Lets start with the big guns. Charles Krauthammer: “‘Disproportionate’ in What Moral Universe?”

What other country, when attacked in an unprovoked aggression across a recognized international frontier, is then put on a countdown clock by the world, given a limited time window in which to fight back, regardless of whether it has restored its own security?

What other country sustains 1,500 indiscriminate rocket attacks into its cities — every one designed to kill, maim and terrorize civilians — and is then vilified by the world when it tries to destroy the enemy’s infrastructure and strongholds with precision-guided munitions that sometimes have the unintended but unavoidable consequence of collateral civilian death and suffering?

To hear the world pass judgment on the Israel-Hezbollah war as it unfolds is to live in an Orwellian moral universe. With a few significant exceptions (the leadership of the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada and a very few others), the world — governments, the media, U.N. bureaucrats — has completely lost its moral bearings.

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Israel’s response to Hezbollah has been to use the most precise weaponry and targeting it can. It has no interest, no desire to kill Lebanese civilians. Does anyone imagine that it could not have leveled south Lebanon, to say nothing of Beirut? Instead, in the bitter fight against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, it has repeatedly dropped leaflets, issued warnings, sent messages by radio and even phone text to Lebanese villagers to evacuate so that they would not be harmed.

Israel knows that these leaflets and warnings give the Hezbollah fighters time to escape and regroup. The advance notification as to where the next attack is coming has allowed Hezbollah to set up elaborate ambushes. The result? Unexpectedly high Israeli infantry casualties. Moral scrupulousness paid in blood. Israeli soldiers die so that Lebanese civilians will not, and who does the international community condemn for disregarding civilian life?

The first and only reasonable case I have heard for a full-scale cease-fire (not the pretend one in force right now). Trudy Rubin: “Bush out of touch with Mideast vision”

“”My intent is not to defame democracy but to challenge the White House outlook. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, we have to deal with the Middle East we have, not the Middle East we want.

Nowhere is this truer than in Lebanon. The Beirut government of Prime Minister Fuad Saniora was the White House’s poster child for regional transformation. Huge crowds turned out in Beirut for the “Cedar Revolution.”

But followers of Lebanon’s leading democratic political group, the Future Movement, led by the son of assassinated former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, now say they feel betrayed by the Bush White House. They want Hezbollah disarmed and want Lebanon to exert sovereignty over its south. They say the time is ripe for the Saniora government to demand that Hezbollah stand its militia down, but they warn that the government will collapse unless a cease-fire comes soon. They ask what Washington’s backing is worth if Bush permits the continued destruction of their country.

The Bush administration, however, sees Lebanon in a broader context of Middle East “transformation.” It hopes for an Israeli knockout blow against Hezbollah militias that will send a powerful message to the group’s Iranian backers. That view ignores internal Lebanese dynamics that won’t permit the destruction of Hezbollah.”

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No one strategy fits all in the region. Dealing with Hamas requires a focus on the Israel-Palestinian issue, while dealing with Hezbollah requires a focus on Lebanese politics. Unless we confront the Middle East that is, not the vision cooked up by the ill-informed, the regional situation will worsen. And more victories in this “new Middle East” will go to the Islamists, not to democrats.

And then there is the case against. And damn, I think the nays have me. David Brooks: “Cease-Fire to Nowhere”.

If Hezbollah emerges from this moment still strong, it will tower like a giant over the Lebanese government.

There are victory markers strewn across southern Lebanon commemorating the last time Israel withdrew from that land. While reporting a piece for The New Yorker a few years ago, Jeffrey Goldberg would come upon them by the roads. It was like seeing the battle markers at Gettysburg or Antietam, he wrote.

One brightly colored sign, written in both Arabic and (rough) English, marked the spot where “On Oct. 19, 1988 at 1:25 p.m. a martyr car that was body trapped with 500 kilograms of highly exploding materials transformed two Israeli troops into masses of fire and limbs.”

Busloads of tourists would take victory tours and stop at the prominent sights. Before the current war, there were gift shops and, in at least one place, a poster showing a Hezbollah fighter lifting a severed Israeli head. It all testified to the magnetism of a successful idea: that Muslim greatness can be restored through terrorism.

Some people believe that terrorists are driven by desperation, but if you read the statements by Sheik Hassan Nasrallah and other Hezbollah leaders, it’s obvious that their movement has been inspired by opportunity and nourished by success. And the big news last week was that most of the world is calling for an immediate Lebanese cease-fire and another Israeli withdrawal.

If that happens, Nasrallah will be able to build another chain of victory markers. There will be a missile- launcher monument in Tyre. There will be a terror gift shop in Maroun al-Ras. Hell, he’ll probably build a suicide-bomber theme park in Bint Jbail.

Nasrallah himself will become a legend, and teens across the region will be electrified by his glory.

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They point to real risks, but if a cease-fire is imposed now, there won’t be only risks. There will be dead certainties. If Hezbollah emerges from this moment still strong, it will tower like a giant over the Lebanese government. Extremist groups around the world will be swamped with recruits. Iran’s prestige will surge. The defenders of nation states and the sponsors of Resolution 1559 will be humiliated. Israel’s deterrence power will be shattered.

It is dead certain that this cease-fire will not last, any more than the cease-fires of ‘78 or ‘93 or ‘96 lasted. And most important, the idea — that the Muslim renaissance will come through terror — will dominate the sky like the bright summer sun.

That idea is the key to the whole string of crises in this decade of jihad. Lebanon is a chance to show that the death cult is not invincible.

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The U.S. lacks authority because of Iraq. Over the past few days, Israel has grown wary of getting into Lebanon, because it might have no help getting out. The Europeans, being the Europeans, are again squandering a chance to play a big role in world affairs. The “moderate” Arabs are finding that if you spend a generation inciting hatred of Israel you will wind up prisoner to groups who hate Israel more than you do. The U.N. is simply feckless.

The U.S. is right to resist the calls for a quick-fix cease-fire. But when you step back, you see once again the power of ideas. The terrorists are more unified by their ideas than we in the civilized world are unified by ours.

Mark Steyn picks up precisely where Brooks left off and lays his finger on the pulse of Western civilisation like only he can: Professionalization of war is ghettoization of war”

We live in an age of inversely proportional deterrence: The more militarily powerful a civilized nation is, the less its enemies have to fear the full force of that power ever being unleashed. They know America and other Western powers fight under the most stringent self-imposed etiquette. Overwhelming force is one thing; overwhelming force behaving underwhelmingly as a matter of policy is quite another.

So even the most powerful military in the world is subject to broader cultural constraints. When Kathryn Lopez’s e-mailer sneers that “your contribution to this war is limited solely to your ability to exercise the skillset provided by your liberal arts education,” he’s accidentally put his finger on the great imponderable: whether the skill set provided by the typical American, British and European education these last 30 years is now one of the biggest obstacles to civilizational self-preservation. A nation that psychologically outsources war to a small career soldiery risks losing its ability even to grasp concepts like “the enemy”: The professionalization of war is also the ghettoization of war. As John Podhoretz wondered in the New York Post the other day: “What if liberal democracies have now evolved to a point where they can no longer wage war effectively because they have achieved a level of humanitarian concern for others that dwarfs any really cold-eyed pursuit of their own national interests?”

That’s a good question. If you watch the grisly U.S. network coverage of any global sporting event, you’ve no doubt who your team’s meant to be: If there are plucky Belgian hurdlers or Fijian shotputters in the Olympics, you never hear a word of them on ABC and NBC; it’s all heartwarming soft-focus profiles of athletes from Indiana and Nebraska. The American media have no problem being ferociously jingoistic when it comes to the two-man luge. Yet, when it’s a war, there is no “our” team, not on American TV. Like snotty French ice-dancing judges, the media watch the U.S. skate across the rink and then hand out a succession of snippy 4.3s — for lack of Miranda rights in Fallujah, insufficient menu options at Gitmo.

Our enemies understand “why we fight” and where the fight is. They know that in the greater scheme of things the mosques of Jakarta and Amsterdam and Toronto and Dearborn are more important territory than the Sunni Triangle. The U.S. military is the best-equipped and best-trained in the world. But it’s not enough, it never has been and it never will be.

Alan Caruba takes liberals to task on their wilful intellectual impotence in the face of adversity: “No Liberals in My Foxhole!”

Now we get to the most liberal notion of all. “The Israeli campaign is so intense and widespread that it is creating more terrorists than it kills.” This is pretty much the same argument made for U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan. It is a liberal article of faith that if only the Israelis or Americans would just stop existing, there would not be a problem with Islamic terrorism.

No. The misnamed “War on Terror” is, in fact, a war against Islamic fundamentalism and the silent consent of more than a billion Muslims who believe that Islam must rule the world and that the five billion Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and other faiths have no right to exist except as Muslims.

The problem is not Israel and is not the United States. The problem is a new world war that must be fought to protect all the freedoms; the scientific and artistic advances of Western civilization.

Charles Moore turns the blowtorch on the liberal imbecility of the European variety:” The tall story we Europeans now tell ourselves about Israel”

You could criticise Israel’s recent attack for many things. Some argue that it is disproportionate, or too indiscriminate. Others think that it is ill-planned militarily. Others hold that it will give more power to extremists in the Arab world, and will hamper a wider peace settlement. These are all reasonable, though not necessarily correct positions to hold. But European discourse on the subject seems to have been overwhelmed by something else – a narrative, told most powerfully by the way television pictures are selected, that makes Israel out as a senseless, imperialist, mass-murdering, racist bully.

Not only is this analysis wrong – if the Israelis are such imperialists, why did they withdraw from Lebanon for six years, only returning when threatened once again? How many genocidal regimes do you know that have a free press and free elections? – it is also morally imbecilic. It makes no distinction between the tough, sometimes nasty things all countries do when hard-pressed and the profoundly evil intent of some ideologies and regimes. It says nothing about the fanaticism and the immediacy of the threat to Israel. Sir Peter has somehow managed to live on this planet for 75 years without spotting the difference between what Israel is doing in Lebanon and “unlimited war”.

As well as being morally imbecilic, this narrative is the enemy of all efforts to understand what is actually going on in the Middle East. It is so lazy.

Joe Mariani delivers the knockout blow in the very first paragraph. Nice. : Opportunity Knocks in the Middle East”

Why are so many on the Left condemning Israel for a “disproportionate response” to attacks by Hamas and Hizballah? Is there a better way to defeat an enemy when it comes down to combat? After all, the object of war is not to play “tit for tat” games with the enemy, but to beat him.

It’s just another symptom of Leftist insanity that they believe the stronger combatant should be handicapped to make things “fair”… especially when the weaker force started the fight, and deliberately murders civilians as standard operating procedure. Did Patton leave men behind to make battles with the German army more “fair” during his push across Europe?

Of course, one has to wonder whether we’d hear the same rhetoric about fighting fair if Israel were among the weakest of Middle Eastern countries, instead of being one of the strongest. The prevalence of anti-Israel rhetoric among the Left seems to indicate that most Liberals wouldn’t shed a tear over the fate of an occupied — or destroyed — Israel.

The Israelis did everything they reasonably could to purchase peace with their enemies. They withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000. Hizballah, Iran’s sock puppet army, used their claim that they had driven Israel out to win political power. Israelis even uprooted their own people and withdrew from Gaza in 2005. Hamas, an offshoot of the same Muslim Brotherhood that spawned al Qaeda, turned the claim that they had forced Israel to leave into a part of their own winning campaign platform. Instead of peace, all Israel got was Hamas firing Qassam rockets from one direction and Hizballah firing Iranian Katyushas from the other. Finally, both Hamas and Hizballah began conducting raids right into Israel itself. What could the Israelis do, if not fight back? No one who condemns Israel’s response seems to offer a reasonable alternative.

This fight was never about land, occupation or peace, as the world should finally be able to see. This has always been about the destruction of Israel, pure and simple. Israel’s enemies chose this fight. There is no “proportional response” to the threat of a nation’s utter destruction.

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Victor Davis Hanson gets us up to speed with the brand spanking new “Vocabulary of Untruth”

Civilians” in Lebanon have munitions in their basements and deliberately wish to draw fire; in Israel they are in bunkers to avoid it. Israel uses precision weapons to avoid hitting them; Hezbollah sends random missiles into Israel to ensure they are struck.

“Collateral damage” refers mostly to casualties among Hezbollah’s human shields; it can never be used to describe civilian deaths inside Israel, because everything there is by intent a target.

“Disproportionate” means that the Hezbollah aggressors whose primitive rockets can’t kill very many Israeli civilians are losing, while the Israelis’ sophisticated response is deadly against the combatants themselves. See “excessive.”

Anytime you hear the adjective “excessive,” Hezbollah is losing. Anytime you don’t, it isn’t.

“Grave concern” is used by Europeans and Arabs who privately concede there is no future for Lebanon unless Hezbollah is destroyed — and it should preferably be done by the “Zionists” who can then be easily blamed for doing it.

Andrew McCarthy draws attention to the elephant in the room ones again: “Not Terrorism Related, and Certainly Not Islam Related”

A Muslim man walks into not just any building in Seattle — not even just any identifiably Jewish location in Seattle — but into the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, whose mission since 1926, according to the website it maintains, is to “ensure Jewish survival and to enhance the quality of Jewish life locally, in Israel and worldwide.”

The Muslim man has obviously not only carefully chosen the target but cased the place. There’s a security system, so he waits until someone attached to the Federation enters using her access code, then he pounces, forcing his way through the open door. He brandishes a large caliber, semi-automatic handgun. He announces that he’s a Muslim angry at Israel. Then he randomly, wantonly opens fire — shooting six women, one of whom is pregnant, one of whom is killed.

So what happens? The police don’t even want to admit that he’s Muslim (“You could infer that,” the police chief tells the reporters who press this patently relevant question). And the FBI insists it’s not terrorism.

Now, it could not conceivably be more clear that it is terrorism.

Struan Stevenson on the problem behind the problems: “Recalling history’s lessons”

Spanish-American political philosopher George Santayana famously said, “Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are destined to repeat them.” Current events in Iran indicate we had better prepare ourselves for some sharp history lessons. As the brutal, fascist regime tightens its grip in the Middle East, the parallels with the rise of Nazi Germany are menacing.

Under the tyrannical rule of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 120,000 opponents have been executed since the overthrow of the shah 27 years ago. Women — even pregnant women — are hanged from cranes in city squares or stoned to death. Offenders are regularly flogged in public. Convicts have their limbs amputated or eyes gouged out. In August 2004, a 16-year-old girl was publicly hanged from a crane in northern Iran for “acts incompatible with chastity.”

The similarities with Adolf Hitler’s Nazis don’t end there. Since President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took office last year, public executions continue at about three daily. Like Hitler, Mr. Ahmadinejad hates minorities. Young homosexuals are routinely flogged in public before they are hanged. Millions of Kurds, Baluchis, Turkmenis, Arabs and Azeris and many other ethnic groups, face daily discrimination and humiliation.

This same man, who has called the Holocaust “a myth” and said Israel should be “wiped off the map,” has a hatred of Jews that would have gratified Heinrich Himmler. His suggestion Israel could be moved to Alaska or Europe mirrors the ideas promoted in “Mein Kampf” by Hitler, who recommended transporting all Jews to Madagascar or Borneo.

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Michael Slackman notes that Iran is more than a little worried just about now: “Iran hangs in suspense as war offers new strength, and sudden weakness”:

These should be heady days for Iran’s leaders. Hezbollah, widely regarded as its proxy force in Lebanon, continues to rain down rockets on Israel despite 17 days of punishing airstrikes. Hezbollah’s leader is a hero of the Arab world, and Iran is basking in the reflected glory.

Yet this capital is unusually tense. Officials, former officials and analysts say that it is too dangerous even to discuss the crisis. In newspapers, the slightest questioning of support for Hezbollah has been attacked as unpatriotic, pro-Zionist and anti-Islamic.

As the war in Lebanon grinds on, Iranian officials cannot seem to decide whether Iran will emerge stronger — or unexpectedly weakened.

They are increasingly confident of an ideological triumph. But they also believe the war itself has already harmed Hezbollah’s strength as a military deterrent for Iran on the Israeli border.

And foreign policy experts and former government officials said that Iran had come to view Israel’s attack on Lebanon as a proxy offensive. They now view the war as the new front line in the decades-old conflict with Washington.

“They are worried that what’s happened in Lebanon to Hezbollah is the United States’ revenge against Iran,” said Hamidreza Jalaipour, a sociologist and former government official. “The way they are attacking them and fighting against them is like waging a war against Iran.”

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And finally, a word from the Left. Martin Bright: “Right showing left the way on radical Islam”

It’s fascism by any other name and it’s time that all political factions joined forces to fight it

I am being feted by the right. As the political editor of the New Statesman and usually written off by conservative thinkers as a dangerous, pinko liberal, this is a novel and rather awkward position in which to find myself.

Two weeks ago, Channel 4 screened a programme I presented concerning Whitehall’s love affair with radical Islam. It was based on a stream of Foreign Office leaks first published in The Observer and the New Statesman which showed that mandarins were prepared to open lines of communication with organisations such Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. Since then, the right-wing plaudits for my work keep coming in, not just in this country but from America, too, where none other than David Frum, the neoconservative Bush adviser credited with coining ‘axis of evil’, has begun quoting my work approvingly. Neocon journal American Thinker ran a 2,500-word analysis of my findings. While any attention is always welcome, these offers of solidarity are also a challenge.

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It is depressing that so few on the left have been prepared to engage with the issue of the Foreign Office appeasement of radical Islam except to minimise its significance. In contrast, the responses on the right have been largely measured. Moore, for instance, fitted the Foreign Office’s search for radical figures it could do business with, such as Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual head, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, into a wider historical perspective. In the 1930s, we adopted a similar strategy with the Mufti of Jerusalem to ‘deliver’ Muslim opinion. The Mufti went on to support the Nazis.

Meanwhile, Johnson identified the British left’s troubling ability to celebrate oppressive ideologies. ‘Some of us distinctly non-leftists have been worried about the growing signs that certain Western leftists have embraced militant Islam as they embraced Jacobinism and Stalinism: as a powerful force against the Western bourgeoisie and as a source of support among the British masses,’ he said. But he also saw that there was another tendency on the left which recognised the totalitarian tendency within Islamism: ‘Many leftists see militant Islam as destructive of the European rationalism in which the left has its true roots.’

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While this situation remains, there is no shame for those on the left opposed to the rise of radical Islam to build alliances with conservatives prepared to call fascism by its real name.

Here’s Lebanon’s Energy Minister Mohammed Fneish, one of two Hezbollah members who are in the Lebanese parliament waxing lyrical about those virtuous defenders of Lebanon, Hizb’Allah. He is responding to the video, played on Al-Jazeera last week, of Al-Qaeda deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahiri calling “Muslims everywhere” to go and fight in Lebanon alongside Hezbollah:

“Hezbollah does not need non-Lebanese fighters — certainly not any al-Qaeda fighters to join the lines.”"Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah are two different groups,” “Al-Qaeda believes in killing innocents. Hezbollah is involved in a legitimate resistance (against Israel).”

Whatever you say, Fneishty One. I hope that message gets relayed to this lot. Although I am sure Hizballah could use some more humans shields.

Thousands of Lebanon’s Christians fleeing Lebanon’s war zone are condemning terrorist Hezbollah. Although they were said to be running for their lives, they wanted to speak to reporters about their torment at the hands of the Hezbollah organization.

Speaking to the NY Times, a Christian Lebanese man Fayad Hanna Amar said: “Hezbollah came to Ain Ebel [a Lebanese village] to shoot its rockets. They are shooting from between our houses! Please write that in your newspaper.”

A woman who remained anonymous, due to fear of losing her job or her life, said that Hezbollah is killing those trying to leave the town of Bint Jbail. The woman commented: “This is what’s happening, but no one wants to say it.”

(Note: The NY Times reported the above also)

How inconsiderate of these people, no appreciation for their brave defenders what-so-ever. Here they are, captured on film, taking up defensive positions, pausing momentarily for a photo opp, before getting back to the “defending”:

A stream of images, obtained exclusively by the News Ltd, depicts how the extremists are using high-density residential areas as launch pads for rockets and heavy calibre weapons. Dressed in civilian clothing so they can quickly melt back into suburbia, the fighters carrying automatic assault rifles ride in on trucks laden with cannons. The photographs from the Christian area of Wadi Chahrour in the east of Beirut were snapped by a visiting journalist caught in the midst of the war, then smuggled out by a friend.

Whatever training Iran provided for Hizbollah militarily, it is perhaps the media war where the Hiz has deployed its best trained trick ponies:

The ringmaster for this unruly carnival, a former Montrealer named Hussein Nabulsi, keeps things moving. “We have the faith, we have the determination, we have the will to win,” he shouts as the cameras and microphones struggle to keep pace. It’s a tightly scripted affair. Local residents who have ventured into the danger zone to retrieve their possessions immediately have pictures of Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, thrust into their hands by the watching militants. A truck piled high with Peavey speakers rolls around the corner and blasts a soundtrack of radical Islamic fight songs. And when the group starts to lag, Nabulsi screams that Israeli jets are on their way and turns heel — exactly the same way he did before the cameras of an American network the day before. The tour ends with an invitation to return tomorrow — same hour, same place — and a plea. “Especially for CNN, please be on time. This is the third time you’ve come late.”

Whatever you reckon, No Ballsy one. Motherfucking CNN. Don’t hold up the Hiz, they are on a very tight schedule, don’t you know.

I am getting a bit over typing out HIZBALLAH all the time. I’ve been tossing up between the The Hiz and The Balls as a legitimate alternative. Leaning towards The Balls just now. “The Balls spokesman Hussein No Balls” has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?

Melanie Phillips covers all the human shieding of the photogenic legitimate ones here, as well as the questions and context around the Qana civilian deaths. She also has some interesting quotes from the esteemed Upright leader of The Balls, Nasrallah (Allah’s nose?):

The question that those screaming ‘disproportionality’ have to answer is just what they think is a proportionate response to the intention to commit genocide against the Jews– which is what Hezbollah stands for. Virtually nothing has been written in the British media about its leader, Nassan Hasrallah, who is by default being portrayed as some kind of resistance leader defending his people against Israeli aggression. CAMERA, the Committee for Accurate Reporting of the Middle East in America, has collated some of Nasrallah’s sayings about Israel and the Jews, from which one can see immediately that this is indeed a man hell-bent on genocide:

Within a month of Nasrallah’s taking over as leader, Hezbollah (with the help of Iranian intelligence) bombed the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 29 and injuring over 200. The next attack perpetrated by Hezbollah—again with Iranian help—was the bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, killing 86 and injuring over 200.

The widening arena of Hezbollah’s attacks stemmed from Nasrallah’s perception that Jews anywhere are legitimate targets. In fact, Nasrallah has said:

‘If they (Jews) all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.’ (Daily Star, Oct. 23, 2002)

Shiite scholar Amal Saad-Ghorayeb analyzed the anti-Jewish roots of Hezbollah ideology in her book Hezbollah: Politics & Religion. In it, she quotes Hassan Nasrallah describing his antipathy toward Jews:

‘If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice, I do not say the Israeli.’ (New Yorker, Oct. 14, 2002)

Nasrallah also incorporates anti-Semitic rhetoric in speeches. For example, he has characterized Jews as the ‘grandsons of apes and pigs’ and ‘Allah’s most cowardly and greedy creatures.’ (MEMRI: Al- Manar, Feb. 3, 2006) Despite his anti-Semitic invective, there are few references to this in the main stream media.

The only thing that is disproportionate – and grotesquely, obscenely so – is the way in which so many in Britain and the west are determined to prevent Israel from defending itself against this terrible threat. And in doing so they fail to see that how gravely it threatens themselves, too. If Israel loses this fight against Iran’s proxy, those western imbeciles will have handed Iran and Islamist fascism a stunning victory against the entire free world. Every poisonous distortion in the British media brings that dreadful outcome one step nearer.

Today is the 30th anniversary of the 20th century’s deadliest earthquake, which struck the city of Tangshan, China in the dead of night, with the power of 400 atomic bombs. The quake claimed the lives of a quarter of the city’s million residents. Some sources estimate the death toll as much as three times higher. The Maoist government had ignored warnings from scientists, who noted the rising seismic activity, choosing to focus on internal disputes and perception shaping instead. They also refused all foreign aid offered to them, although around 165,000 people were recorded as being severely injured, a spokesman for the Red Flag journal declaring: “Any grave natural disaster can be overcome with the guidance of Chairman Mao”.

Rowan Callick reports on the cover-up existing to this day in The Australian:

Coalminer Li Yulin, aged 41, clawed his way out of his collapsed home in his underwear and stumbled towards the nearby Kailuan mine. He flagged down the red mine ambulance that was speeding towards him.
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They drove into the heart of Beijing, arriving at 8am at Zhongnanhai, the leaders’ compound next to the ancient imperial Forbidden City. Dozens of armed soldiers surrounded them. When they had explained their mission, two policemen led them to a reception room where they met vice-premier Ji Dengkui, whom Li recognised from newspaper photos.

“I cried in excitement and he held me in his arms,” Li said. “I felt like a lost son meeting his mother again. I thought, ‘The people of Tangshan are saved.”‘

Li and driver Cui breathlessly reported what they knew of the disaster, concluding by shouting: “Long live the Communist Party. Long live Chairman Mao.” Li lost 22 family members in the earthquake, including his parents and his eldest son, aged 15.

How did the leaders in Zhongnanhai, mesmerised by their own Cultural Revolution endgame and riven by rivalry, respond to the almost supernatural expectations of Li and Cui? Slowly and inadequately.

Mao’s fourth wife, Jiang Qing, one of the Gang of Four, took charge of the rescue efforts, focusing on propaganda rather than practical needs. The next day the story from the official Xinhua newsagency, which still operates today, was headed by a Maoist slogan: “Humans must have the strength to subdue the heavens.” It focused on Mao’s leadership against such disasters.

The People’s Daily newspaper, which also still operates, reported how brave survivors had gathered to criticise Deng Xiaoping’s revisionism. A party member was praised for choosing to rescue the communist branch secretary despite hearing cries from his trapped son and daughter. By the time he returned home, the children were dead.

It took a week for the People’s Liberation Army to bring cranes to the disaster site, by which time almost all the survivors under the rubble had fallen silent, as aftershocks kept hitting the beleaguered city.
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After Zhang Qingzhou published a novel, on the 20th anniversary, about the earthquake that destroyed his home when he was 16, he was contacted by a reader claiming the disaster had been predicted, as had another earthquake measuring 7.3 on the Richter scale 17 months earlier, near the northeastern city of Haicheng, where local officials had been warned and taken precautions, restricting the death toll to 2000.
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Zhang followed up his reader’s leads, speaking with Yang Youchen who, as head of the China Earthquake Administration’s office in Tangshan, had predicted at a meeting early in 1976 that evidence from more than 40 seismic monitoring posts indicated a severe earthquake was due in July or August within a 50km radius of Tangshan.

Yang was punished for his prediction by being sent to a school for unsound cadres. When he repeated his warning at a China Seismological Bureau meeting in Jinan in May, he was removed.

Zhang says the people who succeeded Yang “died in the earthquake, burying his warnings with them”. The cover-up became public when Zhang’s book was published, after a battle with authorities. It soon sold out and reprints have been officially banned.

In Tangshan Apocalypse Zhang wrote that Geng Qingguo, of Beijing’s earthquake forecast team, had predicted the area around Beijing might suffer an earthquake as strong as 7 on the Richter scale, following the Haicheng event. Her reports were quashed by the national bureau.

Geng wrote to Xinhua newsagency criticising her boss, Mei Shirong, who responded that “Geng recklessly made trouble for me. Beijing is the capital. Words must be used with more caution here.”

The warnings came thick and fast in July, Zhang says: from a seismic monitoring post at Kailuan coalmine on July 6, from Zhao Gexhuang mine post and from Beijing’s earthquake forecast team on July 14, from Hongwei middle school post on July 16, from Tongxian county earthquake station on July24 and from Ma Jiagou mine post just 11 hours before the quake.

Zhang says Wang Chengmin, a national seismological bureau researcher, wanted to report the heightened activity, but, he told Zhang, the bureau’s leaders were too busy “criticising Deng Xiaoping and rightism” to pay attention.

Academic discussion had been replaced by a determination “to cover up the truth and to control public opinion”, Wang said. “Certainly it would have been possible to send a warning to people in Tangshan.”

Bizarrely, the handling of the same earthquake in Qinglong County, just 115 km from Tangshan, is hailed by the UN as a case of “public administration best practice”. In 1996 the UN Global Programme for the Integration of Public Administration and the Science of Disasters (UNGP-IPASD), released a report titled “Integration of Public Administration and Earthquake Science: The Best Practice Case of Qinglong County”:

The magnitude 7.8 Great Tangshan Earthquake (GTE) occurred under the city of Tangshan, China, on July 28, 1976. When the dust settled, a quarter of a million people had died, and only a small handful of buildings were left standing. Emerging from this tragedy is a public administration best practice: public administrators of Qinglong County integrated scientific knowledge and monitoring by lay public, and prepared for the Great Tangshan Earthquake. Although 180,000 buildings in the county were destroyed, not one life was lost in the county due to the devastation (one person had a heart attack) while over 240,000 people died in surrounding areas.

“Surrounding areas” of course primarily refers to the flattened city of Tangshen, possibly the 20th century’s best example of public administration worst practice.

The UN Global Programme for the Integration of Public Administration and the Science of Disasters conducted a detailed study of Qinglong County between 1995-1996. This is Qinglong County’s remarkable story.

Two weeks before the Tangshan earthquake…
Administrator Wang Chunqing attended a conference organized by the State Seismological Bureau (SSB) for the North China-Bohai region. During this conference, on the evening of July 16, 1976, scientist Wang Chengmin of the SSB’s Analysis and Prediction Department spoke at an informal meeting attended by sixty conference participants. Young administrator Wang Chunqing was among the audience. He took detailed notes of the scientist’s presentation, including this entry:

“…There is a strong possibility of a magnitude 5 earthquake from July 22 to August 5, 1976 in the Tangshan region. A magnitude 8 is also likely in the second half of ‘76. Preparations should be made immediately…”

On July 21, 1976, administrator Wang Chunqing returned to Qinglong County. He reported on the Tangshan conference, highlighted the talk given by scientist Wang Chengmin, and included updated information from the county’s 16 lay monitoring stations. Public officials of Qinglong County took the report very seriously and acted upon the information immediately.
School classes were relocated and held outdoors several days before the eventual earthquake. Students also played an important part in the collection of data.
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An official early warning from the Chinese Communist Party Committee of Qinglong County was issued advising people to prepare for a possible devastating earthquake.

The County government took advantage of a planned agricultural meeting to publicize the earthquake warning. Telephone and public announcement systems were also used to broadcast the alert.

Volunteer earthquake monitoring stations report:

From July 24th, natural spring water had become muddy and undrinkable.

By July 26th, temporary earthquake tents were set up. Led by County Secretary Ran Guangqi, who moved into an earthquake tent himself, over 60% of Qinglong County’s more than 470,000 residents moved out of their homes. Those who did not move were instructed to keep their doors and windows open at all times to avoid being trapped in case of an earthquake.
Businesses also relocated to outdoor locations where they continued their normal activities.
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In Qinglong County (115 km from Tangshan), more than 180,000 buildings were destroyed by the GTE; over 7,000 of these totally collapsed. However, only one person died, and he died of a heart attack. Meanwhile, in the city of Tangshan and in all its other surrounding counties, more than 240,000 people were crushed to death and 600,000 were seriously injured. Five hours after the earthquake, Qinglong County dispatched the first medical team to the disaster zone, and within a very short time, sent relief teams to Tangshan to help with rescue work and transport of the wounded.
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In the twenty years since the Great Tangshan Earthquake, the Chinese have strengthened their capacity to mitigate earthquake disasters from the perspectives of both science and public administration. Successes in these areas have resulted in fewer fatalities during earthquakes.
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On this twentieth anniversary of the Great Tangshan Earthquake, we look forward to the day when communities will be able to reduce loss of lives from natural disasters because of the lessons learned from Qinglong County.

It should be noted that the above presentation was designed for the UNGP-IPASD by members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Geology and the State Seismological Bureau, also of China.

The contrast between the stories of these two communities is a most tragic irony.

Forewarning relay and preparation were not the only problems in Tangshan. The BBC reported on this day 30 years ago:

The survivors of the Tangshan quake are living in tents and are expected to be moved to winter shelters, the New China news agency has reported. Aircraft and lorries have been taking large quantities of relief supplies to help the relief effort.

The authorities later hope to move people to simple houses, which can withstand tremors and are warm and rainproof before winter sets in.

Chinese officials have rejected any offers of help from the outside world, saying that survivors have enough to eat and wear and there are sufficient medical supplies and doctors in the city.

Well, perhaps not:

One week [after the quake], Tan [Pengru] walked down Victory Street on crutches. The four-lane street was lined with dead bodies, barely leaving room for a bicycle path. Sometimes, the corpses were stacked into piles, and in between them, survivors were cooking their meals in makeshift stoves, oblivious to the horror and the stench that permeated the air.

There was also a short period of lawlessness when food and clean water were extremely scarce. “We had airdrops of food, but people had to fight for them. There was occasional violence,” he sighed. Fortunately law and order was quickly restored with the help of the army that was pouring into the city and mounting a mammoth rescue effort.

Adding insult to injury, two years ago a “memorial” wall was built in Tangshan out of three granite blocks, with families being charged a cost of 1000 RMB to have a perished loved one’s name displayed on it. Or a generous 800 RMB for a place on the back of the wall. Needless to say, a not uncommon view of the residents of Tangshan is to see this as “using a disaster as a gimmick to make money”.

Tangshan before the quake:

After the quake:

Read the rest of this entry »

You can get it while crashing your car through someone’s bedroom, you can get it while winning the Tour de France. As a matter of fact I’ve got it now. (that will probably only make sense to the Aussies)

We all need the occassional feel-good beer story.

A MAN who crashed his car into a sleeping couple’s bedroom allegedly cracked open a beer after freeing himself from his crumpled sedan and declared: “I’m going to jail for sure.”

A 36-year-old man and a 29-year-old woman, asleep in the room, cheated death when the runaway car shunted their bed sideways.
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They escaped serious injury. The man said: “The crash was bizarre. I’m glad no-one was injured. I am very, very, very lucky.”

Unit owner Danielle Loy agreed the sleeping man was lucky to be alive. “They were sleeping on the other side of the bed, cuddled up,” she said.

“If he had slept like he normally did he’d be dead.”

“They’ve basically just cheated death.”

The couple told Ms Loy the driver had quickly emptied a beer after crashing the car, allegedly saying: “I’d better have another beer, I’m going to jail for sure.”

And he didn’t even offer a cold one to the couple whose sleep he just so rudely interrupted (and who were saved by the beer Gods, obviously)? Hmm, thats just Un-Australian!

Another man who knows the value of beer is the 2006 Tour de France champion, Floyd Landis. Cheers, Floyd, nice one!

UPDATE (28/7): Tsk, tsk, seems beer wasn’t Floyd’s secret weapon after all.

Continueing with today’s theme, the following is from a review of Efraim Karsh’s “Islamic Imperialism: A history”, from the Philadelphia Enquirer. The book looks back at the very beginning of the Muhammedan creed, when “Islam began in banditry” and spread over centuries of tyrannical and barbaric Imperialism, conquering through brutality, greed and deception.

Seeing Islam as a culture rooted in war

By Carlin Romano

It sounds like yesterday’s newspaper:

Growing lawlessness… led to the formation of citizen organizations for defense and reprisals… . Notable among these were… thugs drawn from the lower reaches of society… .

Ready to sell their services to the highest bidder, groups… competed against each other to serve the rival Shiite and Sunni camps in their incessant squabbles…

Yesterday’s Financial Times on today’s Iraq? No, Efraim Karsh on eighth-century Baghdad. Forgive yourself if “the more things change, the more they stay the same” comes to mind.

Muslim scholars, proud of Islam’s cultural feats, often don’t know what to say about its endemic violence and militarism. Even great ones fall victim to soft-pedaling the endless battles, assassinations and massacres by which Islam expanded from Arabia to become a world religion. In his Islam: Religion, History, and Civilization (2003), the distinguished Iranian philosopher S.H. Nasr embodied this tradition in a telling, self-contradictory sentence:

“In less than a century after the establishment of the first Islamic society in Medina by the Prophet, Arab armies had conquered a land stretching from the Indus River to France and brought with them Islam, which, contrary to popular Western conceptions, was not forced upon the people by the sword.”

You might say that Efraim Karsh, head of the Mediterranean Studies Program at the University of London, gives the other side of the story.

In his nervy, tightly documented Islamic Imperialism, Karsh challenges scholars and Muslim leaders to refute his own picture of Islam: an imperialist seventh-century Arabic movement that forced itself on neighboring lands such as today’s Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Egypt for secular colonialist payoffs – money, booty, territory.

According to Karsh, Muhammad, by claiming Allah’s authority to act as both a political and religious leader, was able “to cloak his political ambitions with a religious aura” and “channel Islam’s energies” into geographic expansion.

In seventh-century Arabia, Karsh argues, the peninsula teemed with people claiming divine inspiration. What Muhammad added, Karsh contends, was insistence on Allah as the sole god, a desire to unite believers equally in a Muslim umma (or “community of believers”), and a will to do so by force if persuasion failed.

On the practical side, Karsh maintains, Islam began in banditry. After going to Medina, Muhammad sought to “entice his local followers into raiding the Meccan caravans,” and the multiple attacks increased their war chests. His unpopularity with Meccans stemmed not just from his new beliefs, Karsh asserts, but from his brigandage.

Medina, originally known as Yathrib, had been partly “settled by Jewish refugees fleeing Roman persecution.” Karsh says Muhammad first tried to persuade Yathrib’s three Jewish tribes – the Quainuqa, Nadir and Quraiza – to convert to Islam. He adopted “a number of Jewish rituals,” including praying “toward Jerusalem” and not eating pork.

When the “Medina Jews” demurred, Karsh states, Muhammad turned on them, dropping Jewish rituals and changing the direction of prayer to Mecca.

Eventually, Karsh writes, Muhammad expelled the Quainuqa and Nadir and stole their goods. Then, in 627, after accusing the Quraiza of conspiring with Meccan enemies, Muhammad ordered its nearly 800 men beheaded. The Muslims sold the women and children into slavery and split the tribe’s money.

Muhammad also continued his conquest of Arabia. He conducted raids throughout the peninsula and “resorted to the assassination of political rivals.” In 630, he showed up at Mecca with an army, the city capitulated, and Islam’s great rise began.

In Karsh’s view, Muhammad has served as a model for Muslims not just as a wise man and prophet, but as a warrior.

Anyone not expert on early Islam will need a scorecard to follow the innumerable murders, impalings, decapitations and dismemberments that marked the early Islamic caliphates and Shiite/Sunni split. You think what’s happening in Iraq is new? So many severed heads get sent from one leader to another in Islamic Imperialism, you wonder why “Fed Head” didn’t get off the ground as a Meccan firm.

From Muhammad’s farewell address in 632 (“I was ordered to fight all men until they say, ‘There is no God but Allah.’ “), to Saladin in 1189 (“I shall… pursue them until there remains no one… who does not acknowledge Allah”), to Osama bin Laden in 2001 (“I was ordered to fight the people until they say there is no god but Allah…”), Karsh finds Islam’s outward imperialism consistent.

But internally, Karsh notes, mayhem against rival Muslims also implicated Islam’s spiritual side as “a facade that concealed what was effectively a secular and increasingly absolutist rule,” one by which Arab caliphs could “enjoy the material fruits of imperial expansion.”

Every Islamic takeover, Karsh emphasizes, came with a demand for tribute, taxes, or both: “Arab conquerors were far less interested in the mass conversion of the vanquished peoples than in securing their tribute.” Meanwhile, infighting made “a mockery” of Muhammad’s ban on fighting among Muslims.

This history of Islam’s internal wars forms the timely, eye-opening side of Karsh’s book. By the first Abbasid caliphate in 749, Karsh summarizes, “the Islamic empire was an Arab military autocracy run by Arabs for the sole benefit of Arabs.”

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This posts follows on from the last one, quoting from the same Fjordman essay. This one quotes parts of the essay addressing the myth, currently gladly lapped up by would-be dhimmis in the West, that Islam “preserved” our civilisation’s science and knowledge through Europe’s Dark Ages:

These days, we also hear claims that we in the West owe so much to Muslims because Muslim Spain preserved and passed on Greek knowledge to the West, without which there would have been no Renaissance. The funny thing is, nobody seems to ask the Greeks about how good Muslims have been at preserving their cultural heritage. They might disagree.

The classical and Greek heritage did not die when the Western Roman Empire collapsed, it continued in the Eastern Roman Empire, later known as the Byzantine Empire, as it was more Greek than Roman. It lived on there uninterruptedly until the 15th century when it was finally destroyed by, well, Turkish Muslims. The Byzantine Empire upheld the unbroken succession of Roman emperors for a thousand years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The Byzantines played a crucial part in the transmitting the classical and Greco-Roman heritage to Renaissance Italy, especially after the Ottoman Muslim conquest and the many Greek scholars fleeing to the West.

The Greeks bore the brunt of the Jihad for more than a thousand years. Muslims wiped out Greek communities all over the Eastern Mediterranean for centuries, a process that continued in countries such as “Turkey,” the formerly Greek-dominated region of Anatolia, and Egypt even after WW2. If this is how Muslims “preserve Greek heritage,” I hope they will never be in a position to “preserve” mine.

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We often hear that “Islamic culture” was superior to Western culture in the Middle Ages, and that Westerners owe much of our technological progress to Muslims. If we say that the “Middle East” and the Eastern Mediterranean were culturally and economically superior to Europe in the Middle Ages, then this is true. However, this had been the case for thousands of years before Islam entered into history. The oldest civilizations know to mankind originated in a belt stretching from today’s Egypt via Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Iraq to Pakistan. It is not a coincidence that the first European civilizations began in countries that were geographically close to the Middle East: The island of Crete, later mainland Greece and the Balkans, then Rome. Even in the Roman Empire, the Eastern part of the empire was stronger and more urbanized than its Northern and Western regions, which is one of the reasons why the Eastern half proved much more durable while the Western half collapsed in the 5th century.

When the Arab Muslims, a collection of backward, nomadic warrior tribes who did not even have a fully developed script, conquered Egypt, Syria and Iran, they took control over some of the world’s largest centres of accumulated knowledge. To say that “Muslims” or “Islamic culture” created the civilizations of the Middle East can be compared to an illiterate person storming into the planet’s largest library, killing all the librarians and then claiming to have written all the books there. The cultural superiority of the Middle East in relations to Europe did not begin with Islam’s entry into the area. In fact, it ended with it. One of the great riddles of history is how this once-dynamic region could become the world’s number one problem spot. It so happens that this decline coincides with the region’s Islamization, although some would claim that it had already started before this. Islam’s much-vaunted “Golden Age” was in reality just the twilight of the conquered pre-Islamic cultures, an echo of times passed.

It is true that no civilization exists in a vacuum. Modern Western civilization owes much to Egyptians, Persians, Sumerians, Byzantines, Assyrians, Jews, Indians and Chinese. We owe little, if anything to Islam.

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It is a time-tested Islamic tradition: If you cannot show significant historical achievements of your own, you can always steal somebody else’s.

Make that two Fjordman essays I missed. This one deals with the legacy of Jihad and dhimmitude, “the repressive and humiliating apartheid system imposed upon non-Muslim”, in various Islamised lands, exposing the whitewashed mythology propogated by Islamist propogandists, who are inching the subjugation of Europe with the help of degenerate leftist elites.

I am splitting this into two posts, the first being on the theme of jihad and dhimmitude and the second on the Islamic claim to the “preservation” of Greek knowledge through the Middle ages, when Islamic culture was supposedly superior to that of the West.

Jihad and dhimmitude in the Indian subcontinent:

Sir Jadunath Sarkar, the pre-eminent historian of Mughal India, wrote the following in 1920 regarding the impact of centuries of Jihad and dhimmitude on the indigenous Hindus of the Indian subcontinent:

“The conversion of the entire population to Islam and the extinction of every form of dissent is the ideal of the Muslim State. If any infidel is suffered to exist in the community, it is as a necessary evil, and for a transitional period only. Political and social disabilities must be imposed on him, and bribes offered to him from the public funds, to hasten the day of his spiritual enlightenment and the addition of his name to the roll of true believers.” “A non-Muslim therefore cannot be a citizen of the State; he is a member of a depressed class; his status is a modified form of slavery. He lives under a contract (zimma, or ‘dhimma’) with the State: for the life and property grudgingly spared to him by the commander of the faithful he must undergo political and social disabilities, and pay a commutation money. In short, his continued existence in the State after the conquest of his country by the Muslims is conditional upon his person and property made subservient to the cause of Islam.”

Jihad and dhimmitude in the Iberian Peninsula:

["the most informed contemporary scholar of the unique Islamic institution of dhimmitude"] Bat Ye’or and Andrew Bostom [author of "The Legacy of Jihad"] state that: “We believe that reiterating these ahistorical, roseate claims about Muslim Spain abets the contemporary Islamist agenda, and retards the evolution of a liberal, reformed ‘Euro-Islam’ fully compatible with post-Enlightenment Western values.” “Iberia [Spain] was conquered in 710-716 AD by Arab tribes originating from northern, central and southern Arabia. Massive Berber and Arab immigration, and the colonization of the Iberian peninsula, followed the conquest. Most churches were converted into mosques. Although the conquest had been planned and conducted jointly with a strong faction of royal Iberian Christian dissidents, including a bishop, it proceeded as a classical jihad with massive pillages, enslavement, deportations and killings.”

“In the regions under stable Islamic control, Jews and Christians were tolerated as dhimmis – like elsewhere in other Islamic lands – and could not build new churches or synagogues nor restore the old ones. Segregated in special quarters, they had to wear discriminatory clothing. Subjected to heavy taxes, the Christian peasantry formed a servile class attached to the Arab domains; many abandoned their land and fled to the towns. Harsh reprisals with mutilations and crucifixions would sanction the Mozarab (Christian dhimmis) calls for help from the Christian kings.”

The humiliating status imposed on the dhimmis and the confiscation of their land provoked many revolts, punished by massacres, as in Toledo (761, 784-86, 797), Saragossa from 781 to 881, Cordova (805), Merida (805-813, 828), and yet again in Toledo (811-819). The insurgents were crucified, as prescribed in the Koran 5:33.

According to Bat Ye’or and Bostom, “Feuding was endemic in the Andalusian cities between the different sectors of the population: Arab and Berber colonizers, Iberian Muslim converts (Muwalladun) and Christian dhimmis (Mozarabs). There were rarely periods of peace in the Amirate of Cordova (756-912), nor later.” “Al-Andalus represented the land of jihad par excellence. Every year, sometimes twice a year, raiding expeditions were sent to ravage the Christian Spanish kingdoms to the north, the Basque regions, or France and the Rhone valley, bringing back booty and slaves. Andalusian corsairs attacked and invaded along the Sicilian and Italian coasts, even as far as the Aegean Islands, looting and burning as they went. Thousands of people were deported to slavery in Andalusia, where the caliph kept a militia of tens of thousand of Christian slaves brought from all parts of Christian Europe (the Saqaliba), and a harem filled with captured Christian women. Society was sharply divided along ethnic and religious lines, with the Arab tribes at the top of the hierarchy, followed by the Berbers who were never recognized as equals, despite their Islamization; lower in the scale came the mullawadun converts and, at the very bottom, the dhimmi Christians and Jews.”

Richard Fletcher observed in Moorish Spain that “Moorish Spain was not a tolerant and enlightened society even in its most cultivated epoch.” A prominent Andalusian jurist, Ibn Hazm of Cordoba (d. 1064), wrote that Allah has established the infidels’ ownership of their property merely to provide booty for Muslims. Ibn Abdun forbade the selling of scientific books to dhimmis, under the pretext that they translated them and attributed them to their co-religionists and bishops.

Bat Ye’or and Bostom state that: “The Muslim Berber Almohads in Spain and North Africa (1130-1232) wreaked enormous destruction on both the Jewish and Christian populations. This devastation – massacre, captivity, and forced conversion – was described by the Jewish chronicler Abraham Ibn Daud, and the poet Abraham Ibn Ezra. Suspicious of the sincerity of the Jewish converts to Islam, Muslim ‘inquisitors’ (i.e., antedating their Christian Spanish counterparts by three centuries) removed the children from such families, placing them in the care of Muslim educators.”

“The socio-political history of Andalusia was characterized by a particularly oppressive dhimmitude that is completely incompatible with modern notions of equality between individuals, regardless of religious faith. At the dawn of the 21st century, we must insist that Muslims in the West adopt post-Enlightenment societal standards of equality, not ‘tolerance,’ abandoning forever their hagiography of the brutal, discriminatory standards practiced by the classical Maliki jurists of ‘enlightened’ Andalusia.”

The following, also on the conquered Iberian Peninsula, is from Oriana Fallaci’s “The Force of Reason” (see sidebar for link):

It was in 711 that after crossing the Strait of Gibralter they landed in the most Catholic Iberian Peninsula, took possession of Portugal and Spain where despite the Pelayos and the Cid Campeadors and the other warriors engaged in the Reconquest they remained for noless than eight centuries. And whoever believes in the myth of *peaceful coexistence that marked the relationships between the conquered and the conquerors* should reread the stories of the burned convents and monestaries, of the profaned churches, of the raped nuns, of the Christian or Jewish women abducted to be locked away in their harems. He should ponder on the crucifixioins of Cordoba, the hangings of Grenada, the beheadings of Toledo and Barcelona, of Seville and Zamora. (The beheadings of Seville, ordered by Mutamid: the king who used those severed heads, heads of Jews and Christians, to adorn his palace. The beheadings of Zamora, ordered by Almanzor: the vizier who was called the-patron-of-the-philosophers, the greatest leader Islamic Spain has ever produced). Christ! Invoking the name of Jesus meant instant execution. Crucifixion, of course, or decapitation or hanging or impalement. Ringing a bell, the same. Wearing green, the colour exclusive to Islam, also. And when a Muslim passed by, every Jew and Christian was obliged to step aside. To bow. And mind to the Jew or the Christian who dared react to the insults of a Muslim. As for the much-flaunted detail that the infidel-dogs were not obliged to convert to Islam, not even encouraged to do so, do you know why they were not? Because those who converted to Islam did not pay taxes. Those who refused, on the contrary, did.

(book extract here)

(Back to Fjordman) Jihad and dhimmitude in what was the Byzantine Empire:

Robert Spencer describes how on Tuesday, May 29, 1453, the armies of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II entered Constantinople, breaking through the defenses of a vastly outnumbered and indomitably courageous Byzantine force. Historian Steven Runciman notes what happened next: The Muslim soldiers “slew everyone that they met in the streets, men, women, and children without discrimination. The blood ran in rivers down the steep streets from the heights of Petra toward the Golden Horn. But soon the lust for slaughter was assuaged. The soldiers realized that captives and precious objects would bring them greater profit.” It has come to be known as Black Tuesday, the Last Day of the World.

The jihadists also entered the Hagia Sophia, which for nearly a thousand years had been the grandest church in Christendom. Muslim men then killed the elderly and weak and led the rest off into slavery. Once the Muslims had thoroughly subdued Constantinople, they set out to Islamize it. According to the Muslim chronicler Hoca Sa’deddin, “churches which were within the city were emptied of their vile idols and cleansed from the filthy and idolatrous impurities and by the defacement of their images and the erection of Islamic prayer niches and pulpits many monasteries and chapels became the envy of the gardens of Paradise.”

One of the worst burdens on the dhimmi population in the Ottoman Empire was devshirmeh, the forced collection of young boys from Christian Greeks, Croats, Bulgarians, Serbs and Albanians to build a slave army of Janissaries. Vasiliki Papoulia highlights the continuous desperate, often violent struggle of the Christian populations against this brutally imposed Ottoman levy:

“It is obvious that the population strongly resented […] this measure [and the levy] could be carried out only by force. Those who refused to surrender their sons – the healthiest, the handsomest and the most intelligent – were on the spot put to death by hanging. Nevertheless we have examples of armed resistance. Since there was no possibility of escaping [the levy] the population resorted to several subterfuges. Some left their villages and fled to certain cities which enjoyed exemption from the child levy or migrated to Venetian-held territories. The result was a depopulation of the countryside.”

The rest of the essay deals with some specific contemprary examples of Islamist propoganda in vogue and on the march in the EU and the intellectual impotence of European “elites” that renders them complicit in this crime against civilisation. Read the full essay here.

I missed a Fjordman essay while out of town, here it is, sharp as usual. This one deals with the rise of the “neo-Communists” in European politics, who champion transnationalism and multiculturalism, ignoring the will of the people they are supposed to represent, suffocate dissent with political correctness and stifle freedom and autonomy with top-down planning.

Here’s his summary of what needs to be repaired in many Western democracies for them to have a chance at a future:

To sum it up, here are some suggested preconditions for a functioning, democratic system:

1. There has to be a demos, a people with the sense of being a people with shared interests. Multiculturalism and massive immigration without assimilation could severely damage this demos.
2. There has to be a genuine debate about the issues that matter. This is now severely curtailed in many Western countries for a combination of reasons. Leftist activists are promoting formal and informal censorship of critical issues, and the media isn’t functioning as a counterweight to the political élites because, in many cases, the journalists are a part of these élites and share their political goals.
3. There has to be a mental connection between those implementing policies and the people they are supposed to serve. And the general public must have a genuine possibility of removing those officials who are not following the popular will. With the growth of supranational institutions, there are now many people in the élite groups who feel little connection with the people or the nation states they are technically supposed to serve. Their people are just stepping stones to their international careers. They are anyway both physically and mentally so removed from ordinary people that they may not understand their concerns even if they cared about them, which they frequently don’t.
4. No major presence of Muslims. Islam is toxic to a democratic society, for several reasons. One is the fear of physical attacks against anybody criticizing the Islamic agenda, thus destroying any possibility of a free, public discourse. Another is the resentment caused by Muslims asking for separate laws and “special treatment,” as well as the violence and harassment of non-Muslims which is always part and parcel of Jihad.
5. The country must be able to control its own borders, and immigration must follow popular will. A nation that does not discriminate between citizens and non-citizens is destined to die.

Fjordman also suggest a slogan: “Political Correctness is mental AIDS. Wear an intellectual condom. Use the blogosphere.”

The essay contains this fantastic quote from F.A. Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom”:

“Observer after observer, in spite of the contrary expectation with which he approached his subject, has been impressed with the extraordinary similarity in many respects of the conditions under ‘fascism’ and ‘communism.’ Even communists must have been somewhat shaken by such testimonies as that of Mr. Max Eastman, Lenin’s old friend, who found himself compelled to admit that ‘instead of being better, Stalinism is worse than fascism, more ruthless, barbarous, unjust, immoral, anti-democratic, unredeemed by any hope or scruple,’ and that it is ‘better described as superfascist’; and when we find the same author recognising that ‘Stalinism is socialism, in the sense of being an inevitable although unforeseen political accompaniment of the nationalisation and collectivisation which he had relied upon as part of his plan for erecting a classless society,’ his conclusion clearly achieves wider significance.”

“Neither good intentions nor efficiency of organisation can preserve decency in a system in which personal freedom and individual responsibility are destroyed.”

also from FA Hayek:

“There need be little difficulty in planning the economic life of a family, comparatively little in a small community. But as the scale increases, the amount of agreement on the order of ends decreases and the necessity to rely on force and compulsion grows. In a small community common views on the relative importance of the main tasks, agreed standards of value, will exist on a great many subjects. Bu their number will become less and less the wider we throw the net: and as there is less community of views, the necessity to rely on force and coercion increases […] To imagine that the economic life of a vast area comprising many different people can be directed or planned by democratic procedure betrays a complete lack of awareness of the problems such planning would raise. Planning on an international scale, even more than is true on a national scale, cannot be anything but a naked rule of force, an imposition by a small group on all the rest of that sort of standard and employment which the planners think suitable for the rest.”

“…on the whole there was more beauty and decency to be found in the life of the small peoples, and that among the large ones there was more happiness and content in proportion as they had avoided the deadly blight of centralisation. Least of all shall we preserve democracy or foster its growth if all the power and most of the decisions rest with an organisation far too big for the common man to survey or comprehend. Nowhere has democracy ever worked well without a great measure of local self-government, providing a school of political training for the people at large as much as for their future leaders. It is only where responsibility can be learnt and practised in affairs with which most people are familiar, where it is awareness of one’s neighbour rather than some theoretical knowledge of the needs of other people which guides action, that the ordinary man can take a real part in public affairs because they concern the world he knows. Where the scope of the political measures become so large that the necessary knowledge is almost exclusively possessed by the bureaucracy, the creative impulses of the private person must flag.”

I have to say, I am pleasantly surprised by the lack of PC whitewash, such as that which infects most politicians when they touch on this issue, in what Costello has been saying. Looking forward to the policies.

AUSTRALIA faces a future of social upheaval unless couples start having more children, warns the Treasurer, Peter Costello.

Launching the 2006 Census yesterday, Mr Costello said that without an increased fertility rate, Australia would be forced to buttress its population decline with increased immigration.

This, he said, would change the nation’s social composition and lead to problems similar to those being experienced in western European nations such as France, the Netherlands and Denmark.

“There are some European countries with low birthrates and high immigration which have moved into this situation and it has caused a lot of social division. In some of these countries there has been social disruption and violence,” he said.

Mr Costello said Australia had benefited from immigration and the biggest waves of immigrants had come when the birthrates were highest.

“It was easier to keep the balance in population because immigrants were being absorbed into a growing population led by fertility,” he said.

Australia’s fertility rate has recovered in recent years from a 40-year low of 1.73 in 2002-03 to 1.8 in 2004-05.

Mr Costello said the rate needed to be 2.1 for parents to replace themselves but he conceded achieving this rate would be “a very tall order”.

He has made an increased birthrate a personal crusade since 2002 when he released the intergenerational report, which warned of an ageing population with too few workers to sustain it.

Allowing more guest workers was not a long-term solution because they were second-class citizens who were not expected to assimilate, were vulnerable to exploitation and became a society within a society, he said.

“Our concept of an immigrant society is that all arrivals are offered the opportunity to become full, first-class citizens. Our culture and history is not compatible with the introduction of guest workers or different tiers of citizenship,” he said.

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Mark Davis reported in the Financial Times (print edition):

[Mr Costello] nominated child care, family payments, more flexible work arrangements and the degree to which fathers helped in child-rearing as key areas affecting incentives for women to have children.

Well, I suppose thats a start.

Some more quotes on the Demographic suicide of the West:

“Never in recorded history have prosperous and peaceful nations chosen to disappear from the face of the earth. Yet that is what the Europeans have chosen to do. Back in 1348 Europe suffered the Black Death.” “The plague reduced the estimated European population by about a third. In the next 50 years, Europe’s population will relive – in slow motion – that plague demography, losing about a fifth of its population by 2050.”
Spengler in the Asia Times Online

“It’s demography, and not democracy, that will be the critical factor shaping growth and security in the 21st century. High rates of births are contributing to the booming populations which are dragging down developing nations. Meanwhile falling birth rates are sapping the growth of developed nations.”
former Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew

“Europe and Japan are now facing a population problem that is unprecedented in human history,”
Bill Butz, president of the Population Reference Bureau

I’ll take re-Christianisation over Islamisation or re-primitivisation any day.

Reuters reporting:

KRAKOW, Poland (Reuters) – At Krakow’s Franciscan Missionary Center, a display case full of African masks and Asian costumes recalls the adventures that awaited priests who went to spread the Roman Catholic faith in far-off lands.

Nowadays, however, half of the missionaries who leave this southern Polish city for abroad head no further than nearby European countries or just over the Atlantic to North America.

Across town at the archdiocesan seminary, students can add English, German, French or Italian to their theology and Latin courses to be ready to move west as soon as they are ordained.

Priests have become a top “export product” as Poland, where the Catholic Church retains a vibrant strength lost in the rest of Europe, helps fill the dwindling ranks of clergy in the West.

“The Church is universal, not just Polish,” said Father Marek Lesniak at the Krakow seminary, whose alumni man parishes of this large archdiocese and also work in Austria, Britain, Germany, Italy, Switzerland and the United States as well as Russia, Ukraine, Democratic Republic of Congo and Brazil.[..]

“We Franciscans want to join in the rechristianization of Europe,” said Father Jan-Marie Szewek of Krakow’s Franciscan province, which has missionaries in Germany, Austria, Italy and the United States.[..]

“I was in Cologne at the World Youth Day last year and we got lots of requests from bishops there from Greece, the Netherlands, Germany and France,” said Lesniak, who celebrates Mass at the seminary in his fluent English, German and Italian in order to teach students to pray in a foreign language.

It is hard to put a figure on Polish priests working abroad because they are sent by their dioceses and religious orders. Vatican statistics show over 1,500 Polish diocesan priests work abroad and dioceses and orders here say the numbers are rising.[..]

About 95 percent of Poles say they are Catholic. Over half attend mass weekly, far more than the 10-20 percent seen in former Catholic strongholds such as France, Italy and Spain.

The number of seminarians is high, assuring a surplus of fresh blood here while the ranks of the clergy elsewhere thin out for lack of young men willing to join the priesthood.

Poland has 22.5 seminarians per 100 ordained priests whereas Italy has only 11.6, Spain 9.5 and France 5.6. Ireland — once a great “exporter” of priests — has only 3.6 per 100 priests.There are about 10 U.S. seminarians per 100 priests.

With 6,427 student priests in 2004, Poland accounted for about one quarter of all seminarians in Europe. It easily surpassed the 5,038 total of all U.S. and Canadian seminarians.

“There are not enough priests in Western Europe and that’s why we are being trained to work there,” said Tomasz Gora, 20, at the Salvatorian order’s seminary in Bagno near Wroclaw in southwestern Poland.[..]

At the Krakow seminary, Lesniak said that young priests are warned not to try to recreate the traditional style of Polish Catholicism in parishes in the more secularized West.

“It’s important to accept local customs,” he said. “If a priest wants to colonize his community, that’s not good.”

He recalled with nostalgia his years studying in Rome but admitted he never got used to some things there. “People talk so much in church in Italy,” he said disapprovingly.