Mark Steyn in the Chicago Sun-Times: “Why abduct us? We cede our values for free”

Did you see that video of the two Fox journalists announcing they’d converted to Islam? The larger problem, it seems to me, is that much of the rest of the Western media have also converted to Islam, and there seems to be no way to get them to convert back to journalism.

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Perhaps they are thinking along similar lines to Thomas Pellow and his fellow slaves, in the book based on his memoirs, “White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and Islam’s One Million White Slaves”. Pellow was one of this million, stolen by Islamic pirates, who regularly raided the European coastline in the 17th and 18th centuries for human booty, and held captive for 23 years until his escape. Writes one reviewer:

They were held for ransom, built the [Moroccan Sultan Moulay Ismail's] vast pleasure palaces, became part of the 4,000 European women in imperial harems or were sold in the vast slave auctions in Morocco, Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli. Those captured by sea by the Moroccan corsairs where likely to be middle-class, educated and skilled Europeans, but Europe was too powerless to meaningfully respond. The Sultans effectively managed to raid as far as the Irish coast although they preferred the far richer Spanish Galleons. Coupled with real fear and brutality, there was always the hope that with luck, ability or the possession of marketable skills and most of all conversion to Islam, a slave could not only gain freedom but status, wealth and power.

Status, wealth and power? Perhaps thats it. Coupled with real fear and brutality, nay, who am I kidding, make that stupidity.

More from Mark last week in the Western Standard (“Londonistan calling”) and McLeans, where he reviews a couple of books dealing with the 9/11 conspiracy theories. And if thats not enough Steyn for ya, check out this video of him on C-Span.

Ralph R. Reiland recounts several warnings about mixing religion and politics from some great Americans in “A short stroll to fanaticism”

Arguing against religious coercion and in support of diversity of opinion, Jefferson wrote: “Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half of the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth. Let us reflect that the world is inhabited by a thousand millions of people. That these profess probably a thousand different systems of religion. That ours is but one of that thousand.”

Next, a Telegraph Comment on some modern day seekers of religious “uniformity”:

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Contrary to what Peter Taylor suggests on this page, no negotiation is possible with al-Qaeda or the fanatical Islamist organisations affiliated to it. Their goal is to destroy liberal, tolerant, secular society in all its forms, and replace it with a rigid theocratic dictatorship that enforces a medieval interpretation of the most barbaric elements of Islamic law.

In the conflict between the terrorists who wish to impose their vision of a “just and righteous society” by force on the rest of us, there is nothing to talk about: they are not interested in compromise or negotiation, and there is no common ground between their vision of the future and ours. The terrorists themselves have stated their position clearly: “We are not,” one of them has insisted, “trying to exact concessions from you. We are trying to eliminate you.”
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Earlier this year, the Government brought in the Terrorism Act 2006, whose provisions are precisely directed against those who make statements that “glorify the commission or preparation” of acts of terrorism. That Act has yet to be used.

In particular, it has not been used to prosecute the Islamist preachers who have stated that the murders of July 7, 2005 “raised the banner [for] jihad in the UK, which means it is allowed for suicide bombers to attack”; who have said that all non-Muslims should be converted or killed (“capture them and besiege them and prepare for an ambush from every angle”); and who have insisted that those murdered by the 7/7 bombers were, as “kuffar”, or non-Muslims, “animals and cowards”.

The Government’s failure to act against preachers of this kind of poison merely perpetuates and encourages them. That, in turn, helps, far more effectively than any foreign policy, to recruit people with a propensity to homicidal violence to the terrorist cause.

It was the failure to act decisively against the preachers of hate that helped to incubate Islamic terrorism in Britain. The continued reluctance to prosecute those preachers can only exacerbate the mortal danger we face.

Well, perhaps something is finally being done about this scum?

Victor Davis Hanson in the National Review Online: “The Waiting Game”.

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The truth is that we are in a pause, a lull in a great storm that broke upon us five years ago on September 11. We are waiting to see when and where and how — not really if — the Iranians test their envisioned bomb. “Another 9/11” is now part of the lexicon, suggesting that most Americans accept that an amorphous enemy that tries to knock down the Sears Tower, to blow up the Holland tunnel, to explode airliners over the Atlantic, and to slaughter commuters from London to Madrid to the Rhine may finally get lucky once — and that once could be a death warrant for thousands of Westerners.

After 9/11 we were at war with a fascist creed that had trumped any damage to the homeland wrought by all earlier enemies, whether Germans, Italians, Japanese, or Russians. But now, five years later, we are in a holding pattern, waiting in a classic bellum interruptum — whether in exhaustion from this long war in Afghanistan and Iraq, or complacent due to our very success hitherto in preventing jihadists from enacting mass murder in the United States.

So we are in limbo — a sort of war, a sort of peace. Lulls of this nature are not such rare things in history. The Athenians and the Spartans between 421-415, or the Western Europeans between October 1939 and May 1940, likewise thought the squall had passed — the respite a sign that the enemy was satiated, or was occupied elsewhere, or had had a change of heart, or that times of transient calm might mean permanent peace

We all wish it were so, but in private also fear that the worst — whether from al Qaeda, Iran, or their epigones — is to come.

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