I haven’t seen anyone this confused since… (well, probably since that Communist hijabi the other week):

The city of Tallinn is assessing the damage after two consecutive nights of violent rioting by gangs of mostly young local Russians. The third night passed relatively quietly. Ostensibly triggered by the expected relocation of the Red Army monument (the Bronze Soldier) from downtown Tallinn, the protests turned into a rampage, with drunkenness and plunder overriding the political or ethnic motivations.

Compared to the first night of rioting, April 26-27 (see EDM, April 27), the night of April 27-28 featured even younger mobs, partly under 18 years of age, looting shops in the downtown Viru Street and Vabaduse Square, after having devastated the shops on Tatari Street the preceding night. They particularly sought out sports clothes and liquor. Rioters holding bottles of alcoholic drink became the iconic image of both nights. They also smashed windows at the Estonia Theater, the Estonian Academy of Arts, and the governing Reform Party’s offices.

In a rare political gesture, a large group of secondary-school students demonstrated outside the parliament building under the slogan, “USSR Forever.” Occasionally during both nights, rioters waved the Russian flag or shouted “Russia, Russia;” but such episodes were isolated and uncharacteristic of the events as a whole.

Youths arriving from the Russian-settled northeastern towns of Narva and Sillamae rioted in the nearby Estonian-majority town of Johvi. There they set on fire the monument to Alexander Tonisson, commander of Estonia’s successful defense against Soviet Russian forces in 1918, who was killed after the 1940 occupation by those same forces.

[..]
Russia’s state-controlled television channels misleadingly claimed that the monument had been “cut to pieces,” whereas it is actually being transferred intact to a military cemetery on the outskirts of Tallinn. The Russian channels reported very little about the vandalism and drunkenness. Instead, they blamed Estonian police for “brutality,” characterized the gangs as “Russian school pupils,” “monument defenders,” and “anti-fascists,” and ran archival footage of Soviet-era festivities around the monument. Russian TV generalized that “British MPs” disapproved of Estonia, only to produce the eccentric leftist George Galloway expressing that view.

Wouldn’t expect it any other way from good ol’ George.

Lebanese terrorist propaganda rag Al-Akhbar had this positively gorgeous photograph of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on their front page a couple of days ago
(h/t The Ouwet Front):

Today they’ve gone for a cross-eyed Commie retard with a shit-eating grin. The guy next to her doesn’t seem impressed.

They are protesting at Lebanese University on a rumour that US Ambassador Jeffrey Feltman was going to accompany Craig Barrett, the chairman of Intel Corporation, on his visit to the University yesterday afternoon.

Al Akhbar was launched during last summer’s war by rabidly anti-American and pro-Hezbollah far left nationalists. Its newspaper license was leased from the Lebanese Communist Party. Looks like the LCP donated much more than just a newspaper license.

Self:

Chapter 1: “Life’s little contradictions”, by Tim Blair
Chapter 2: “A Self-Hater’s Guide To Science”, by P. Granate

Well, at least for some:

The booming economy may make elective surgery and luxury vehicles affordable for the upper-middle class, but the Venezuelans who are amassing the immense fortunes are the Boliburguesa, or the members of President Chávez’s inner circle. (The name refers to the president’s leftist Bolivarian revolution and the bourgeoisie.) Boliburgueses had constructed mega-mansions in the most storied Caracas neighborhoods and bought spanking new jets. A journalist friend who shadowed one of Chávez’s closest allies was chauffeured around in a bulletproof BMW, flanked by Korean bodyguards who can allegedly brain a would-be assailant with a butter knife at a distance of 20 meters. “It was like something out of Goldfinger,” my colleague said, still somewhat incredulous. Just as bizarre was his description of a Caracas sushi restaurant that had been enthusiastically recommended: rare tuna could be served—for an exorbitant fee—on the belly of a woman in the buff.

To be sure, this hedonism is out of reach for the great majority of Venezuelans. Even with the billions of dollars that have arrived in the country, four out of 10 residents subsist on two dollars a day or less.

(via FP Passport)

To be fair the Korean bodyguards are hardly a luxury item, seeing as Venezuela has the highest murder rate in the world, outside of Baghdad. And at $50 a pop, even those of the proletariat can afford to occasionally indulge.

Here are a couple of quotes I came across on a martial arts forum, of all places, about Josef Stalin, another avid fan of brutalist architecture.

From Malcolm Muggeridge’s accounts of a conversation with Svetlna Stalin, from the book “Can Man Live without God”, by Ravi Zacharias:

“On one occasion Stalin called for five live chickens and proceeded to use it to make an unforgettable point before his henchmen. Forcefully clutching a chicken in one hand, with the other he began to systematically pluck out its feathers. As the chicken struggled in vain to escape, he continued with the painful denuding until the bird was completely stripped. “Now you watch, ” Stalin said as he placed the chicken on the floor and walked away with some breadcrumbs in his hand. Incredibly the fear-crazed chicken hobbled toward him and clung to the legs of his trousers. Stalin threw a hand full of grain to the bird, and as it began to follow him around the room, he turned to his dumbfounded colleagues and said quietly, “This is the way to rule the people. Did you see how that chicken followed me for food, even though I had caused it such torture? People are like that chicken. If you inflict inordinate pain on theme they will follow you for food the rest of their lives.”

Every chicken has its day:

Stalin’s death fits Aristotle’s thought that ‘a tyrant is of all persons the man who can place no confidence in friends, as every one has it in his desire and these chiefly in their power to destroy him.’

Some of Stalin’s colleagues certainly had reason to hope for his death. He was preparing another purge and had also indicated that he was thinking of removing Beria from his post as head of the secret police. The night before his stroke, he had kept his colleagues up until four in the morning. He had said that some of the leadership thought they could get by on their past merits. Some of them may have been chilled by his further remark that ‘they are mistaken’.

All the next morning, Stalin did not appear. His staff started to worry at midday, but they knew better than to enter his room unless they were sent for. They first went in at eleven o’clock that night and found Stalin on the floor, conscious but unable to speak. The called Malenkov and Beria, but Malenkov would not come without Beria. At three in the morning, Beria arrived and said Stalin was only sleeping.

Under Beria’s instructions, no doctors were called. Beria and other leaders came back at nine a.m. The doctors followed.

Beria had delayed medical help for perhaps a whole day after the stroke had occurred and it seemed clear that Stalin could not live. Khrushchev described Beria at the bedside: “Beria started going around spewing hatred against him and mocking him. It was simply unbearable to listen to Beria.”

But Stalin regained partial consciousness and pointed to something on the wall. Stalin’s daughter noted how Beria changed: ‘Beria stared fixedly at those clouded eyes, anxious even now to convince my father that he was the most loyal and devoted of them all, as he had always tried with every ounce of his strength to appear to be.’ Khrushev says that Beria then ‘threw himself on his knees, seized Stalin’s hand, and started kissing it. When Stalin lost consciousness again and closed his eyes, Beria stood up and spat.

– Jonathan Glover; (1999); from ‘Humanity A Moral History of the Twentieth Century’

UPDATE: Stalin not a John Wayne fan.

Or Creating Ghettos for Dummies.

Pure comedy gold this article is, start to finish:

[..] But the country’s real building boom began in the 60s. The year was 1964 and a general election was looming. Housing remained a hot topic; the economy was good, people were moving from the countryside to the city and local authorities desperately wanted more homes to attract new industry.

In their manifesto, the Social Democrats vowed to build 100,000 new homes every year for ten years – the foundations for the Million Homes Programme were laid.

“In 1962 and 1963, almost 100,000 apartments were built each year,” [Lisbeth Söderqvist, a Stockholm University researcher and expert on the Million Homes Programme.] says. [..] new towns were being manufactured across the country, with concentrations largely in big city outskirts. New, modern living for good democratic citizens was the message. “These homes were built for everyone, not just poor people,” says Söderqvist.

“There were apartments, family dwellings and terraced houses and the idea was to blend different people from different backgrounds. By doing so you would have a society that was stable and a society without conflict.”

Integration was key, and this was to be achieved by including a good range of local services in the planning – transport, schools, nurseries, community centres, libraries and public space.

“People started to move and everyone was happy,” Söderqvist says. “It was an expression of the welfare state that people had a modern functional home, with three rooms and a kitchen.”

But the bubble soon burst when academics unexpectedly started to point to the problems they saw. The press and politicians soon jumped on the bandwagon. A big new shopping centre in Skärholmen in 1968 caused unprecedented uprising.

“For the left-wing commentators, this kind of commercialism was a disaster,” Söderqvist says. “It was said there was nothing to do in Skärholmen but shopping.”

Hey, I can imagine their horror. Good democratic citizens should be busy integrating, not shopping. What kind of a monster have you created here?!

Oh, it gets better:

The end of the honeymoon

The Skärholmen debate opened the floodgates for further criticism of the Million Homes Programme. In the seventies, liberal thinkers poured their scorn and the right-wing press took up the campaign, portraying the areas with disturbing images of social deprivation. The suburbs’ reputations declined as a result and residents started packing their boxes. [Leaving Paradise on account of a right-wing smeer campaign? Must be a social status thing.]

But the political and media crusades weren’t the only cause of decline, Söderqvist says:

“In the early 70s there was a change in the tax system, making it much cheaper to buy a house.” Private developers were rubbing their hands and the exodus began. [Hey, I could have warned you - the way towards a Socialist utopia does not lie through the Valley of Low Taxes. ]

“At the same time there was an influx of immigrants coming here,” Söderqvist adds. “They moved into the newly-emptied apartments and even more Swedes started to move out.”
[The "good democratic citizens" lost their zest for integration after their descent into bourgeois shopping mall hell, no doubt.]

Nowadays, these places are largely viewed as immigrant ghettos. “What is tragic is they are used as a symbol in the segregation debate in Sweden,” Söderqvist says. Ironically, it seems, the once celebrated housing project, which aimed to integrate the nation, has only served to fuel a divided society.

The extent of the decline in these areas became a political embarrassment during the 90s, with employment rates going down and criminality and drug use on the up. It was time for the Social Democrats to renew their promises.

The answer was to pour more money into areas in bad repair, with the intention of improving not just the physical but also the social fabric of the estates. The two billion kronor Metropolitan Development Initiative (Storstadssatsningen) began in 1998, aiming to improve educational standards and reduce unemployment among immigrants. By doing so, the state believed social segregation could be better fought.

[..]

Can you possibly guess whatever happened next?

Many of the programme’s successes turned out to be double-edged swords: the majority of those who did manage to gain employment moved out, only to be replaced by a new wave of immigrants.

Let me guess – another right-wing smeer compaign to damage the reputation of this Glorious Oasis of the Proletariat? And just when you thought that this couldn’t get any better:

Another of the programme’s aims was to make these urban concrete jungles more aesthetically pleasing with a lick of paint, new plants and playgrounds. Planners also made some interesting architectural modifications, says Lisbeth Söderqvist.

“Instead of having a straight path, they made it curvy,” she says. “It looks nice of course but it won’t break segregation. No Swedish family will move in just because there’s a curvy path.”

Yep, its one of “dont-know-whether-to-laugh-or-to-cry” articles. And on and on it goes, in complete Pleasantville seriousness, thick with unintended irony.

Absolutely oblivious to reality and in complete denial of what is going on in their country the Swedes march on down the path towards extinction. But hey, at least the path is curvy!

Continueing on the theme of Francis Fukuyama’s essay I posted yesterday, there is quite an interesting ongoing debate on the issue of Multiculturalism and Muslim integration (or lack thereof) in Europe on signandsight.com (a site that “gathers voices from across Europe on a variety of topics, aiming to foster trans-European debates and the creation of a European public space”):

Who should the West support: moderate Islamists like Tariq Ramadan, or Islamic dissidents like Ayaan Hirsi Ali? Are the rights of the group higher than those of the individual? With a fiery polemic against Ian Buruma’s “Murder in Amsterdam” and Timothy Garton Ash’s review of this book in the New York Review of Books, Pascal Bruckner has kindled an international debate. By now Ian Buruma, Timothy Garton Ash, Necla Kelek and Paul Cliteur have all stepped into the ring.

The departure point for the debate is the book “Murder in Amsterdam” by Ian Buruma about the murder of Theo Van Gogh and a review of it by “English journalist and academic” Timothy Garton Ash. In the book Ian Buruma voices his disagreement with Ayaan Hirsi Ali over her persistant criticism of Islam and Garton Ash, who Bruckner calls “the apostle of multiculturalism” and Bruce Bawer recently termed “official-expert-on-Europe”, then goes on to call her an Enlightenment fundamentalist.

The first installment by Pascal Bruckner defends Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the subject of much debate and media attention this week, as her new book “Infidel” was released on Tuesday, concluding:

It is astonishing that 62 years after the fall of the Third Reich and 16 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, an important segment Europe’s intelligentsia is engaged in slandering the friends of democracy. They maintain it is best to cede and retreat, and pay mere lip-service to the ideals of the Enlightenment. Yet we are a long way off the dramatic circumstances of the 1930s, when the best minds threw themselves into the arms of Berlin or Moscow in the name of race, class or the Revolution. Today the threat is more diffuse and fragmented. There is nothing that resembles the formidable peril of the Third Reich. Even the government of Mullahs in Tehran is a paper tiger that could be brought to its knees with a minimum dose of rigour. Nevertheless the preachers of panic abound. Kant defined the Enlightenment with the motto: Sapere aude – dare to know. A culture of courage is perhaps what is most lacking among today’s directors of conscience. They are the symptoms of a fatigued, self-doubting Europe, one that is only too ready to acquiesce at the slightest alarm. Yet their good-willed rhetorical molasses covers a different tune: that of capitulation!

Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash fire back with weak replies about “tolerance for cultural diversity” (Ash), because “a free-spirited citizen does not tolerate different customs or cultures because he thinks they are wonderful, but because he believes in freedom.” (Buruma).

After that comes the good part. First comes the Turkish German author Necla Kelek’s excellent response to Buruma, then Paul Cliteur takes on multiculturalism and relativism:

[..] Think of the principle of free speech. The answer of postmodern cultural relativism is: refrain from criticism. Be reticent to comment on unfamiliar religions. Let reform come from within and avoid provocation and polarization.

[..] What remains a mystery is why many intelligent people stick to the postmodern frame of mind, even though so many intelligent writers – Terry Eagleton and John Searle, to name just two – have thoroughly deconstructed its tenets. I think this has to do with the postmodernist conviction that an attitude that they see as relativistic and pragmatic would help in the struggle against religious terrorism. They hope that, if we abstain from radical criticism of the terrorist mindset, we can pacify the most radical elements.

[..] Buruma thinks he knows why terrorists hate Van Gogh, Ellian, and Hirsi Ali: because religious terrorists have a conflict with “radical Enlightenment.” Buruma and many other postmodernists labor under the delusion that once we reject radical Enlightenment, and thereby radical critique of religion and provocation, we can pacify the terrorists.

There is a final reply from Buruma, which is barely worth mentioning, following by some links to further articles relating to the discussion, including Fukuyama’s article and reviews of Hirsi Ali’s book.

I’d add to this collection Bruce Bawers review of Tony Judt’s (the other “official-expert-on-Europe”) book “Postwar”, a history of Europe after world war II from the Winter 2007 issue of the Hudson Review:

Judt knows a great deal about how Europe renewed itself after being devastated by one totalitarian ideology and how it survived the nearly half-century-long domination of its eastern half by another totalitarian ideology. Today Europe confronts a third totalitarian ideology. In two world wars, it committed suicide; now it’s doing so again—and this time it may not rise from the ashes. Yet Judt either can’t accept it or won’t admit it. He’s not alone, of course: most of today’s academic “Europe experts” are utterly useless on this subject. Some don’t even dare mention the elephant in the room. Predictably, Judt concludes that the real problem here is “Islamophobia” (this is one word he doesn’t put in scare quotes) and the rise of “far-right,” “anti-immigrant” parties.4 For all his flagrant denial of reality, however, one is still astonished to see him conclude on a note of sheer fantasy, insisting, in his closing sentences,
on Europe’s right “to offer the world some modest advice” on how to live and suggesting that “the twenty-first century might yet belong to Europe.” More likely, Europe will by the end of the century belong, in whole or in part, to the Islamic world, and will be governed, in whole or in part, according to sharia law. Yes, this disaster may yet be averted; but only if people like Judt—that is to say, the teachers, professors, politicians, writers, artists, and journalists who shape government agendas and public attitudes—summon the courage to face difficult challenges and speak uncomfortable truths before it’s too late.

I’ll round the post of with one more article that draws on material from both Bruce Bawer and Ayaan Hirsi Al – “Appeasement takes hold again in Europe”, by Paul Sheehan, from Monday’s Sydney Morning Herald:

Faced with the rising tide of bomb attacks, plots, threats, demands and belligerent victimology from a violent, ignorant and sexually repressive subculture, the centre of European civilisation appears to be doing exactly what it did the last time blackshirts were on the march in Europe – appeasing, denying and capitulating.

A holiday sign sighting in Byron Bay:

Well, you were only going to smoke it anyway.

Unable to stand the shame any longer I promptly joined the queue nearby to have my car recycled into wind chimes. I now drive a fridge.

Meanwhile in Canada…
UPDATE: the link to the story in that post is dead, here it is on another site.

Sean Scallon understands the appeal of Islam and Islamism to certain alienated subgroups on both the far Left and the far Right rather well:

[In the 21st century] growth in Islam will come from Third World immigration of course. But it will also come from white converts as well and they will come from two sources of thought.

Islam always has had an ideological appeal to those on the far left and right. To a cultural Marxist, Islam is the God that hasn’t failed (unlike Communism), at least not yet. Its diverse, multicultural following and the fact that it is the religion of the Third Word i.e. it was founded there and expanded there outside of Europe and the West, makes it a perfect vehicle for cultural upheaval and egalitarianism. Marxism derided religion which limited its appeal while Islam is a religion and has mass appeal. And within an adversarial culture, converting to Islam becomes the perfect vehicle to shock one’s parents and friends and peers. Indeed, Jean-Paul Sartre himself became more and more fascinated with Islam as the communist left declined in his later years. This has more of chance of happening with the nominal baptized or secular Christian than anyone else. Think of John Walker Lindh, the Marin County, California teenager who got fed up with empty secularist lifestyle of parents and neighbors and converted to Islam and joined the Taliban in Afghanistan, and you’ll understand the type. Since 9-11 and since George Bush II give Islam his stamp of approval by calling it a “religion of peace,” there’s been a growing study of Islam within in the media and with others who are curious to know more about it. Such study, no doubt, will increase the size of the pool of converts for Islam within the U.S.

On the other side, Nazis have always appreciated Islam’s marshal spirit and ascetic, non-bourgeois lifestyle along with its ability to submit the will of the mass towards one deity or person. They found it far superior to Christian piety which they found to be nothing more than religion for wimps, not the supermen they were supposed to be. Those who are not inclined towards Nazism still find these same qualities admirable, along with Islam’s male-dominated patriarchy. Women and men do not pray together. If you are a fellow who is unchurched right at the moment because you think the modern church in the U.S. is too female dominated and has no place for you, then Islam may be your scene. Think of [the] guy who used to attend Promise Keeper rallies in football stadiums and spent his time crying on the shoulder of another guy while being told what an awful person he was. When he realized the whole thing was nothing more than a religious version of 1990s male bonding without the tom-tom drums, campfires and war paint and when he realized his wife and her friends were laughing their heads off at him down at the solon, then you’ll know the kind of person I’m talking about. In fact the crisis of the maleless church has become such a concern that, according to religious news reports, that certain pastors have gotten to the point of parking Harley Davidson motorcycles out front of the entryways of their churches and putting on football uniforms and using football metaphors to attract males back into the pews again. But Islam’s call may be more enticing than that just more passing Christian fads.

Examples are fun, so here’s a couple more.

The alliance between Hezbollah (and Iran) and the far Left in Lebanon and around the world is a great example of the first trend described above.

A “story” (read: propaganda piece) in the Montreal Gazette, Dec 10th, by Maria Abi-Habib:

Ibtisam Jamaleddine stood in the room of her dead son, Maxim. Maxim was 18 years old when he was mistaken for a fighter and killed by an Israeli missile during this summer’s war between Israel and Hezbollah.

Pictures of Che Guevara and soccer players as well as a plaque dedicated to Shiite Islam’s most revered imam, Ali, adorn the walls of his room. They tell a story unknown in the West, of the complex nature of forces that fought Israel last summer.

During the war, U.S. President George W. Bush pitted the conflict as one fuelled by “Islamo-fascism,” pushed by Hezbollah, the Party of God. But fighting alongside Hezbollah was an older, more seasoned resistance movement – the Lebanese Communist Party, which allied with the Islamic party for the first time and showed its members that Islam and communism can complement each other.

For Maxim’s mother, the alliance of these two ideologies was natural and the pictures in her son’s room of a communist martyr and a Muslim hero attest to that.

She said her son wasn’t religious. She said she sees her son as part of a line of resistance fighters “that began with Imam Ali and went to Che and then to Maxim. It’s one lineage of struggle.”

The nature of forces and alliances in Lebanon may be complex, but this is hardly an example of that complexity. Communism and Islamism in bed together makes perfect sense, as both are totalitarian fantasies of a utopia, which, at every attempt at implementation turns into its hellish opposite. (Isn’t it hilarious when Muslims counter real-world examples of the failings of Islam by saying the examples don’t apply to “true” Islam because “there is currently no ‘true’ Islamic state in existance”? Gee, I wonder why?) Neither is the above alliance happening “for the first time”. Hezbollah and Lebanese Communist Party members have been running on voting tickets together in Lebanese elections ever since Hezbollah was forced to change its image from sectarian terrorist militia to a political party of “resistance” at the end of the civil war in the early nineties.

Here’s a couple of recent happy snaps of the happy couple:

“Supporters of the Lebanese Communist Party wave a party flag last Sunday during a peaceful sit-in organized by Hezbollah in Beirut.” according to the Montreal Gazette

Dec 2006, Hezbollocks-led protest in Beirut – A drop of Red in a sea of Yellow and Orange.

And if you think that a portrait of Che Guevara on the wall next to an Islamic one is an anomaly, think again:

Prime Minister of Chechnya is not a man to be messed with, especially if you work for him.

At the age of just 30, Ramzan Kadyrov counts the Russian President Vladimir Putin as a close ally, wields enormous power in his war-ravaged world-infamous republic, and is the object of a Stalin-style personality cult.

[..] He has advocated polygamy, banned gambling, and clamped down on the sale of alcohol – all policies that would cause a riot if implemented elsewhere in Russia.

[..]Inside, Kadyrov’s office resembles the boardroom of a multinational corporation, albeit with a few significant differences. The federal Russian flag stands alongside the green flag of the Chechen republic, and from one wall, a framed black-and-white picture of Che Guevara stares down. Kadyrov clearly identifies with the Argentine who made his name in Cuba, since his fan club (yes, he does have a fan club) often waves aloft stencilled posters of the Chechen leader wearing Che’s beret and adopting the same uncompromising stare.

[..]A colourful portrait of a woman wearing a headscarf adorns another wall, presumably Kadyrov’s mother, and I notice at least two likenesses of his benefactor, Vladimir Putin.

Through the window, the green-topped minaret of a newly built mosque reaches up into the gloomy Grozny sky, a reminder that Kadyrov has styled himself as a devout Muslim and adopted elements of shariah for his regime.

Yep, you read correctly, a chunk of Russia is now partially implementing Sharia Law. But don’t get too carried away with that one – this is an elaborate and cynical exercise in sock-puppetry, not a naive subjugation to a creeping Islamification. This is Russia, not Sweden, and the Russia Empire has centuries of experience with “self-governing” Muslim populations within its borders. More importantly it has several centuries experience of being governed by Muslims – an experience permanantly etched into the national psyche and untempered by Western political correctness and one Russia will not be repeating any time soon (“scratch a Russian and you will find a Tartar”, goes a Russian proverb). And by soon I mean ever. I had a post on Islam and demographics in Russia in the works that I am thinking of posting in several smaller posts, largely in response to the “Russia is turning Muslim” silliness that swept the blogosphere recently. Chechnya is only a very small part of Russia, the Muslims of the North Caucasus are a very different breed to say the Tartars, who make up the biggest Muslim segment in Russia, and the whole Islamification-of-Russia line is a misfire. But I digress.

Now a quick look at the other end of the spectrum – the far right and Islamism. Its not called Islamo-Fascism for nothing, and if you need proof, look up the collaboration of Bosnian Muslims with the Nazis in World War 2. Look up the relationship between the Mufti of Jerusalem and Hitler. Look up the list of speakers at the recent Holocaust conference in Iran.

I’ll throw in just one more example though, that relates directly to the “Promise Keeper rally enthusiast” types Scallon is talking about:

Turning Muslim in Texas

Praying in Texas
George W Bush may be backed by Christian fundamentalists but in his home state of Texas, Islam is the latest big draw. The Bible belt is transferring its allegiance to the Qur’an because, for many erstwhile Christians, believe it or not, the church is too liberal.

Eric was a Baptist preacher before he became a Muslim 14 years ago. Now he prays five times a day – even in the middle of watching a football game. His wife, Karen, also a convert, is covered from head to toe in the traditional Muslim burka. Islam, says Eric, ‘is everything I wanted Christianity to be’.

The Bible belt is not about to turn into the Our’an belt, any more than Russia is about to turn into Russiastan, so don’t take the “transferring its allegiance” baloney above too seriously. But do check out the video for the comedy. You can watch the full 24-minute documentary, “Turning Muslim in Texas”, on Google Video. Here it is:

See also my previous posts on Islam’s useful idiots on the Left.

Daniel Pipes in the NY Sun:

[..] however strong the Western hardware, its software contains some potentially fatal bugs. Three of them — pacifism, self-hatred, complacency — deserve attention.

Pacifism: Among the educated, the conviction has taken hold that “there is no military solution” to current problems, a mantra applied to Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, the Kurds, terrorism, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. But this pragmatic pacifism overlooks the fact that modern history abounds with military solutions. What were the defeats of the Axis, America in Vietnam, or the Soviet Union in Afghanistan if not military solutions?

Self-hatred: Significant elements in several Western countries — especially America, Britain, and Israel — believe their own governments to be repositories of evil and see terrorism as just punishment for past sins. This “we have met the enemy and he is us” attitude replaces an effective response with appeasement, including a readiness to give up traditions and achievements. Osama bin Laden celebrates by name such leftists as Robert Fisk and William Blum. Self-hating Westerners have an outsize importance due to their prominent role as shapers of opinion in universities, the press, religious institutions, and the arts. They serve as the Islamists’ auxiliary mujahedeen.

Complacency: The absence of an impressive Islamist military machine gives many Westerners, especially on the left, a feeling of disdain. Whereas conventional war — men in uniform; ships, tanks, and planes; and battles for land and resources — is simple to comprehend, the asymmetric war with radical Islam is elusive. Box cutters and suicide belts make it difficult to perceive this enemy as a worthy opponent. Senator Kerry and too many others dismiss terrorism as a mere “nuisance.”

The original also has many links worth checking out.

And here are some points towards victory from Victor Davis Hanson:

So how, aside from killing jihadist terrorists, can we defend ourselves against the insidious spread of radical Islam? Here are a few starting suggestions:

Bluntly identify radical Islam as fascistic — without worrying whether some Muslims take offense when we will talk honestly about the extremists in their midst.

At the same time, keep encouraging consensual governments in the Middle East and beyond that could offer people security and prosperity, while distancing ourselves from illegitimate dictators, especially in Syria and Iran, that promote terrorists.

Establish that no more autocracies in the Middle East and Asia will be allowed to get the bomb.

Seek energy independence that would collapse the world price of oil, curbing petrodollar subsidies for terrorists and our own appeasement of their benefactors.

Appreciate the history and traditions of a unique Western civilization to remind the world that we have nothing to apologize for but rather much good to offer to others.

Finally, keep confident in a war in which our will and morale are every bit as important as our overwhelming military strength. The jihadists claim that we are weak spiritually, but our past global ideological enemies — Nazism, fascism, militarism and communism — all failed. And so will they.

Eric Hoffer previously made that last point rather well, some decades prior:

All the ‘true believers’ of our time-whether Communist, Nazi, Fascist, Japanese or Catholic-declaimed volubly[..] on the decadence of the Western democracies. The burden of their talk is that in the democracies people are too soft, too pleasure-loving and too selfish to die for a nation, a God or a holy cause.This lack of a readiness to die, we are told, is indicative of an inner rot – a moral and biological decay. The democracies are old, corrupt and decadent. They are no match for the virile congregations of the faithful who are about to inherit the Earth.