Again, with the "Springtime for Hitler"?!

I just watched the cutest little dance number over at little green footballs. There they were, all goose-stepping as a swastika, just like in The Producers, with the bad music and everything... I kept waiting for Dick Shawn to burst from the crowd, shouting, "Nein nein nein!"

Funny how these dancers at parade are calling somebody else Nazis, while it's their boys doing living in fear of their government, and their boys stiffly marching with their toes barely missing the tushies of the boys a'front of them.

Malaysia moving toward sharia

Mark Steyn at NRO brings to attention this Telegraph report:

Hardline Islamic law could be introduced across Malaysia under reforms proposed by the country's chief justice.

The article continues:

Ahmad Fairuz, the chief justice, told an Islamic conference in Kuala Lumpur that 50 years of independence had failed to free Malaysia from the "clutches of colonialism". Sharia law should be "infused" into the gaps created by abolishing common law, he said.

Malaysia's non-Muslim Chinese and Indian communities, who form 40 per cent of the population, are alarmed at creeping Islamisation.

They're not the only ones alarmed. I'm downright worried. My old flame, ratfink (who still refers to me as his first wife), and his entire family live as Christians (Catholics) in Malaysia. Will he -- will they -- be safe living where they are?

I think I'd better start cleaning up the extra rooms in my house and making ready for their long-term occupancy. It may not come to that, but it can't hurt to be prepared.

US spy squirrels captured in Iran

At least, the Iranian government says that they've caught the little critters red-pawed. Some are skeptical that we would wire these rodents to listen in on Iran. I say, who better to check on the real nuts?

What's so funny about peace through strength?

Rand Simberg has a follow-up post to his earlier analysis of why we shouldn't be surprised doctors wage jihad against us -- and, precisely, what is behind this jihad in the first place. The follow-up gives background on why they attack us, here in the good old U. S. of A., and it isn't strictly because we're big and mean and have evil intentions...

There are (at least) two categories of error in foreign policy. One is to commit egregious acts against a people such that they rise up against you.

The other is to show weakness, such that they think that if they can hurt you badly enough, you'll give up, and give in to their demands, no matter how outrageous and unreasonable they may be.

While we've done more than we should have of both over the last...well...half century, if not longer, the latter is the major reason that we are currently under siege (at least metaphorically, if not literally).

Yes, bin Laden whined about the "occupation of Arabia" during and after the first Gulf War. And the Arabs continually whine about the oppression of the "Palestinians" by the "Zionists" (see, I can use scare quotes just as well as Reuters, except...well, mine are actually accurate).

But the real reason for the war we're in can be found in the part of bin Laden's speech about the "weak horse" and the "strong horse."

His argument is, Bin Laden has assumed that, because we backed down, we were weak and would remain so. There is more to it than that, of course. But the perception of our weakness -- valid or not, is a large part of our problem since even before Vietnam. It certainly does go back more thana half-century. To wit, Bill Mauldin's 1961 cartoon and comment from What's Got Your Back Up?


More to the point is the comment Mauldin includes beneath the image:

Totalitarian leaders do their worrying in private and always show a resolute face to the world. It is hard for them to understand societies which struggle openly with decisions, and it must be very easy for dictators to make the dangerous mistake of confusing soul-searching with flabbiness.

By and large, since the 1970s, we have been a flabby nation -- especially during terms when military-loathing Democrats have had greater power in Washington. Nevertheless, historically and currently, this nation does not tolerate that sort of self-destructive behavior too often or for too long. Elections come, truth about real threats is recognized, and would-be Jimmy Carters fail swiftly.

I hope I'm not mistaken about my fellow countrymen (not to mention other free peoples). I would hate to see Robert Heinlein proven wrong on his 100th birthday.

Weekend fun with Mullah Goose

Along with is very nice follow-up to Joe Lieberman's WSJ piece on Iraq, Jules Crittenden has forwarded the torch to his readers on another, related issue: children's verse with a jihadi twist. He's asking for contributions to the list of Mullah Goose rhymes, as initiated by Theo Spark.

Here is my first stab at the genre:

I will explode thee, infidel
The reason why I cannot tell
But the Quran we know full well
Will grant me passage straight to hell.

I hope to add more, later.

NYT gets one 66.6% correct -- maybe

AS several bloggers have pointed out over the past 48 hours, the New York Times described the individuals arrested after the latest spate of attempted bombings in the UK as from the "disenfranchised South Asian population."

Mark Steyn answers the first part of that description:

Tim Blair provides a fine example of why The New York Times is an unreliable guide to the ways of the world:

In July 2005, four suicide bombers killed 52 people on London’s transit system, and another set of attacks failed two weeks later, bringing home to Britain fears of homegrown terrorist attacks among its disenfranchised South Asian population. Witnesses said the two men in the Glasgow attack were South Asian.

My dictionary defines "disenfranchised" as:

to deprive of a franchise, of a legal right, or of some privilege or immunity; especially : to deprive of the right to vote

The "South Asian population" are British subjects with as much right to vote as Tony Blair or Gordon Brown. If the Times is merely using the word to mean more generally "deprived", the July 7th bombers didn't exactly hail from the ghetto: Shehzad Tanweer rode around in his dad's Mercedes. Omar Sheikh, who's supposed to have plotted the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, was an English "public" (ie, private) schoolboy and a London School of Economics alumnus. The four would-be suicide bombers who attempted a follow-up Tube carnage on July 21st 2005 were discovered to have "more than £500,000 in benefits payments" from the bountiful British welfare state in their bank accounts.

So the next editor of Webster's might like to include a new New York Times definition of "disenfranchised": "complacent liberal assumption designed to reassure readers that they can fit this story into all the old cliches about the usual root causes"

At the time of that publication, those arrested had been recent immigrants, with real property (they had money enough for nice cars), education (several of them were physicians or medical students), and were from Jordan and Iraq... not exactly "South Asian." So, wrong on two counts about these guys' backgrounds (and many of the 7/7/05 bombers were even voters, having been born or naturalized as British subjects).

Well, now we learn that at least one of this recent spate of deadly doctors came from India and another from Pakistan, and, without citizenship, they're temporarily disenfranchised until or unless they apply for and receive citizenship in UK. So that's 2/3 accurate. But wait! Is either qualified to vote back home in their respective countries? Maybe this brings them back down to just being "South Asian," a score of 33.3% accurate.

Still, not bad, for the NYT.

But the Times is not the only journal to miss a few facts: somehow, according to the WaPo, the only tie they all seem to have is that they're "foreign physicians." Funny how they all have names like Mohammed and Abdulla, and, yet, have no common ground except their having become doctors without boundaries.
(HT: CQ)

Update: Christopher Hitchens has an observation about a further subject not accurately dealt with, in MSM coverage of the London car bombs: the target was women.

More about free speech case in Finland

Baron Bodissey has posted an update or five on the Mikko Ellilä case as it comes up before the long arm of the law...

The one thing to point out is that few, so far, actually like the sort of thing that Ellilä says -- it is silly, offensive, even racist. What this is about is a person's right to speak (or blog) his mind.

How do simple statements of belief suddenly morph into a threat to the public? There is no evidence that, in his blog -- anywhere -- Ellilä did anything more than say some things which many rational people would deem impolite. There seems to be no call to rise up in violence against others, there is no finger-pointing or crying "fire" in a crowded theater.

If the decision goes against people like Mikko Ellilä, when will they start globally tracking down and arresting those who truly do incite people to violence?

As a free, educated American, I do not understand the drive of a portion of any nation -- especially those whose histories are chock-full of liberties -- to limit freedoms. Do the people who press for speech codes, who press for "hate crimes" laws, who press for special treatment for certain categories of citizens not understand that, eventually, the legislation will backfire on them? Do they not understand these laws as genuinely hypocritical, as well as, over the long run, indefensible and unenforceable?

How does plain, ordinary, brutal violence become something "special" when it comes accompanied by a racial or sexist slur? How does one gauge whether a savage "spree" killer is worse because he was motivated by racial hatred or by a perceived social slight? Don't results count for anything, these days?

And where is it written that free people have the right to be protected, by law, from having their feelings hurt by some arrogant or spiteful nonsense? I guess we're approaching the day and age when, in the freest nations, sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will get you twenty years in Marion.

US foreign aid buys silence of honest bloggers

In the column on the right side of my blog's main page is a series of recommended blogs for you to check out. Under "other worthy sites" I now have two blogsites listed which are no longer in action. It seems that, while Big Pharaoh has taken a job which keeps him too busy to blog, and has taken a temporary blogleave, Sandmonkey has, over the past few months, found his situation as an independent thinker more dangerous, so he has opted to save his life and freedom by completely ceasing to blog.

If you have prayers, send some his way.

Meanwhile, we might consider applying a little pressure on our own government to stop subsidizing Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and other such islamofascist thugs in that country, so that Sandmonkey may someday soon be comfortable and safe, ranting again.

(HT: Gateway Pundit and lgf)

The other hate crime

Scary. Somebody left a ham sandwich at a lunch table.

I think I may have just committed the same crime, myself. Sat there, downing a ham, Swiss cheese, Boetje's mustard & sweet onion on sourdough, right out on my folks' front porch. Take that, you sissies!

Everybody should be afear'd. I didn't have my lactase tablets to counter the effects of the cheese. Does that count as simple hate crime, as terrorism, or as a war crime for gassing the enemy?


Update: Charles Johnson has added a second post on the subject, with further details of the incident and the Orwellian quote du jour:

If people think insulting Muslims with ham is OK, “More degrading acts will follow, until at some point we’ll end up having violence,” [executive director of the Center for Prevention of Hate Violence, Stephen] Wessler said.

Oh, no, ham cruelly offered to schoolboys last week is the cause of the bombing of the Beirut barracks, the Khobar Towers, the USS Cole, the WTC in 1993. Yesterday's bacon caused 9/11/01!

But for me, the kicker isn't that we have 1984 all over again (that's been a given for years), but that people are acting as though this incident were somehow atypical of junior high school. Well, technically, it is atypical, because it's not nearly as cruel as the normal stunts kids that age pull. Every kid in the modern world is traumatized by experiences in middle school/junior high school. Body hair starts to grow, and all of a sudden you're a pack of wolves. It's the rare ones who keep some semblance of civility amid the raging hormones.

New heights of Chutzpah

Or, as Mom puts it, "Chhhhutzpah with a little extra phlegm": The flying imams are naming a number of "John Doe" passengers in their lawsuit against US Airways.

They're suing a handful of people for having the temerity to be openly unnerved by the deliberately provocative behavior of the imams. I believe if this suit is allowed to go forward, it will fall into the category of "twice raping the victims".

One of lgf's commenters had the right idea:

All Minesotans (of which I am one) should stand up and pronounce, "I am Sparticus"

And don't just stop with Minnesotans. Let every Midwesterner rise and say it. I was on that flight. I called in the cops. So. There.

And then we can tell them what they can do about Sharia cashiers at Target, too.

Non-flying Imams to sue US Airways

Via Power Line comes the news that the Imams who disrupted a flight out of Minneapolis this past winter are preparing to sue the airline for their inconvenience and for having been "racially profiled". Uh huh.

One of the commenters was going in what I think is the right direction:

Could the other passengers file a civil suit against the Imams claiming that their actions were a terrorist threat or a probe leading to one?

But somehow, I'm pretty sure that bird won't fly. There really isn't any proof of links to terrorism, other than the usual links to CAIR.

OTOH, maybe those same passengers could counter-sue the CAIR bears for deliberately creating the circumstances which caused them all (the other passengers) distress and which also delayed their travel.


At any rate, if I have to fly, this year, I do believe my first choice will be US Airways. They seem to be the company most serious about getting us there safely.

The people the "anti-war" crowd love to support

via Power Line, the news (I come to it a day late) is that the soldiers who were kidnapped from a U.S. Army compound last week (by men wearing American-looking uniforms, driving vehicles identical to those issued to our troops, etc...) were found yesterday. It is not exactly the best news possible.

Let me rephrase that: the NY Post has the right of it. It is an Atrocity in Karbala.

Four U.S. soldiers, one of them a New Yorker, were captured - and promptly murdered - last Saturday in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, 50 miles from Baghdad, officials confirmed.

Two of the slain soldiers were found handcuffed together in the back of a vehicle.

Soldiers die in combat, of course.

But the murder of disarmed and helpless troops - killing POWs, in effect - is what's at issue here.

Now see the latest on this: Iran apears to have played a major role in the entire attack:

The American Forces Information Service provides the details of the attack in Karbala. Based on the sophisticated nature of the raid, as well as the response, or cryptic non-responses, from multiple military and intelligence sources, this raid appears to have been directed and executed by the Qods Force branch of the Iranian Republican Guard Corps. My sources agreed this is far to sophisticated an operation for the Mahdi Army or Badr Corps, while al-Qaeda in Iraq would have a difficult time mounting such an operation in the Shia south. "The Karbala Government Center raid the other day was a little too professional for JAM [Jaish al-Mahdi, or the Mahdi Army]," according to a military source.

This raid required specific intelligence, in depth training for the agents to pass as American troops, resources to provide for weapons, vehicles, uniforms, identification, radios and other items needed to successfully carry out the mission. Hezbollah's Imad Mugniyah executed a similar attack against Israeli forces on the Lebanese border, which initiated the Hezbollah-Israeli war during the summer of 2006.

And, yet somehow, I know there will be those who will automatically say either, "the US troops were over there, so they deserved it," or, "It's all Bush's fault." Those who do need to study Iranian history, and, perhaps, the history of Islam a little better. The only thing the American troops deserved was respect, and Bush's fault would be in doing what nobody else wanted to do -- to help clean up that scorpion's nest built up over the past centuries, and allowed to grow and fester further during recent administrations.

Nobody. But. Nobody. deserves to be tortured in this fashion.

We don't do it. But the friends of John Kerry and Nancy Pelosi do.

Finally, a swimsuit I can wear!

Not that I'm devout, or anything. I just have a little consideration for other people's sensibilities, when it comes to large, middle-aged, cane-wielding cat-ladies at the beach.

So, imagine my delight upon finding this posted at lgf. Swimwear for women who are too modest to expose their ankles or elbows to the uncontrollably impassioned animals who are men at swimming pools and beaches. A burqini.

And I always thought the ninteenth century was history.

Jihadi arrested in Illinois

It's reported at lgf. Some Islamosumbitch was planning to toss a few grenades into a mall in my state. Or, barring that, he hoped to stab a few jews to death, for fun and prophet.

Of course, the regular media geeeeniuses call him simply an "Illinois man", leaving out the part where he says he's planning to "commit violent acts of jihad" against the locals. It took several hours before any of the press included any indication of his ties to Islamofascism*. Even now, they have yet to publish whatever connections he has -- the FBI supposedly describes him as a "lone operator".

But, speaking as one who used to have to work in malls, and, considering some of my friends are still working there, I'm grateful that the FBI was on top of this thing. If this guy really wanted to do something dramatic in the name of Islam, we could arrange to martyr him by putting him in a room full of 14-year-old girls and telling them that he was planning to blow up their shopping hangout. He wouldn't last ten seconds.


Update: one of the commenters at lgf suggests concealed carry weapons (CCW) as the solution. That would be all very nice and good, if only Blagojevich hadn't vetoed the last 2 bills passed by the state legislature of IL. The nitwit even blocked standardization of state laws concerning the transportation of hunting weapons -- so hunters still don't know when they're going to cross from one county in to the next and find themselves in a whole new world of legal nightmares, for something that's wholly legal just a mile down the road. I'm no gun enthusiast, but if this keeps up, I'll become one.


*MSNBC has finally come around to opening with the descriptive "A Muslim convert". Yeeeehah! Maybe they're getting a clue. Or am I reading too much into their admission that it's not a "disgruntled youth" like they have in la Fwance?

How to lure me onto an airplane

Start a Muslim boycot of the airline.

(HT: Michelle Malkin)

I am Satan's weapon!

According to this at lgf , at any rate, Sydney-based Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali says I have the power to turn men into hungry, unthinking beasts by virtue of the ammunition within my gun turrets (if only mine looked so sturdy!).

I love it when some theologically-challenged jackass with a religious title pretends to speak for God. This commenter has my perspective in a nutshell.

It is time people decided whether human beings are base animals or thinking creatures.