Mark Steyn talks about his recent meeting with President Bush (in the context of his usual topics of course), Chicago Sun-Times, Oct 29: “Only choice on war is to win or lose it”
I was on C-SPAN the other morning, and a lady called in to complain that ‘’you are making my blood pressure rise.'’ Usual reason. The host, Paul Orgel, had asked me what I thought of President Bush and I replied that, whatever my differences with him on this or that, I thought he was one of the most farsighted politicians in Washington. That’s to say, he’s looking down the line to a world in which a radicalized Islam has exported its pathologies to every corner on Earth, Iran and like-minded states have applied nuclear blackmail to any parties within range, and a dozen or more nutcake basket-case jurisdictions have joined Pyongyang and Tehran as a Nukes R Us one-stop shop for all your terrorist needs. In 2020, no one’s going to be worrying about which Congressional page Mark Foley is coming on to. Except Mark Foley, who’ll be getting a bit long in the tooth by then. But if it really is, as Democrats say, ‘’all about the future of our children,'’ then our children will want to know why our generation saw what was happening and didn’t do anything about it. They will despise us as we despise the political class of the 1930s. And the fact that we passed a great prescription drug plan will be poor consolation when the entire planet is one almighty headache.
Serge Trifkovic reviews Robert Spencer’s “The Truth about Muhhamad”, for Human Events, Oct 30: “Truth About Islam’s Founder Revealed”
His [Muhhamad] kinsmen and tribesmen were prone to war by custom and nature, accustomed to living by pillage and the exploitation of settled populations. Theirs was an “expansionism denuded of any concrete objective, brutal, and born of a necessity in its past” (Ibn Warraq), but Muhammad provided a powerful ideological justification for those wars—a justification that was religious in form, global in scope and totalitarian in nature. In the space of a decade, the “warner in the face of a terrific punishment” morphed into a vengeful warlord, slayer of prisoners, murderer of political opponents and exterminator of Jews (chapters 6-9), his every move duly condoned by “revelations” from on high. From Muhammad’s second year in Medina on, Islam combined the dualism of a universal religion and a universal state, and jihad became its instrument for carrying out the faith’s ultimate objective by turning all people into believers. As Spencer explains, Muhammad postulated the fundamental illegitimacy of the existence of non-Islam, and mandates permanent “rejection of the Other” —to use a fashionable term—by every bona fide Muslim as a divine obligation. To a Muslim, Jihad does not necessarily mean permanent fighting, but it does mean a permanent state of war.
Even the cornerstone statement, “there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet,” goes beyond a declaration of monotheism and implies the radical division of the world into two camps. Antagonism toward non-Muslim religions, societies and cultures is certainly not the trait shared by all Muslims, but it is an attitude mandated by Muhammad to all true Muslims and prevalent among most to this day. Thanks to its founder, Islam has emerged as a quasi-religious ideology of cultural and political imperialism that absolutizes the conflict with other than itself, and knows no natural limits to itself.
L. Brent Bozell III, in Pittsburgh Live, Oct 29: “CNN: Terrorists’ sock puppet”
On the Oct. 18 edition of “Anderson Cooper 360,” CNN aired a story by reporter Michael Ware, an Australian correspondent renowned for his contacts with terrorist groups. The story showed video filmed by terrorists calling themselves the Islamic Army of Iraq. From the very start, the viewer sees this for what it is: enemy propaganda. The grainy video shows Islamic terrorist snipers time and again shooting and presumably killing American soldiers. (CNN, bless its heart, cut the footage just before each bullet found its mark, but not before the sound of the rifle fire that launched it.)
Here’s what CNN also aired, without editorial comment of any sort, as “news”: The translator has the terrorists saying they should wait to shoot the American soldier since there are innocent “people” around. Later in the report, the shooter claims to be trying to target an American soldier, not Iraqis. Since when have these murderers cared about killing Iraqi soldiers or civilians? They’ve massacred thousands with remorseless regularity.
The video is sickening. Imagine being the mother or father, sister, brother, wife or child of that American soldier murdered so brutally.
So why did CNN air something that cannot be defended as newsworthy? That video was given to CNN by terrorists in order to demoralize the American people about the hopelessness of Iraq just before midterm elections. And CNN did exactly what the terrorists wanted, and CNN knows it. In his introduction that night, Anderson Cooper said, “Insurgents” — never terrorists, mind you, always “insurgents” — were “delivering a deadly message, aiming for a global audience.” CNN is the terrorists’ messenger service, FedEx for the fanatics who want us dead.
John F. Cullinan in the National Review, Oct 30: “Instead of Burning Effigies”
A group of Muslim scholars composes a noteworthy response to the pope’s Regensburg speech.
An authoritative ad hoc group of Islam’s most senior clerics and scholars has issued a detailed public response to Pope Benedict XVI’s September 12 Regensburg remarks. This remarkable document, dated October 12, has largely escaped notice, at least in the English-speaking world, apart from references this past week by Sandro Magister, the veteran Vatican-watcher, and David Warren, the estimable Canadian columnist.
It is a pity that this document, published in English on the website of Islamica Magazine, a small American quarterly, has received so little attention so far. For it marks a welcome and promising step toward properly focused inter-religious dialogue, as well as an authoritative refutation of some regrettably common views in the Muslim world on such pressing issues as religiously motivated violence and the denial of religious freedom.
Richard Halloran, RealClearPolitics.com, Oct 29th, “Australia Sees U.S. as Its Most Crucial Ally”
In Canberra, Prime Minister John Howard of Australia said something about America recently that is not often heard these days: “None of the security challenges we face can be met without American power and purpose.”
Asserting that Australia’s alliance with the U.S. was the cornerstone of his nation’s defense, the prime minister told the Australian Strategic Policy Institute: “For the foreseeable future, no other country in the world will have the spread of interests or strategic reach of the United States.”
The plain-spoken Australian evidently sought to convince several audiences that his nation’s reliance on the U.S. for security served not only Australia’s national interests but those of other countries in the region.
