The Sydney Postscript

Dying Day by Day, One Way or the Other

The dust has started to settle in Sydney, after the Islamic hostage drama.  We are now in a position to reflect upon what happened and upon the wider implications.

Here is a summary of events as they unfolded:

• Siege ends after police storm building

• Gunman identified as Haron Monis – a self-styled cleric – accused of being an accessory to the murder of his former wife and once notorious for sending poison letters to the family of deceased Diggers.

• Events sparked by gunman shooting hostage

• Police confirm gunman Haron Monis is dead, along with 34-year-old man and 38-year-old woman

• 17 hostages confirmed, including five who escaped yesterday [NZ Herald]

One columnist said that civilians remained calm and did what they ought to have done.  They refused to become terrified.  The police acted with professionalism throughout.  Less professional and more histrionic were the politicians who made sure the world understood they were shocked, outraged.  Peter Hartcher had this reflection:

Why do political activists turn to terrorism? Australia gave the world a lesson today.   They turn to terrorism to win attention, to cause fear, and to use that fear to produce an overreaction. That overreaction is the measure of their success.

Terrorism is a tool of the weak against the strong. It is designed to turn the enemy’s strength against itself.  One man showed how to get extraordinary attention and inflict serious disruption using only a gun and a Muslim prayer banner.  Successful terrorism is so rare in Australia that the overreaction is perhaps understandable. The police response seemed exactly right. But our political and media systems need to get better at measured reaction.

Two innocents died.  They started their day as they had done thousands of times before.  They had no idea they would die that day. We do not know whether they were ready and prepared to die that day.

The perpetrator was not mad, but evil.  He appears to have acted alone.  But he did what ISIS has been calling Islamic believers in the West to do: engage in individual acts of mayhem and suicidal death. The man’s former lawyer commented:

It’s a damaged goods individual who’s done something outrageous,” his former lawyer, Manny Conditsis, told Australian Broadcasting Corp.  “His ideology is just so strong and so powerful that it clouds his vision for common sense and objectiveness,” Conditsis said.

The inevitable question became, What ought we to do now?  In some senses, very little, we believe.  Hundreds of people die on our roads every year.  We mitigate the risks by road rules, policing, education, the courts and criminal sentences.  In this fallen world evil things happen.  Calamities occur.  But we adapt.  We mitigate.  We prepare.  We learn.  We respond better next time.

In New Zealand criminal gangs perpetrate crime on an industrial scale.   Some say they run and rule the prisons.  Does this prevent us going out our front doors?  Not at all.  But we citizens participate in the community responsibility to combat such evils.  We are the eyes and ears of the police.  We inform.  We let them know what we see going down.  It is a vital tool in combating such crime.  The evil is restrained.  Its effects are mitigated.

Should the community turn against Islamic people?  Of course not.  Islamic believers are above all human beings, made in God’s image.  They deserve–even command, therefore, our respect, friendship, and support as citizens.  But if any amongst them were to conspire to commit crimes the normal processes to confront crime or other similar threats must apply. That is, society must treat all Islamic people normally, not as a special case.

We live in a world filled with dangers and threats.  Islamic terrorism is just one of them.  It is not to be singled out as qualitatively different from every other mortal threat we face.  We acknowledge that in the struggle to mitigate and resist the threats we will “win some” and “lose some”.

If politicians arose to promise us citizens that they would ensure a crime-free society we would dismiss them as idealistic idiots.  They would lose all credibility.  Similarly, if a politician were to claim the government would deliver a terrorist-free society, we need to dismiss them as flakes.  That means we, as citizens, are accepting the intrinsic and unavoidable risks of living in a fallen world.  That means we are grown ups.

The society which fears Islamic terrorism so much it would demand of its government a cocooned, cotton wool certainty that “it will never happen here” might as well self-immolate, since a government that attempts to deliver on such nonsense, and a citizenry which demands it, will end up killing us all in one way or another.

In the coming month, all over this country, people will be waking up in the morning not realising that this is the day they will die (whether from a road accident, exposure on a mountain face, or shot in a drive-by gang shooting, or a heart attack–or something else.)  None of these folk will have been expecting it to happen.  None of them will have seen it coming.  That’s what it means to live in a fallen, sinful world.  

The man who is ready to die today, if God so wills, is a free man.  It’s the best response possible to the threat of terrorism. 

Wishful Thinking, Logs, Islam, and the West

Effete Arrogance

The West does not “get” Islam.  There are good reasons.  We will explore some of the causes of this inability to understand the heart and mind of an Islamic believer.  For the moment, however, we need to set forth some descriptive categories of variations of Islamic belief and believers. 

The first variant is classical Islam, by which we mean Islam as it was believed and practised in the early centuries of its existence (650 through to 1,000 AD).  This was the period when all of its authoritative writings were completed (the Koran, the traditions [hadith] and law [sharia]).  The second is modernist Islam, which refers to Islamic belief and practice reshaped by Western philosophical and religious constructs.  Patrick Sookhdeo puts a face to this kind of Islam:

Earlier this year I had a cup of tea with a Muslim Arab diplomat who was holidaying in London.  He shared with me his feelings about Islam.  He told me that he completely rejected the classical Islam embraced by modern Islamic extremists, particularly its violent aspects.  He longed to see his faith transformed by reason, liberalised and endorsing a separation of religion and state.  He wanted all Muslims to be able to function comfortably within a secular, plural society, indeed to embrace such a society. [Patrick Sookdheo, Global Jihad: The Future in the Face of Militant Islam. (McLean, VA: Isaac Publishing, 2007), p.8.]

The third variant is Islamist Islam–what we in the West have termed Islamic extremism, Islamic fundamentalism, Islamic terrorism, etc.  The face of this kind of Islam has been (and remains) Osama Bin Laden and the Al Qaeda network. 

What’s the score between these three contestants?  Firstly, classical Islam has not just dominated the past, it is by far and above the dominant intellectual, theological, social, and cultural manifestation of Islam in the world today.  If an Islamic believer takes his religion seriously in any way, he will be nine-tenths a believer in classical Islam.  Secondly, Islamism is a modernist expression of classical Islam, in the sense that it seeks to take classical Islam and apply it to the circumstances (political, social, and religious) of the modern world.  Thirdly, modernist Islam is intrinsically foreign to the religion.  Sookdheo again:

While there are small minorities of liberal and secular Muslims, the majority of the world’s Muslims today continue to champion the traditional classical version of Islam as the only true God-given and unchangeable religion which must not be criticised, disparaged or tampered with.  The Islamist version of Islam which has recently become dominant in most Muslim societies further strengthens and radicalises such traditional views.  Islamism (revivalist Islam, political Islam, Islamic fundamentalism) is an integral part of Islam and its influence is growing rapidly across the Muslim world. [Ibid., p. 46].

How does the West’s established religion–secularism–respond or cope?  Like a ship passing in the night.  It persistently misunderstands, misreads, misinterprets, and misspeaks when it comes to Islam and Islamism.  In what ways do the miscues and misinterpretations show up?

Firstly, the West is persistently condescending when it comes to Islam and Islamic peoples.  Condescending because Islam is a religion–and a backward and inferior one at that–whereas the West’s secularism represents the escape of the educated and intelligent from the myths, errors, and superstitions of all religions.  Muslims are Islamic only because they are uneducated, ignorant simpletons.  When they become educated, learning to read, write, figure, and reason they will mature, putting away childish things such as their religious superstitions.  At this point, the West’s chattering classes put Christians and Muslims in the same pigeon hole. 

Christopher Hitchens, for example, became a militant atheist–largely because of the barbarism exhibited in Islam.  Hitchens, however, placed Christianity and Christians in the same category as Islamic believers, lumping all religions together.  He spoke scathingly about the bloody nature of the Christian religion, requiring sacrificial death to escape from sin.  Christians and Islamic believers were ignoramuses and primitives alike in his view, hence his jeremiad against all religions in his advocacy of militant, secular atheism.

These condescending attitudes explain why intellectuals in the West are patient and tolerant towards Islamic peoples and nations.  They are tolerant in the same way that parents are tolerant and indulgent towards children who believe in fairies or Santa Claus.   The mindset is to humour them until they eventually grow up, and become, well, like us. 

Secondly, the West is triumphalistic with respect to Islam.  It believes it will win out in the end.  In other words, it is axiomatic to the secular mind that Islamic nations and peoples will inevitably become westernised, rather than the West become islamised.  The Western secularist believes in the arc of evolutionary development.  Islam (like Christianity) is ancient, and the world–as part of inevitable evolutionary development and progress–will eventually throw off more primitive and ancient thought forms.  They will inevitably be replaced by rational scientific materialism.  This represents the arc of human progress which is fixed and certain.  Either Islam and Islamic nations will become Westernised, or they will die out. 

Thirdly, the West believes that it represents a superior civilisation.  It believes that Western secularism is both rational and reasonable and grounded in the truth.  All men will eventually agree.  Not that there is anything wrong with religion in principle, of course.  It’s just that it needs to be kept out of the public square, within in the privacy of the four walls of the mind.  All reasonable men will eventually come to embrace this. 

In summary, the West believes that the whole world will eventually travel the arc of history which the West has already traversed.  Once the West was in the thrall of Christendom, but as knowledge expanded and people became educated and able to think for themselves, they threw off childish superstitions.  What was once seen as an act of God, eventually and inevitably came to be understood as caused by a confluence of atoms.  Fundamentalism in Christianity came to be transformed into a personal moral code and private comfort food.  This is the arc which Islamic peoples and nations will inevitably travel.  We just have to be patient in the meantime.  In the end, they will look, think, and act just like us.  Herein lies the root of Western eschatological dogma. 

Patrick Sookdheo himself reflects this condescension, albeit not so triumphalistically:

We live in depressing times, as leaders, both political and military, whether in the Islamic or non-Islamic world, grapple with issues that seem to be insoluble.  The apparent intractability of modern conflicts, in particular Iraq, can easily lead to despair.  However, we can find hope not only in the Iraqi diplomat but also in countless other Muslims like him who seek the way of peace and reason. 

For this to be done, the Muslim world–its clerics, theologians, political leaders and umma–must rise up and engage in a radical transformation of Islam. [Just as we have done in the West with respect to Christianity, Ed.] This reformation will re-interpret the Qur’an so as to reject religious violence, will advocate a total separation of religion from the state, and will argue for full equality of all citizens under a law based on international norms not on shari’a.  This will include the reinterpretation of the Medinan Qur’anic passages on violence, the rejection of the hadith and summa as authoritative sources, and the adaptation of shari’a from a public legal code to a personal code of conduct and morality. [Op cit., p. 9f]

In other words, Islam is going to have to become like the secular West, which for its part rejected Christianity and Christendom in favour of a secular materialism, grounded upon an impersonal rationalism.   Islam is going to have to follow the same trajectory of development, if there is to be any progress. 

Yup, Islam and Muslim societies are going to have to become more like Sodom and Gomorrah.  They are going to have to learn how to tear babies in the womb apart, practise unbridled licentiousness, adultery, fornication, envy, covetousness, and theft in order to become secularised like us in the West. 

Maybe, just maybe a parable along the lines of specks of dust and logs in eyes might be the order of the day. 

Beria Had His Good Points

We’re The Good Guys 

The latest revelations about the UK spying programme are worrying indeed.  They demonstrate just how quickly a so-called Western liberal state can morph into a institution of sinister countenance.

To be sure, both the Left and the Right in Western liberal democracies have had their respective versions of conspiracy.  The Left version has plutocratic capitalists perverting good and just government for pecuniary advantage.  The Right version has secret societies of Marxist bent infiltrating government agencies to work their poison.  Both versions have been pretty whacko at times.  Now, however, reality is trumping weird fiction.

Along came 9/11.  Suddenly, the threat from conspirators became vivid and tangible.
  The threat was terrorism and terrorists.  These people were archetypical conspirators: the theory became reality.  In order to combat the threat, governments needed extra powers.  But, it was argued, the common man would never tolerate such arrogation of power (at least once the immediate threat had passed), so it was better to keep them ignorant whilst government powers expanded secretly.  But the powers-that-be felt righteous in proceeding this way, because in their own eyes they were the good guys–protecting people , preventing harm, defending the innocent, etc.  The righteous end very definitely justified illicit means.

Since secretive terrorist groups relied substantially upon high-tech communication, the expansion of surveillance capability over billions upon billions of phone calls, e-mails, and other electronic communication was a wonderful boon.  Suddenly, snooping was taken to a heretofore unbelievable level.  Just in time.  But the rot set in immediately.

The Guardian has revealed that in the UK the electronic spy agency, the Government Communications Headquarters(“GCHQ”) has argued strenuously against its making its eavesdropping admissible in courts of law.  Why?  Because it did not want the public to know what it was doing. 

The UK intelligence agency GCHQ has repeatedly warned it fears a “damaging public debate” on the scale of its activities because it could lead to legal challenges against its mass-surveillance programmes, classified internal documents reveal.  Memos contained in the cache disclosed by the US whistleblower Edward Snowden detail the agency’s long fight against making intercept evidence admissible as evidence in criminal trials – a policy supported by all three major political parties, but ultimately defeated by the UK’s intelligence community.  Foremost among the reasons was a desire to minimise the potential for challenges against the agency’s large-scale interception programmes, rather than any intrinsic threat to security, the documents show.

Let’s get this clear.  The intelligence agencies (and political parties) wanted to spy on everyone, everywhere without warrant, but did not want its data used in courts as evidence, for fear of public backlash.  In other words, the intelligence agencies wanted to operate outside the judicial system.  What this implies is that extra-judicial executions in back streets was the next operational step. 

Let’s think this through.  An intelligence agency learns via electronic eavesdropping that a suspect is indeed a threat.  But he or she cannot be arrested and tried because the evidence must be kept secret.  What to do?  Black ops.  Take him or her out on the quiet.  Oh, but it’s OK.  We have the evidence.  They represent a clear and present danger.  It’s just that we are not going to bring that evidence before the court.  The public might not like how we gathered the evidence, since we are watching and eavesdropping on them as well.

The papers also reveal that:
• GCHQ lobbied furiously to keep secret the fact that telecoms firms had gone “well beyond” what they were legally required to do to help intelligence agencies’ mass interception of communications, both in the UK and overseas.
• GCHQ feared a legal challenge under the right to privacy in the Human Rights Act if evidence of its surveillance methods became admissable in court.
• GCHQ assisted the Home Office in lining up sympathetic people to help with “press handling”, including the Liberal Democrat peer and former intelligence services commissioner Lord Carlile, who this week criticised the Guardian for its coverage of mass surveillance by GCHQ and the US National Security Agency.

The most recent attempt to make intelligence gathered from intercepts admissible in court, proposed by the last Labour government, was finally stymied by GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 in 2009.  A briefing memo prepared for the board of GCHQ shortly before the decision was made public revealed that one reason the agency was keen to quash the proposals was the fear that even passing references to its wide-reaching surveillance powers could start a “damaging” public debate.

The snooping, surveilling, spying, Panoptican State operating extra-judicially on a mass scale came into being in the space of ten short years in the West.  It all happened while we were sleeping.  What a shift!  What a transformation.  What a revolution.  Stalin, Beria, the Stazi–suddenly these demons and institutions of secret state terror seem not so strange any more. 

When men stop believing in God, they will act as if they were gods.  The lust for power, illegal power, will become both insatiable and undeniable.  Quickly. 

Letter From the UK (About State Tyranny)

Ta-ta UK freedoms! Miranda matter outs vindictiveness of wounded police state

Annie Machon is a former intel­li­gence officer for the UK’s MI5, who resigned in 1996 to blow the whistle. She is now a writer, public speaker and a Director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.

Published time: August 19, 2013 20:10

RT

 

As you read the article below, keep asking yourself this question: What had David Miranda to do with planning or conspiring or perpetrating acts of terror?  The answer is obvious. How then could be be detained under “emergency powers” that are designed to interdict those actively involved in plotting or carrying out terrorist attacks?  Only by a drawing a long, tyrannical bow: namely, he who opposes the powers of government to combat terror is by definition aiding and abetting terrorist acts by others.  This would make most citizens complicit in, and guilty of terrorism, by association.  The beast is unchained and loose.

Ed.

 

U.S. journalist Glenn Greenwald (L) walks with his partner David Miranda in Rio de Janeiro’s International Airport August 19, 2013. (Reuters/Ricardo Moraes)

As the definition of terrorism has expanded to cover activists, placard wavers, protesters and now, apparently, the partners of journalists, the arrest of Glenn Greenwald’s partner is just another nail in the coffin of British Freedoms.

David Miranda had just spent a week in Berlin before flying back to his home country, Brazil, via London’s Heathrow airport. As he attempted to transit on to his flight home – not enter the UK, mind you, just make an international connection – he was pulled to one side by the UK’s border security officers and questioned for nine hours, as well as having all his technical equipment confiscated.

He was detained for the maximum period allowed under the draconian terms of Schedule 7 of the UK’s Terrorism Act (2000). His apparent “crime”? To be the partner of campaigning journalist Glenn Greenwald, who broke the Edward Snowden whistleblowing stories.

Miranda’s detention has caused outrage, rightly, around the world.
Diplomatic representations have been made by the Brazilian government to the British, UK MPs are asking questions, and The Guardian newspaper (which is the primary publisher of Greenwald’s stories), has sent in the lawyers. This episode is troubling on so many levels, it is difficult to know where to begin. Firstly, the Terrorism Act (2000) is designed to investigate…terrorism – at least, so you would think.

However it is all too easy for mission creep to set in, as I have been saying for years. The notion of terrorism has developed to cover not only terrorists themselves, but also activists, placard wavers, and protesters. And now, apparently, the partners of journalists have also joined the ranks. The old understanding of due legal process is merely yet another quaint, British artifact like the Magna Carta and habeas corpus.

The Magna Carta (originally known as the Charter of Liberties) of 1215, written in iron gall ink on parchment in medieval Latin, using standard abbreviations of the period, authenticated with the Great Seal of King John. The original wax seal was lost over the centuries. This document is held at the British Library and is identified as The British Library, Cotton MS. Augustus II. 106. (Photo from wikipedia.org)

In the UK we now have secret courts covering all things “national security”, pervasive Big Brother surveillance (as exemplified by GCHQ’s TEMPORA program), and we have our spies involved in kidnapping and torture.

So Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act is just another small nail in the coffin of historic British freedoms. Under its terms, anyone can be pulled aside, detained and questioned by border security guards if they are “suspected of” involvement in, the commissioning of, or financial support for terrorism. The detainee is not allowed to speak to a lawyer, nor are they allowed not to answer questions, on pain of criminal prosecution. Plus their property can be indefinitely seized and ransacked, including computers, phones, and other gadgets. Under Schedule 7 people can be questioned for a maximum of 9 hours. After that, the authorities either have to apply for a formal extension, charge and arrest, or release.

According to a UK government document, 97% people are questioned for less than 1 hour then released and only 0.06% are held for six hours. Miranda was held up until the last minute of the full nine hours before being released without charge. Secondly, this abuse of power displays all too clearly the points that Edward Snowden has disclosed via Greenwald about a burgeoning and out-of-control surveillance state. The detention of Miranda displays all the obsessive vindictiveness of a wounded secret state that is buzzing around, angry as a wasp.

Snowden has the protection of the only state currently with the power to face down the brute might of US “diplomacy”, and Greenwald still has the shreds of journalist protections around him. Friends and partners, however, can be seen as fair game. I know this from bitter personal experience. In 1997 former MI5 intelligence officer, David Shayler, blew the whistle on a whole range of UK spy crimes: files on government ministers, illegal phone taps, IRA bombs that could have been prevented, innocent people in prison, and an illegal MI6 assassination plot against Gaddafi, which went wrong and innocent people died. Working with a major UK newspaper and with due respect for real national secrets, he went public about these crimes.

Pre-emptively we went on the run together, so that we could remain free to argue about and campaign around the disclosures, rather than disappearing into a maximum security prison for years. After a month on the run across Europe, I returned to the UK to work with our lawyers, see our traumatized families, and pack up our smashed-up, police-raided flat.

AFP Photo/John Macdougall 

In September 1997 I flew back with my lawyer from Spain to London Gatwick. I knew that the Metropolitan Police Special Branch wanted to interview me, and my lawyer had negotiated this ahead of my travels. Despite this, I was arrested at the immigration desk by six heavies, and carted off to a counter-terrorism suite at Charing Cross police station in central London, where I was interrogated for six hours. At that point I had done nothing more than support David. As another ex-MI5 officer I agreed that the spies needed greater oversight and accountability, but actually my arrest was because I was his girlfriend and going after me would be leverage against him. But it got worse – two days later Shayler’s two best friends and his brother were arrested on flagrantly trumped-up charges. None of us was ever charged with any crime, but we were all kept on police bail for months.

Looking back, our treatment was designed to put more pressure on him and “keep him in his box” – it was pure intimidation. Journalists and students were also threatened, harassed, and in one case charged and convicted for having the temerity to expose spy crimes disclosed by Shayler. To this day, none of the criminals in the UK intelligence agency has ever been charged or convicted. So the threats and intimidation around the Snowden case, and the detention of Greenwald’s partner, are old, old tactics. What is new is the sheer scale of blatant intimidation, the sheer brutish force. Despite the full glare of global Internet and media coverage, the US and UK spooks still think they can get away with this sort of intimidation. Will they? Or will we, the global citizenry, draw a line in the sand?

Oh, and let’s not forget the sheer hypocrisy as well – the US condemns Snowden for seeking refuge in Russia, and castigates that country for its civil rights record on certain issues. Be that as it may, the US establishment should look to the log in its own eye first – that one of its young citizens faces the death sentence or life-long incarceration for exposing (war) crimes against the global community as well as the country’s own constitution. There is an internationally-recognized legal precedent from the Nuremburg Nazi trials after World War 2: “just following orders” is not a defense under any law, particularly when those orders lead to victimization, war crimes and genocide. The UK border guards, as well as the international intelligence communities and military, would do well to heed that powerful lesson from history.

So this overzealous use of a law to detain the partner of a journalist merely travelling through the UK should make us all pause for thought. The West has long inveighed against totalitarian regimes and police states. How can they not recognize what they have now become? And how long can we, as citizens, continue to turn a blind eye?

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

Letter From America (About Bumbling Incompetence)

Big Politically Correct Brother

The bozo leviathan sees everything . . . and nothing.

By  Mark Steyn 

 

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE         

June 14, 2013 4:30 PM

Every time I go on his show, my radio pal Hugh Hewitt asks me why congressional Republicans aren’t doing more to insist that the GOP suicide note known as “the immigration deal” include a requirement for a border fence. I don’t like to tell Hugh that, if they ever get around to building the fence, it won’t be to keep the foreigners out but to keep you guys in.

I jest, but only very slightly and only because the government doesn’t build much of anything these days — except for that vast complex five times the size of the Capitol the NSA is throwing up in Utah to house everybody’s data on everything everyone’s ever done with anyone ever.

A few weeks after 9/11, when government was hastily retooling its 1970s hijacking procedures for the new century, I wrote a column for the National Post of Canada and various other publications that, if you’re so interested, is preserved in my anthology The Face of the Tiger. It began by noting the observation of President Bush’s transportation secretary, Norman Mineta, that if “a 70-year-old white woman from Vero Beach, Florida” and “a Muslim young man” were in line to board a flight, he hoped there would be no difference in the scrutiny to which each would be subjected.

The TSA was then barely a twinkle in Norm’s eye, and in that long-ago primitive era it would have seemed absurd to people that one day in America it would be entirely routine for wheelchair-bound nonagenarians to remove leg braces before boarding a plane or for kindergartners to stand patiently as three middle-aged latex-gloved officials poke around their genitals. Back then, the idea that everybody is a suspect still seemed slightly crazy. As I wrote in my column, “I’d love to see Norm get his own cop show:

“Captain Mineta, the witness says the serial rapist’s about 5′10″ with a thin mustache and a scar down his right cheek.”
“Okay, Sergeant, I want you to pull everyone in.”
“Pardon me?”
“Everyone. Men, women, children. We’ll start in the Bronx and work our way through to Staten Island. What matters here is that we not appear to be looking for people who appear to look like the appearance of the people we’re looking for. There are eight million stories in the Naked City, and I want to hear all of them.”

A decade on, it would be asking too much for the new Norm to be confined to the airport terminal. There are 300 million stories in the Naked Republic, and the NSA hears all of them, 24/7. Even in the wake of a four-figure death toll, with the burial pit still smoking, the formal, visible state could not be honest about the very particular threat it faced, and so in the shadows the unseen state grew remorselessly, the blades of the harvester whirring endlessly but, don’t worry, only for “metadata.”

As I wrote in National Review in November 2001, “The bigger you make the government, the more you entrust to it, the more powers you give it to nose around the citizenry’s bank accounts, and phone calls, and e-mails, and favorite Internet porn sites, the more you’ll enfeeble it with the siren song of the soft target. The Mounties will no longer get their man, they’ll get you instead. Frankly, it’s a lot easier.” As the IRS scandal reminds us, you have to have a touchingly naïve view of government to believe that the 99.9999 percent of “metadata” entirely irrelevant to terrorism will not be put to some use, sooner or later.

Along the way, alas, Secretary Mineta’s dream of a world in which “a 70-year-old white woman from Vero Beach” and “a Muslim young man” are subject to equal scrutiny has not come to pass. The Vero Beach gran’ma gets a lot more attention than the guy from the Yemeni madrassah, especially if she’s made the mistake of attending a tea-party meeting or two. The other day the Boston Globe ran a story on how the city’s police and other agencies had spent months planning a big training exercise for last weekend involving terrorists planting bombs hidden in backpacks left downtown. Unfortunately, the Marathon bombers preempted them, and turned the coppers’ hypothetical scenario into bloody reality.

What a freaky coincidence, eh? But it’s the differences between the simulation and the actual event that are revealing. In humdrum reality, the Boston bombers were Chechen Muslim brothers with ties to incendiary imams and jihadist groups in Dagestan. In the far more exciting Boston Police fantasy, the bombers were a group of right-wing militiamen called “Free America Citizens,” a name so suspicious (involving as it does the words “free,” “America,” and “citizens”) that it can only have been leaked to them by the IRS. What fun the law-enforcement community in Massachusetts had embroidering their hypothetical scenario: The “Free America Citizens” terrorists even had their own little logo — a skull’s head with an Uncle Sam hat. Ooh, scary! The Boston PD graphics department certainly knocked themselves out on that.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was training in Dagestan, posting terrorist videos on YouTube, and getting fingered by the Russians to the FBI. Who did nothing.

If you had the misfortune to be blown up by the Tsarnaev brothers, and are now facing a future with one leg and suddenly circumscribed goals, like those brave Americans featured on the cover of the current People magazine under the headline “Boston Tough,” you might wish Boston had been a little tougher on Tamerlan and spent less time chasing the phantoms of “Free America Citizens.” But, in fact, it would have been extremely difficult to track the Tsarnaevs at, say, the mosque they attended. Your Granny’s phone calls, your teenager’s Flickr stream, and your Telecharge tickets for two on the aisle at Mamma Mia! for your wife’s birthday, and the MasterCard bill for dinner with your mistress three days later are all fair game, but since October 2011 mosques have been off-limits to the security state.

If the FBI guy who got the tip-off from Moscow about young Tamerlan had been sufficiently intrigued to want to visit the Boston mosque where he is said to have made pro-terrorism statements during worship, the agent would have been unable to do so without seeking approval from something called the Sensitive Operations Review Committee high up in Eric Holder’s Department of Justice. The Sensitive Operations Review Committee is so sensitive nobody knows who’s on it. You might get approved, or you might get sentenced to extra sensitivity training for the next three months. Even after the bombing, the cops forbore to set foot in the lads’ mosque for four days. Three hundred million Americans are standing naked in the NSA digital scanner, but the all-seeing security state has agreed that not just their womenfolk but Islam itself can be fully veiled from head to toe.

We’re told that universal surveillance has prevented all kinds of atrocities we can never hear about — an answer straight out of Orwell. Yet oddly, in the ones we do hear about, the perps are hiding in plain sight (Major Hasan with “Soldier of Allah” on his business card), the intelligence services do nothing (the Pantybomber known to the CIA but still permitted to board the plane), and the digital superstate is useless (the Tsarnaev photo rang no bells with the facial-recognition software, but was identified by friends who saw it on TV).

And thus, the bozo leviathan blunders on. Big Politically Correct Brother sees everything . . . and nothing.

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2013 Mark Steyn

Quislings and Dhimmis

The Principled Courage of the Australian National University

I M Fletcher, over at NZ Conservative, has a piece documenting the double standard that applies throughout the West when it comes to Islam–particularly amongst the Commentariat and the complicit media.  The piece is entitled, Islam and the Fear of Offending.

One instance cited by I M Fletcher was the Australian National University forcing a student newspaper to retract an article which sent Islam for a long walk up Satirical Street.  The rich irony is that the piece was indiscriminate: it also sent up Roman Catholicism, Scientology, Judaism, and Mormonism.  (One presumes that it was a piece written from the perspective of atheistic secular materialism).

What is most startling is firstly that the ANU forced the withdrawal of the piece on Islam (but not the other religions) and secondly, the justification offered: the piece on Islam risked offended Muslims (apparently).  So why is Muslim offence getting special consideration from the censors?

Administrators claimed the piece of satire violated the university code of conduct. [Apparently the code does not apply with respect to the other religions mocked, Ed]  They also feared it could inflame radical Muslims.  “In a world of social media, [there is] potential for material such as the article in question to gain attention and traction in the broader world and potentially harm the interests of the university and the university community,” said a statement from the Chancelry of the university.

There is a word for this.  It is cowardice.  The intimidation of Islamic activists is working.  The ANU, for one,  is proving to be spineless: compliant and submissive in the face of violence, hate, murder, and standover thuggery.  We can think of few attitudes which would more harm to the interests of the university and its community than that.  They have proved to the watching world that terrorism is an effective technique: it works.  At least amongst Quislings.

Thus departs the Australian National University from the West’s historical commitment to liberty and free speech. Surely we have become men without chests, as C. S. Lewis prophesied in The Abolition of Man.

Letter From Australia (About the Religion of Peace)

Koran Justifies Murder

May 27, 2013
Paul Sheehan
Sydney Morning Herald columnist

The murder of Drummer Lee Rigby by a pair of psychopaths invoking the name of Islam has galvanised Britain and gained global media attention, but what about the other 176 or so people who were murdered by Muslim psychopaths last week?

Drummer Rigby was white, English and a soldier, so the gory, bizarre and provocative manner of his death garnered headlines around the world, but hundreds of families, mostly Muslim, are also in mourning because of the actions of psychopaths using Islam to justify their bloodlust. 

One of the men charged with the murder of Rigby, Michael Adebolajo, 28, was a thug long before he gravitated to Muslim fundamentalism. At high school he cultivated a gangsta persona, got into drugs, then armed robbery, and became known for putting a knife to people’s throats and stealing their phones and money. . . .

It is instructive to consider the reaction to the murder from one of the clerics that Adebolajo followed, Omar Bakri Mohammed.
He was banned from Britain, and lives in Lebanon, after being caught on film supporting jihad against the West and stating that decapitating enemies of Islam was permitted by Islam. When The Independent contacted Bakri Mohammed, he predictably rationalised the savagery: ”I saw the film and we could see that he [Adebolajo] was being very courageous. Under Islam this can be justified. He was not targeting civilians, he was taking on a military man in an operation. To people around here he is a hero for what he has done.”

There is no shortage of such heroes in the Muslim world, nor a shortage of rationalisations of violence.  Thousands of Muslims, including Adebolajo, have cited the Koran to justify murder. Here is a sample from the more than 100 verses in the Koran that call Muslims to violence against the Unbelievers:

”Soon shall We cast terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers …
”And slay them wherever ye find them …”
”As to those who reject faith, I will punish them with terrible agony …”
”Whoso fighteth in the way of Allah, be he slain or be he victorious, on him We shall bestow a vast reward.”
”Slay the idolaters wherever you find them …”
”Fight those who believe not in Allah …”
And so on. So, too, does the body of jurisprudence which accompanies the Koran, the Hadiths, bristle with calls to jihad: ”I have been made victorious with terror …”
”And jihad will be performed continuously …”
”Kill any Jew who falls under your power.”
”Fight everyone in the way of Allah and kill those who disbelieve in Allah.”

So many Muslims have been encouraged to murder civilians by such exhortations that the rate of violent incidents perpetrated in the name of Islam is staggering, a toll that shows no sign of subsiding. The website thereligionofpeace.com, which maintains a record of terrorist acts committed in the name of Islam, has logged an astounding 20,939 terrorist acts committed in the name of Islam since the attacks of September 11, 2001. Thereligionofpeace.com keeps a monthly list of bloody incidents and during the past 30 days it records 222 incidents, in 25 different countries, including much of the Arab world and North Africa, and Britain, France, Russia, Nigeria, Thailand, the Philippines and China. (Apologists for Muslim violence claim that thereligionofpeace.com does not provide sources for its lists and thus has no credibility, which is nonsense as every incident is based on credible published reports.)

Seventy per cent of these 222 incidents in the past month took place in four countries – Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Syria – all battlefields in the ancient religious civil war between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, a civil war more violent now than it has been for decades.

The existence of this violent sectarian schism, and the systemic repression of religious dissent throughout the Muslim world, demolish the absurd claim that Islam is ”a religion of peace”.

Most Muslims are peaceful, like most non-Muslims, but the Koran groans under the weight of its own contradictions, with entreaties to kindness co-existing with exhortations to merciless war. If the Koran were only a text of peace and mercy, tens of thousands of Muslims could not invoke its verses to engage in violence. Those who gravitate to the wrathful messages of the Koran bring their own pathologies with them, which they then cloak in zealous piety. Apologists argue that those who use the Koran to justify violence are not Islamic. And in the West there is fearfulness to trigger the belligerent victimology that extreme Muslims use to cloak intransigence, separatism and special-pleading. . . .   

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/twisting-islam-to-justify-cruelty-20130526-2n535.html#ixzz2URMOw8X0

Letter from the UK (Manifesting Integrity and Grace)

Showing Their Quality

According to the Guardian, the family of accused murderer, Michael Adebolajo–one of the ten involved in murdering an off-duty UK serviceman in the name of Allah–has released a letter to the public.  It is replete with righteousness, wisdom, dignity, and rectitude–a salutary example amidst the pain and shame they must be enduring.  No doubt they have been hounded by the media and others.  We salute them.  The text as reported reads:

Nothing we say can undo the events of last week. However, as a family, we wish to share with others our horror at the senseless killing of Lee Rigby and express our profound … distress that this has brought on our family. We send our heartfelt condolence to Lee Rigby’s family and loved ones.

We wish to state openly that we believe that there is no place for violence in the name of religion or politics. We believe all right-thinking members of society share this view wherever they were born and whatever their religion and political beliefs.

We wholeheartedly condemn all those who engage in acts of terror and fully reject any suggestion by them that religion or politics can justify this kind of violence.

We unreservedly put out faith in the rule of law and with others fully expect that all the perpetrators will be brought to justice under the law of the land.

And we pray for Lee Rigby’s soul to rest in peace, for the Lord to comfort his parents and loved ones and provide all of us affected the strength and fortitude to cope with this tragedy. 

In all the circumstances and in respect to ongoing police investigations, this is the only statement we wish to give. We ask that we are not contacted for further comments.

 

Jihadi Challenge

Will the “Real Allah” Stand Forth?

The alleged cold-blooded murder of an off-duty UK serviceman by two Islamic jihadis has shocked the nation.  The “note” left by one of those arrested provides their apologia for murder:

The only reason we have killed this man today is because Muslims are dying daily by British soldiers, and this British soldier is one, and it’s an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. By Allah, we swear by the Almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you until you leave us alone. So what if we want to live by the sharia in Muslim lands. Why does that mean you must follow us and chase us and call us extremists and kill us? Rather, you are extreme.

You are the ones. When you talk of bombs, do you think it hits one person? Or rather your bomb wipes out a whole family. This is the reality. By Allah, if I saw your mother today with a buggy, I would help her up the stairs. This is my nature. But we are forced by … many many [sections] throughout the Koran that we must fight them as they fight us. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

On the other hand, the Muslim Council of Britain has condemned the attacks.

The Muslim Council of Britain are holding a press conference. Farooq Murad, the MCB’s secretary general, said he wanted to express his “outrage and horror” at what took place.  The culprits had “insulted Allah and dishonoured our faith” he said.  He added: “It has no basis in Islam and we condemn it unreservedly.” 

He called on all British Muslims to “reach out to fellow Britons and testify the true reality of our faith”.

We applaud the Muslim Council of Britain’s condemnation of the attacks.   But it leaves us all with a significant problem.  On the one hand the alleged murderer says his conscience is bound by the Koran.  He is “forced” by many sections throughout the Koran to fight “them” as they fight us.  He is “forced” to exact an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.  In other words, he and his fellow conspirators acted as they did conscientiously, as commanded, required, and instructed in the Koran. 

On the other hand, the spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain says the alleged perpetrators have “insulted Allah and dishonoured our faith.”  What they did “has no basis in Islam.”

So who is being accurate?  Who is faithfully representing the teachings of Islam.  Clearly by the lights of the alleged attackers, the Muslim Council of Britain is insulting Allah and dishonouring the faith.  So, who is telling the truth?

Now is the time for Muslims in the UK to take some responsibility to explicate exactly what the teaching of Muhammad is, as presented in the Koran, the hadiths, the traditions, and the fatwas.   As it stands–and hopefully it will not be left to stand–Islam is a religion without meaning because it accommodates at least two diametrically opposed positions which mutually condemn.  As it stands, Islamic believers can apparently conscientiously believe totally contradictory teachings.  (On the surface of it, this seems to be a not unreasonable possibility, given eleven centuries of bloody, deadly conflict between Sunni Islam and Shi’ite Islam, which continues before our very eyes in these days in the Middle East.)

The burdens of explication and proof lie firmly on the shoulders of Islamic people and its teachers, not just in Britain, but everywhere.  It’s not enough for the Muslim Council of Britain to condemn the alleged murderers by asserting they have “insulted Allah and dishonoured our faith” and that what they did “has no basis in Islam”.  They now have a duty of care, an obligation, to prove it to us all by a thorough exegesis of the Koran, the hadiths, the traditions, and the fatwas.  After all, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that it is the Muslim Council of Britain who are the heretics.  We hope not.  

We hope they will take up their duty of care.  We fear they will not–whether out of conscientious choice, or inability. 

Letter From the UK (About US Citizen Surveillance)

The “War on Terror” is Proving to be a War on Citizens

In wartime it is common for civil liberties to erode.  The exigencies of war mean that extraordinary and emergency measures are required to prosecute the conflict.  Often civil liberties are attenuated.  At the very least, the resistance to the state exerting emergency powers over its citizens becomes muted.

Hopefully (and hope is the operative word) at the end of the conflict the greater powers of the state prove to have truly been emergency powers and temporary only.  They are revoked, and civil liberties are restored.  But what happens when the state moves to a permanent state-of-war footing?  George Orwell’s dystopian 1984 shows us one consequence: an alleged state of perpetual war was used as a pretext for totalitarian controls over all citizens (in the name of freedom and liberty, naturally).

The United States has been at war now for decades. 
  It is as close to being in a state of perpetual war that we have seen in the modern period.   The War on Terror is the latest morph.  This gets the United States pretty much into a state of perpetual war for the country.  Terrorists need to be fought, both abroad and at home.  During war, it is the risk of enemy spies in the land which normally provides the justification for greater controls and restrictions of citizens, on the one hand, and of much greater powers of state surveillance, on the other.  Because terrorism is a tactic, not a defined enemy nation against whom Congress has declared war, the possibilities of domestic terrorism and of “combatants” being one’s next door neighbour increase exponentially.  Enemy operatives could be anywhere.  Naturally, the drive to attenuate and remove civil liberties ratchets up considerably.  Naturally, the state surveils its citizens far more comprehensively.

In this regard, The Guardian ran the following piece on US government surveillance of its own citizens.  What was fantastical and unthinkable ten years ago is now normal.  Welcome to the wonderful world of perpetual war.  The US is proving to be an exceptional nation after all.  Well outside the common understanding of what constitutes a free society. 

Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?

A former FBI counterterrorism agent claims on CNN that this is the case

Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 4 May 2013

The real capabilities and behavior of the US surveillance state are almost entirely unknown to the American public because, like most things of significance done by the US government, it operates behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy. But a seemingly spontaneous admission this week by a former FBI counterterrorism agent provides a rather startling acknowledgment of just how vast and invasive these surveillance activities are.

Over the past couple days, cable news tabloid shows such as CNN’s Out Front with Erin Burnett have been excitingly focused on the possible involvement in the Boston Marathon attack of Katherine Russell, the 24-year-old American widow of the deceased suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. As part of their relentless stream of leaks uncritically disseminated by our Adversarial Press Corps, anonymous government officials are claiming that they are now focused on telephone calls between Russell and Tsarnaev that took place both before and after the attack to determine if she had prior knowledge of the plot or participated in any way.

On Wednesday night, Burnett interviewed Tim Clemente, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, about whether the FBI would be able to discover the contents of past telephone conversations between the two. He quite clearly insisted that they could:

BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone companies to give that up at this point. It’s not a voice mail. It’s just a conversation. There’s no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?
CLEMENTE: “No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It’s not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.
BURNETT: “So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.
CLEMENTE: “No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not.”

“All of that stuff” – meaning every telephone conversation Americans have with one another on US soil, with or without a search warrant – “is being captured as we speak”.

On Thursday night, Clemente again appeared on CNN, this time with host Carol Costello, and she asked him about those remarks. He reiterated what he said the night before but added expressly that “all digital communications in the past” are recorded and stored. 

Let’s repeat that last part: “no digital communication is secure”, by which he means not that any communication is susceptible to government interception as it happens (although that is true), but far beyond that: all digital communications – meaning telephone calls, emails, online chats and the like – are automatically recorded and stored and accessible to the government after the fact. To describe that is to define what a ubiquitous, limitless Surveillance State is.

There have been some previous indications that this is true. Former AT&T engineer Mark Klein revealed that AT&T and other telecoms had built a special network that allowed the National Security Agency full and unfettered access to data about the telephone calls and the content of email communications for all of their customers. Specifically, Klein explained “that the NSA set up a system that vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T” and that “contrary to the government’s depiction of its surveillance program as aimed at overseas terrorists . . . much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic.” But his amazing revelations were mostly ignored and, when Congress retroactively immunized the nation’s telecom giants for their participation in the illegal Bush spying programs, Klein’s claims (by design) were prevented from being adjudicated in court.

That every single telephone call is recorded and stored would also explain this extraordinary revelation by the Washington Post in 2010:

Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications.

It would also help explain the revelations of former NSA official William Binney, who resigned from the agency in protest over its systemic spying on the domestic communications of US citizens, that the US government has “assembled on the order of 20 trillion transactions about US citizens with other US citizens” (which counts only communications transactions and not financial and other transactions), and that “the data that’s being assembled is about everybody. And from that data, then they can target anyone they want.”

Despite the extreme secrecy behind which these surveillance programs operate, there have been periodic reports of serious abuse. Two Democratic Senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, have been warning for years that Americans would be “stunned” to learn what the US government is doing in terms of secret surveillance.
Strangely, back in 2002 – when hysteria over the 9/11 attacks (and thus acquiescence to government power) was at its peak – the Pentagon’s attempt to implement what it called the “Total Information Awareness” program (TIA) sparked so much public controversy that it had to be official scrapped. But it has been incrementally re-instituted – without the creepy (though honest) name and all-seeing-eye logo – with little controversy or even notice.

Back in 2010, worldwide controversy erupted when the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates banned the use of Blackberries because some communications were inaccessible to government intelligence agencies, and that could not be tolerated. The Obama administration condemned this move on the ground that it threatened core freedoms, only to turn around six weeks later and demand that all forms of digital communications allow the US government backdoor access to intercept them. Put another way, the US government embraced exactly the same rationale invoked by the UAE and Saudi agencies: that no communications can be off limits. Indeed, the UAE, when responding to condemnations from the Obama administration, noted that it was simply doing exactly that which the US government does:

“‘In fact, the UAE is exercising its sovereign right and is asking for exactly the same regulatory compliance – and with the same principles of judicial and regulatory oversight – that Blackberry grants the US and other governments and nothing more,’ [UAE Ambassador to the US Yousef Al] Otaiba said. ‘Importantly, the UAE requires the same compliance as the US for the very same reasons: to protect national security and to assist in law enforcement.'”

That no human communications can be allowed to take place without the scrutinizing eye of the US government is indeed the animating principle of the US Surveillance State. Still, this revelation, made in passing on CNN, that every single telephone call made by and among Americans is recorded and stored is something which most people undoubtedly do not know, even if the small group of people who focus on surveillance issues believed it to be true (clearly, both Burnett and Costello were shocked to hear this).

Some new polling suggests that Americans, even after the Boston attack, are growing increasingly concerned about erosions of civil liberties in the name of Terrorism. Even those people who claim it does not matter instinctively understand the value of personal privacy: they put locks on their bedroom doors and vigilantly safeguard their email passwords. That’s why the US government so desperately maintains a wall of secrecy around their surveillance capabilities: because they fear that people will find their behavior unacceptably intrusive and threatening, as they did even back in 2002 when John Poindexter’s TIA was unveiled.

Mass surveillance is the hallmark of a tyrannical political culture. But whatever one’s views on that, the more that is known about what the US government and its surveillance agencies are doing, the better. This admission by this former FBI agent on CNN gives a very good sense for just how limitless these activities are.

Letter From America (About the Skull)

           

The Collapsing of the American Skull  

The parameters in which we allow ourselves to think about vital issues shrink remorselessly.

By Mark Steyn 

 

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE    

www.nationalreview.com 

One of the most ingenious and effective strategies of the Left on any number of topics is to frame the debate and co-opt the language so effectively that it becomes all but impossible even to discuss the subject honestly. Take the brothers Tsarnaev, the incendiary end of a Chechen family that in very short time has settled aunts, uncles, sisters, and more across the map of North America from Massachusetts to New Jersey to my own home town of Toronto. Maybe your town has a Tsarnaev, too: There seems to be no shortage of them, except, oddly, back in Chechnya.

The Tsarnaevs’ mom, now relocated from Cambridge to Makhachkala in delightful Dagestan, told a press conference the other day that she regrets ever having gotten mixed up with those crazy Yanks: “I would prefer not to have lived in America,” she said.

Not, I’m sure, as much as the Richard family would have preferred it. Eight-year-old Martin was killed; his sister lost a leg; and his mother suffered serious brain injuries. What did the Richards and some 200 other families do to deserve having a great big hole blown in their lives? Well, according to the New York Times, they and you bear collective responsibility. Writing on the op-ed page, Marcello Suarez-Orozco, dean of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, and Carola Suarez-Orozco, a professor at the same institution, began their ruminations thus:

“The alleged involvement of two ethnic Chechen brothers in the deadly attack at the Boston Marathon last week should prompt Americans to reflect on whether we do an adequate job assimilating immigrants who arrive in the United States as children or teenagers.”

Maybe. Alternatively, the above opening sentence should “prompt Americans to reflect” on whether whoever’s editing America’s newspaper of record these days “does an adequate job” in choosing which pseudo-credentialed experts it farms out its principal analysis on terrorist atrocities to. But, if I follow correctly, these UCLA profs are arguing that, when some guys go all Allahu Akbar on you and blow up your marathon, that just shows that you lazy complacent Americans need to work even harder at “assimilating” “immigrants.” After all, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan were raised in Cambridge, Mass., a notorious swamp of redneck bigotry where the two young Chechens no doubt felt “alienated” and “excluded” at being surrounded by NPR-listening liberals cooing, “Oh, your family’s from Chechnya? That’s the one next to Slovakia, right? Would you like to come round for a play date and help Jeremiah finish his diversity quilt?” Assimilation is hell.

How hard would it be for Americans to be less inadequate when it comes to assimilating otherwise well-adjusted immigrant children? Let us turn once again to Mrs. Tsarnaev:

“They are going to kill him. I don’t care,” she told reporters. “My oldest son is killed, so I don’t care. I don’t care if my youngest son is going to be killed today. . . . I don’t care if I am going to get killed, too . . . and I will say Allahu Akbar!”

You can say it all you want, madam, but everyone knows that “Allahu Akbar” is Arabic for “Nothing to see here.” So, once you’ve cleared the streets of body parts, you inadequate Americans need to redouble your efforts.

There is a stupidity to this, but also a kind of decadence. Until the 1960s, it was assumed by all sovereign states that they had the right to choose which non-nationals were admitted within their borders. Now, to suggest such a thing risks the charge of “nativism” and to propose that, say, Swedes are easier to assimilate than Chechens is to invite cries of “Racist!” So, when the morgues and emergency rooms are piled high, the only discussion acceptable in polite society is to wonder whether those legless Bostonians should have agitated more forcefully for federally mandated after-school assimilationist basketball programs.

As Ma Tsarnaev’s effusions suggest, at the sharp end of Islamic imperialism, there’s a certain glorying in sacrifice. We’re more fatalistic about it: After Major Hasan gunned down 13 of his comrades and an unborn baby, General Casey, the Army’s chief of staff, assured us that it could have been a whole lot worse:
“What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy, but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here.”

What happened at Boston was a “tragedy,” but it would be an even greater tragedy if there were to be any honest discussion of immigration policy, or Islam, or anything else that matters.

Speaking of glorying in blood, in Philadelphia the Kermit Gosnell defense rested, without calling either the defendant or any witness to the stand. As I wrote last week, “Doctor” Gosnell is accused of cutting the spinal columns and suctioning out the brains of fully delivered babies. The blogger Pundette listed some questions she would have liked the “doctor” to be asked:

“Why did you chop off and preserve baby hands and feet and display them in jars?”  There seems to be no compelling medical reason for Gosnell’s extensive collection, but bottled baby feet certainly make a novelty paperweight or doorstop. “I think we already know the answer,” wrote the Pundette. “He enjoyed it.”

Unlike the Boston bombings, even the New York Times op-ed team can’t figure out a line on this. Better to look away, and ignore the story. America is the abortion mill of the developed world. In Western Europe, the state is yet squeamish enough to insist that the act be confined to twelve weeks (France) or 13 (Italy), with mandatory counseling (Germany), or up to 18 if approved by a government “commission” (Norway).

Granted, many of these “safeguards” are pro forma and honored in the breach, but that’s preferable to America where they’re honored in the breech and the distinction between abortion and infanticide depends on whether the “doctor” gets to the baby’s skull before it’s cleared the cervix. The Washington Examiner’s Timothy Carney sat in on a conference call with Dr. Tracy Weitz of the University of California, San Francisco:

“When a procedure that usually involves the collapsing of the skull is done, it’s usually done when the fetus is still in the uterus, not when the fetus has been delivered. . . . So, in terms of thinking about the difference between the way abortion providers who do later abortions in the United States practice, and this particular practice, they are completely worlds apart.” 

Technically, they’re only inches apart. So what’s the big deal? The skull is collapsed in order to make it easier to clear the cervix. Once a healthy baby is out on the table and you cut his spinal column, there’s no need to suck out his brains and cave in his skull. But “Dr.” Gosnell seems to have got a kick out of it, so why not?

You can understand why American progressivism would rather avert its gaze. Out there among the abortion absolutists, they’re happy to chit-chat about the acceptable parameters of the “collapsing of the skull,” but the informed general-interest reader would rather it all stayed at the woozy, blurry “woman’s right to choose” level.

We’re collapsing our own skulls here — the parameters in which we allow ourselves to think about abortion, welfare, immigration, terrorism, Islam shrink remorselessly, not least at the congressional level. Maybe if we didn’t collapse the skulls of so many black babies in Philadelphia, we wouldn’t need to import so many excitable young Chechens.

But that’s thinking outside the box, and the box is getting ever smaller, like a nice, cozy cocoon in which we’re always warm and safe. Like — what’s the word? — a womb.
— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2013 Mark Steyn

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

Backpacks From the Sky 

Culture and Politics – Politics
Written by Douglas Wilson
Friday, 19 April 2013

When you get to the crazy part, it is important to remember that nothing will make much sense. If sin made any real sense, it wouldn’t be sin. If being struck with a judicial stupor and blindness helped you see better, it wouldn’t be a judicial blindness.

As I write this, Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev is being pursued for his alleged role in the Boston bombing. What does he think he is trying to do? Pad a resume for a job application to Columbia like Kathy Boudin did? Trying to create a story that Robert Redford can try to lionize a decade or two from now? That movie can be called The Company You Keep II, and hopefully it will do every bit as badly as the first one did. Or maybe Dzhokhar is wanting to be the next Bill Ayers, grooming some Chicago lightweight on how he can learn how to use that liability as a strength as he floats up to the highest office in the land.

Now the way everybody is talking and acting, you would think that the Boston bombing was a bad thing.
Yes, there seems to be universal consensus on that point, but this is only because emotions are currently running high. But there is also another bad thing, and that is to have the excruciatingly bad manners to point out that these two Chechen sociopaths have done nothing different than what was and is commonly accepted by the hard leftists who put the president where he is today.

And don’t forget Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, teen-aged son of Anwar al-Awlaki, and an American citizen, was killed two weeks after his father was killed, also by means of a drone strike — what we might call Obama’s backpacks-from-the-sky program.

As I argued in an earlier post, terrorists can smell fear, and so they do what they do in order to create certain responses in their targeted societies. One of those responses is to try to get large numbers of normal people to see how crazy things have gotten, and to assume that they are the crazy ones, and that what they are watching on C-Span is normal.

No, not at all. To lift a phrase from Mencken, what we are seeing is what happens when the zoo is run from the monkey house.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

The Payroll of the Bilderbergers 

Culture and Politics – Politics
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, 17 April 2013

The Boston bombing brings the whole question of terrorism front and center again, and so it is worthwhile to discuss what the point of terrorism is, considered as a tactic. In the case of the Boston horror, we do not yet know which direction the tactic was pushing, but we should make a point of knowing how such pushes are designed to work.

Terrorism aims at eliciting particular political responses from the targeted society. Those responses would include weariness, fragmentation, self-accusation, coddling of the perpetrating group, and immediate politicization. It does not aim at creating a united and angry response toward the perpetrators of the terrorism. If it were to do that, it would be a failure as a tactic. This means that the targeted society must be soft, not hard. Terrorism works only on cultures that are adrift.

Just as angry dogs can smell fear, so the terrorist mind can smell the presence of a society upon which such a tactic will work. When I was a young man, there was no problem bringing your Bowie knife onto the plane in your carry on. I remember when high-jackings were the new and latest thing — and before that, they weren’t. The thing that protected our planes before airport security was obviously not airport security — it was a cultural security.

When a culture has not yet had a failure of nerve, the terrorists (who are always present somewhere) have to get up their nerve to attempt the next outrageous thing. The Boston bombing signals a move into our next chapter with this stuff. What is it that protects us from terrorist attacks? It is not the TSA. It is not security.
What is it that protects small town Friday night football games in Alabama? It isn’t security. How hard would it be to get a bomb into that stadium? How hard would it be to get an explosive device into the mall nearest you? In a free society, it would be, and will continue to be, the easiest thing in the world. The only reason it hasn’t happened yet (although it is now starting to happen) is that the perpetrators don’t want to push too far or too hard — if they get unified blowback, they overplayed their hand. So this new era will likely be ushered in by dribs and drabs.

But the early returns from the Boston bombing do represent just the sort of thing that will encourage more of this. Politicians using the bombing to justify gun control. Journalists hoping out loud that the culprit, when found, will be a white tea partier named Earl, and not a jihadist named Ahmed. Immediate political disunity. Conspiracy speculations forming before the debris has finished falling out of the sky. Alex Jones continuing on the payroll of the Bilderbergers.

Terrorist acts are theater — they are violent, but they are still theater. They are calculated to elicit a particular set of responses from the audience. Our security operations like the TSA are counter-theater — security theater. With a great show of thoroughness, they prevent you from taking more than 3 ounces of contact lens solution onto the plane. If that makes anybody feel better about our safety, then that person is a big part of the problem.

A dissolute free society can be worked, and is, even now, being worked. A terrorist act achieves just the sort of outcome that they want. Anybody who wants to answer this horror with a federal department of “marathon security” is a big part of our problem. Ten years from now, when you are going through a metal detector in order to get to your kid’s parks and rec soccer game, don’t look at me and tell me it is a small price to pay to protect our liberty. What liberty?

A virtuous free society doesn’t need security everywhere — because terrorist acts, while physically possible everywhere, could not achieve results that the terrorists would ever want. But . . . here it is . . . you knew it was coming . . . no virtue without the blood of Jesus.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

Define Terrorism 

Culture and Politics – A Second Battle of Tours
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, 20 November 2012

Having commented on things Middle Eastern a few times in the last few days, I have had occasion to examine the quality of what passes for “oh, yeah?” these days.

One of the things we need to learn is that terrorism is a tactic. It is an evil tactic, but it is a tactic, and the success of the tactic depends upon it being out there in the open. Thus, to do something evil in secret, or to conduct a “false flag” operation, can be every bit as evil as terrorism, but it does not qualify as terrorism. That secret operation may or may not have happened, and if it did, it was evil. But an “out in the open” operation did happen, and we know because we all saw it, and this means that we know that those who claim to have done such things are in fact evil.

A “surprise attack” is also a tactic, and if the attack is not a surprise, then it was not a surprise attack. Shall I go over this again?
If a surprise attack was treacherous, it does not follow from this that anything treacherous must also be a surprise attack. It is the same kind of thing with terrorism. All cows are mammals, but not all mammals are cows. And so, if Iran announced their intention to build a nuclear weapon and launch it at the Sixth Fleet, I am quite prepared to denounce it. But I wouldn’t denounce it as a surprise attack, because they announced it beforehand, and I wouldn’t denounce it as terrorism because it was a military target. Terrorism is sinful, but something can be sinful, like running for Congress, and not be terrorism.

If somebody blows up a city bus and all the grandmas on it, and their sponsoring organization “claims responsibility,” and then tells us that “there is a lot more where that came from,” we don’t have to do a whole lot of investigating to find out who the dirt bags are. They told us. If one of our drone strikes blows up an Afghan wedding ceremony, and the officials responsible for it apologize right before they are all sacked, we have to do a lot of investigating before we know what it was — “collateral damage,” an “electronic malfunction,” “operator error,” “culpable manslaughter,” or fill in the blank.

Consequently, organizations like Hamas are a known evil. Shilling for them is not much better. Israel does not function in that way, and does not use or avow that tactic. In order to use it at all it must be embraced and owned. Now the fact that Hamas avows this tactic, and Israel denounces it, and yet the “enlightened” opinions of our Isaiah 5:20ers reverse all this, means that something morally bizarre is going on. There is a pecular sort of hatred out there, of the kind that blinds the one who allows it to take up residence behind his eyeballs. There are those, of course, who say they are not blind at all and that the Zionist entity must be paying me big money under the table. Yeah, well, how many fingers am I holding up? How much money are they paying me to make you say two when there are clearly one, two, three?

So, when I say that Israel does not sponsor terrorism, I am making a factual claim that can be easily verified in public. It is similar to the claim that Israel is east of Italy and west of India. This is not hard to distinguish — it is the difference between claiming responsibility and denying responsibility.

Now it does not follow from this that I am claiming that the Mossad has never murdered anybody in private. It is saying that a private murder, assuming it to have occurred, is not the same thing as public murder done for public effect.

I will also say, in passing, that the sheer inability of many to master this very basic distinction between claim and disclaim, with regard to public events that are publicly owned and those which are disowned, does not inspire confidence in me when such folks claim to have all kinds of inside info on dirty deeds that Noam Chomsky found out about. That’s as may be, but since you just finished extracting darkness out of sunbeams, I don’t want to see what you can do with actual darkness.

Terrorism is a tactic that targets innocent civilians, and does so for the sake of demoralizing the rest of the nation. An attack on a military installation is not terrorism. “Terrorist” is not synonymous with “bad guys.” It is not what the big army calls the little army. It is not an all-purpose term of opprobrium in military affairs.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

A Brief for Israel 

Culture and Politics – A Second Battle of Tours
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, 19 November 2012

Yesterday I tweeted this . . .

“If you read the escalating fighting in Israel with anything other than sympathy for Israel, then you need to turn the book right side up.”

. . . and the responses I got indicated I needed to say something more. So here it is. A few qualifications first.

First, it is easy for folks to guess where a sentiment like this might be coming from, and unfortunately, to guess wrong. I am no kind of Zionist, and the motive force behind all dispensational support for Israel has been left entirely out of my intellectual and theological framework.

If you want to know the theological term for what I believe, I am a supercessionist — the Church is Israel now, and is the lawful recipient of all God’s promises to Abraham.
I do believe that ethnic Jews do retain, on the basis of their ethnicity, one remaining promise, which is that they will eventually be grafted back into all the other promises. But this will not happen apart from Christ the Messiah. The promises are all found in the root of the olive tree, which is the Christian Church, and Paul tells us that their return and conversion will have a glorious effect on world evangelization.

Second, I am no naif when it comes to the question of whether or not Israel, as a modern nation state, has been capable of dirty deeds and other grotesqueries. I take that as a given also. My support for Israel is whole-hearted, but not simplistic.

Third, what I am about to say does not preclude sympathy for those on the Palestinian side of things whose lives have been destroyed by the conflict. The issue is not whether their misery is believed to be a good thing — I emphatically deny it. The issue has to do with who is actually responsible for this human cost. I hold the Palestinian leadership responsible for it, along with all the myopic liberalism in the West that keeps those pirates in power.

So this being the case, then why the sympathy for Israel during the current escalation of hostilities? I am going to try to pack it all in to one (longish) paragraph. Here are five reasons.

First, Israel is a Western nation. We understand her, sins and all, while we have a very dim understanding of the thugocracies that surround her on every side. I am opposed to any solutions that pretend to understand Arab hostility to the Jews in Western terms. Hamas is not the League of Women Voters. Second, unlike her enemies, Israel repudiates the deliberate targeting of civilians as a matter of open policy. Note the point here is not whether civilians are killed, and sometimes on purpose. The point is whether such murderous killing is avowed as the purpose of the engagement with the whole world watching. Israel’s enemies have no problem “taking responsibility for” the bombing of a teen-age pizza hang-out because it was filled with non-combatants. Those who ignore this reality, and they are legion, have no right to try to bring a Christian perspective to bear on the conflict — because they have no biblical perspective to bring. Those who cannot see the difference between Israel and her enemies on this point are what might be called “blind.” Third, debates over Israel have revealed a seething and wide-spread anti-Semitism on the left, of the kind that I want nothing to do with. Opposition to Israel, in this time of history, would require me to keep public company with the kind of vitriol that I refuse to keep company with. Opposition to Israel need not be anti-Semitic, of course, but until responsible opponents of Israel learn how to control those within their broad coalition who clearly have a bad case of rabies, deal me out. Fourth, Israel has offered many objective concessions in exchange for a pledge of peace and co-existence. The “no concessions” mentality is all on the Palestinian side, which is governed by poltroons who have walked away from more than one sweet deal. Their negotiating prowess is about on par with their rocket-building prowess. And last, Israel’s Iron Dome is the coolest thing ever, and is the kind of defense spending that the most ardent lover of peace should be able to get behind. It has the added bonus of vindicating Ronald Reagan’s much vilified “star wars” proposal. The first step in beating swords into ploughshares is beating them into shields first. Right?

Incompetence

Dereliction of Duty?

If ever confirmation were needed that the Obama administration is one of the most inept in living memory and the president himself is AWOL from the job mentally, emotionally, and physically, this report from Brett Baier shows it all in sharp relief.

Secret "Kill Lists"

The Great Liberal’s Other Side

The New York Times has written an article about President Obama that is both chilling and risible at the same time.  First, the chilling aspect.

Obama and his Justice Department have “discovered” a new federal government power: the right to execute American citizens abroad, without any due process, checks and balances, or judicial review.  Obama reserves the right and power to make every “kill” decision.  He personally reviews all “candidates” and makes a selection.

Mr. Obama is the liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war and torture, and then insisted on approving every new name on an expanding “kill list,” poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre “baseball cards” of an unconventional war. When a rare opportunity for a drone strike at a top terrorist arises — but his family is with him — it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation. . . . In interviews with The New York Times, three dozen of his current and former advisers described Mr. Obama’s evolution since taking on the role, without precedent in presidential history, of personally overseeing the shadow war with Al Qaeda. They describe a paradoxical leader who shunned the legislative deal-making required to close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, but approves lethal action without hand-wringing.  

A second chilling aspect is the active dissembling used by Obama and his advisers on whether innocent people are getting killed in drone strikes–euphemistically called collateral damage.  Obama had actively encouraged at policy of all killed to be combatants, unless there is hard forensic evidence to the contrary.

This counting method may partly explain the official claims of extraordinarily low collateral deaths. In a speech last year Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obama’s trusted adviser, said that not a single noncombatant had been killed in a year of strikes. And in a recent interview, a senior administration official said that the number of civilians killed in drone strikes in Pakistan under Mr. Obama was in the “single digits” — and that independent counts of scores or hundreds of civilian deaths unwittingly draw on false propaganda claims by militants. 

But in interviews, three former senior intelligence officials expressed disbelief that the number could be so low. The C.I.A. accounting has so troubled some administration officials outside the agency that they have brought their concerns to the White House. One called it “guilt by association” that has led to “deceptive” estimates of civilian casualties. 

“It bothers me when they say there were seven guys, so they must all be militants,” the official said. “They count the corpses and they’re not really sure who they are.”

All of this will cause painful conniptions amongst members of Obama’s left-wing, liberal base.   It will sour liberals in Hollywood. 

For our part, we have no objections whatsoever with the government of a sovereign state, by means of a preventive strike, executing people conspiring to murder citizens.  But we object strongly to the decisions being made without due process, without judicial review, without checks and balances. 

And now the risible aspect.  The article points out Obama’s fundamental incompetence as a President.  His aides and associates have found at times he believes his rhetorical pronouncements have the efficacy and power of God Himself.  Merely to pronounce is to bring things into being. 

One example was his loudly pronounced intention to close Guantanamo Bay.  Obama never had even the remotest idea how it could or should be done.

Walking out of the Archives, the president turned to his national security adviser at the time, Gen. James L. Jones, and admitted that he had never devised a plan to persuade Congress to shut down the prison. “We’re never going to make that mistake again,” Mr. Obama told the retired Marine general. 

General Jones said the president and his aides had assumed that closing the prison was “a no-brainer — the United States will look good around the world.” The trouble was, he added, “nobody asked, ‘O.K., let’s assume it’s a good idea, how are you going to do this?’”

It was not only Mr. Obama’s distaste for legislative backslapping and arm-twisting, but also part of a deeper pattern, said an administration official who has watched him closely: the president seemed to have “a sense that if he sketches a vision, it will happen — without his really having thought through the mechanism by which it will happen.”

This vignette explains why Obama spends most of his time campaigning, pronouncing what will be.  It also explains why he is so ineffectual and feckless when it comes to working with Congress.  He pronounces and expects Congress to reify his words.  This is why, twice, he has presented a budget to Congress, and suffered  the ignominy of them being voted down unanimously.

Nevertheless he gravely tells us that he ranks right up there with the greatest and most effective presidents the United States has ever had. 

War Games

Stupid Idiots

Shortly after 9/11 New Zealand passed its own anti-terrorism law, the Terrorism Suppression Act.  Its focus and intent was upon the threat of Islamic terrorists infiltrating into New Zealand and committing murder.  The passing of the law was a panic-stricken, rushed affair.  As is almost always the case, laws passed in haste produce decades of pain due to unforeseen adverse consequences.  NZ’s anti-terror act is a dog’s breakfast we are told. Even MP’s are now publicly repenting of their sins in acting in such ill advised haste.

What the panic-stricken parliamentarians never considered in drafting the law was home-grown terrorists.  But that is what we got.  A raggle-taggle bunch of deluded utopians, filled with their own sense of moment and self-importance.  Military-style training camps for armed assaults and revolution in the remote Te Uruwera forest were conducted.  A network of left-wing radicals and anarchists was developed, with links throughout the country.

The police were on to it.
  They used some of the powers granted under the anti-terrorism law.  The raggle-taggle mob was surveilled.  Communications were intercepted.  Hidden cameras installed.  Finally, the police raided remote Tuhoe country in the Uruwera’s, discombobulating the local population.  Understandably, having police descend in force, armed to the teeth, running around a village in and out of houses, whilst keeping inhabitants under their weapons was pretty frightening.

Nevertheless, the police nabbed the perps.  At the forefront was he whom the media has dubbed a “Maori activist”–probably the leading Maori activist, one Tame Iti.  Now, we don’t know Tame Iti personally, but by all accounts he is a bit of a lad, with a flair for the dramatic, the grand gesture.  But the point is that no-one takes him seriously.  He is a bit of a comic.  A likeable bloke, but a bit of a joke. 

Tame Iti

The media and the Chattering Classes, learning that Iti was involved up front and centre, dismissed the whole military-style training camp thing as harmless, naughty-boy stuff.  A bit of a laugh, really.  The police, therefore, in this elitist narrative, were framed as grossly overreacting, the terroriser of small children and frightened women.

This narrative played well with the public.  Anyone involved in the kinds of activities that had been going on in the Te Uruwera forest had to be a bit silly, idiotic even.  At best it was self-aggrandized high jinks; at worst it was idiotic.  Either way, it was so outlandish that the perps deserved pity more than anger.

The heart of the Crown’s case against Tame Iti and his cohorts was bled out when it was determined ex-post that the anti-terrorism act was so flawed, its powers and provisions could not apply.  Hence a lot of evidence was thrown out as inadmissible.  Naturally, this reinforced the dominant narrative about the whole affair.

Finally, Tame Iti and his chief cohort have been jailed for two and a half years on firearms charges–a much reduced charge, but nevertheless a criminal conviction.  Iti’s supporters are claiming that the sentence handed down was unduly harsh.  Iti remains the victim in their minds.  They are proud of him and what he has done.  No doubt his path to martyrdom is secure.

We believe Iti and his cohorts have been stupid, self-aggrandizing and detached from reality.  Yes, they have been more comical than Dad’s Army.  But the intent was clearly there to kill and maim others.  The police had probable cause in spades.  Iti and friends deserve their sentences–and a good deal more.  They should consider themselves fortunate that most of the evidence against them was ruled inadmissible. 

Below is NZ Police Commissioner, Peter Marshall’s defence for police actions on that fateful day in Tuhoe country.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

In the Thousands

Liturgy and Worship – Exhortation
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, September 10, 2011

Today marks the tenth anniversary of 9/11, the horrific attack on our nation that caused the collapse of the World Trade Towers, and significant destruction at the Pentagon. On a horizontal level, on its own terms, this was an act of war which fully justified a military response, and with that we have no quarrel.

But we serve a God who providentially governs all things in line with, through, under, and contrary to the intentions of the human actors involved, as He pleases. This means His providential actions are not to be taken as an instance of Him taking up sides, the way a man would take up sides.
If 9/11 was a judgment from God on America, the fall of Baghdad was no less a judgment from God upon Iraq, and as the fall of Kabul was a judgment on the Taliban.

When we say that God intends something, we are not saying that He intends whatever presidents or terrorists intend. One-way horizontal interpretations of “God’s judgment” are quite foolish. The intentions of the Father in the death of Jesus were quite distinct from the intentions of Judas, the Sanhedrin, Herod and Pontius Pilate.

As Christians, we must function with a different calculus. In the ten years since this terrible event, have we become a godlier people? Have we heard the message of Scripture, which tells us that we are to interpret all things as a summons to return to our God? This is true of blessings and hard providences both. Have we done so? To ask these questions is to answer them. This means that we are commemorating 9/11 as a people, but we are still not understanding it.

Three thousand Americans died in the 9/11 attacks. Approximately three thousand Americans die every day in our abortion mills. It has been ten years now, and that means we have gone through 3,650 9/11s since that horrific September attack. We have had the equivalent of more 9/11 attacks than there were original individual victims in that first attack.

Also since that attack we replaced an ineffectual pro-life president with the most pro-abort president we have ever had. Does this look like a spirit of repentance to you? Does this look like the stirrings of reformation?
The Navy SEALS dispatched Osama bin Laden, and he discovered immediately afterward that Allah is not the true God, and Muhammad is not his prophet. We shed no tears for him. But we cannot but note that compared to the bloodthirstiness of our secular ruling class, that man was a piker. Osama’s central problem is that he would not worship the true and living God. If we would heed the voice of God, within the Church we must lead our nation in how to repent of our form of that same refusal.

Ten Years On

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Ten years on from 9/11–what have we learned?  There are pluses and minuses–which is to be expected in a fallen world.  To our mind, here are some of them:

1. There is now much more unease amongst Islamic people over the nature of their religion.  It is evident to many that Al Qaeda and its affiliates have killed many more Islamic “brethren” than infidels.  This has led to revulsion and disgust at the religion of “peace” amongst Islamic people.  The true face of Islam has been on display; the mask has been removed to a degree.  The peace of Islam is the “peace” of a submission to absolutist human authorities claiming authority over every part of the human anatomy.  The impotence of the false Islamic god, Allah to change and transform sinful human beings is now more evident than it was before 9/11 and its aftermath.  Islam is a religion of hate: one has to deny Islam, one has to lapse in one’s observance in order to become willing to live in peace with all men and be an enemy of none.  
2. Al Qaeda is a spent force.  This is not to say there will be no more terrorist attacks in Western countries.  Nor is to say that vigilance can be relaxed.  Far from it.  But Al Qaeda as a force with the prime objective of “purifying” Islam in the Middle East has gone.  Bin Laden’s goal was always the overthrow of the house of Saud in Saudi Arabia; his “adventures” in Afghanistan and his attacks upon the West were always a means to that end.  His railings against the West were always intended to stir up Arabian hatred for the Western aligned house of Saud in his native land.  
3. The West has made remarkable progress in intelligence and intelligence gathering since 9/11.  We recall that at the time of the tragedy there was open acknowledgement that intelligence “assets” were very thin on the ground–if existent at all.  It took years and years for Western people to learn to speak Arabic fluently, we were told.  However, these obstacles have been overcome; the levels of (international) intelligence sharing have risen exponentially.  Whilst some terrorist attacks have got through many many more have been thwarted and rendered null. 
4. The “big” responses have all proved problematic; the consequences will be bad, and will linger for decades, if not generations, we presume.  Whilst going after Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan was defensible, nation-building in Afghanistan was and is not.  Invading Iraq on the false threat of weapons of mass destruction buttressed by spurious intelligence was (in hindsight) a dumb move.  To believe that Saddam Hussein, horrible man though he was, would trustfully co-operate with Al Qaeda extremists and be part of an Axis of Evil was preposterous.  Equally preposterous was the same notion with respect to the House of Saud and Al Qaeda.  
5. We have still to learn that Islam is not uniform or united.  The biggest threat to Islam is its pervasive sectarianism; it is a house of Unbelief that will tear eventually itself apart from the inside.  Shia, Sufi, Sunni, Salafi, Wahhabism cannot coincide without ideologically fatal internal compromise.  As always, God brings judgement upon Unbelief by allowing it to ascend and succeed to its own destruction. One of the wisest and more enlightened responses to Islam would be to leave it to its own devices.   
6. The bureaucratic border and travel controls imposed in the West, coupled with the implacable refusal to screen by profiling suspects on the grounds that it is discriminatory and a violation of universal human rights, is both risible and pathetic.  It stands as a monument to the ideological and spiritual blindness of the West.  It exposes how anaemic and frayed Western culture and civilization has become.  
7. The supine Quislingesque response of the media and Western intellectual elites to “cease and desist” Islamic threats of death and terror has exposed the cowardice that lies at the heart of secular humanism.  Thoroughly laced with evolutionism, the educated in the West fear death above all else; self-survival of its own species at all costs is the prevailing noisome issue of its putrefying heart.  Standing for nothing except its own continuance, it will immediately capitulate in the face of any mortal threat. 
8. We remain sickened and offended at the wicked idolatry of “American Exceptionalism”: it does great harm to the world–most of all to the United States itself.  It weakens the United States.  It remains a terrible, odious secular perversion of the Christian faith.