslim nations, they will most certainly fall into the hands of the Islamists.

We need a strategy to combat the insidious form of political Islamism that has found the civilized world’s Achilles heel.

Those are examples of the rising Jihad temperature of for this week. When seen in groups like this, the slow boil becomes obvious.

Next week another look back at the rising Jihad temperature of Islamist DISINFORMATION!!

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