Eternity Road - WAP Version
Saturday, October 02, 2004
But…
From James Taranto comes this illuminating roundup of Kerry statements from the Thursday night debate:
“I’ll never give a veto to any country over our security. But . . .”
“I believe in being strong and resolute and determined. And I will hunt down and kill the terrorists, wherever they are. But . . .”
“We have to be steadfast and resolved, and I am. And I will succeed for those troops, now that we’re there. We have to succeed. We can’t leave a failed Iraq. But . . .”
“I believe that we have to win this. The president and I have always agreed on that. And from the beginning, I did vote to give the authority, because I thought Saddam Hussein was a threat, and I did accept that intelligence. But . . .”
“I have nothing but respect for the British, Tony Blair, and for what they’ve been willing to do. But . . .”
“What I want to do is change the dynamics on the ground. And you have to do that by beginning to not back off of the Fallujahs and other places, and send the wrong message to the terrorists. You have to close the borders. You’ve got to show you’re serious in that regard. But . . .”
“I couldn’t agree more that the Iraqis want to be free and that they could be free. But . . .”
“No president, through all of American history, has ever ceded, and nor would I, the right to pre-empt in any way necessary to protect the United States of America. But . . .”
“I’ve never wavered in my life. I know exactly what we need to do in Iraq, and my position has been consistent: Saddam Hussein is a threat. He needed to be disarmed. We needed to go to the U.N. The president needed the authority to use force in order to be able to get him to do something, because he never did it without the threat of force. But . . .”
Ann Coulter has pinned this syntactic structure for what it is: an attempt to contradict the premise positioned before the “but” while appearing to agree with it. On matters of national security and the use of military force in the national interest, it’s leftists’ invariable pattern.
It makes a great deal of sense, if one adopts certain premises of the Left:
- America is not a virtuous nation nor a virtuous society; indeed, it has a great many crimes, past and present, to atone for.
- When other countries or peoples castigate us, or strike us, it’s because we deserve it, whether for our past sins or for failing to render them their due.
- In any contest or controversy with other nations, America should be presumed to be in the wrong until explicitly granted absolution (or permission to deviate) by those other nations.
- Therefore, our use of military force is inherently illegitimate unless literally every other nation on Earth agrees with it—in which case, why would we need to take up arms?
You have to let that sink in for a moment before you can feel the appropriate degree of revulsion and disgust. It brings to mind another Coulter observation: if ordinary patriotic Americans knew what leftists really believe, the public would boil them in oil.
Does John Kerry start from the Left’s premises?
Were we to judge from his actions as a public “servant,” we would deem John Kerry to be the consummate leftist, one to out-Marcuse Marcuse. From his words and deeds, we would infer that he believes that governments have the legitimate authority to run other people’s lives down to the smallest detail (except for abortion rights), and that private citizens have no inviolable right to their property or their incomes, only grants of permission from a wise elite of which he deems himself to be the pinnacle, and that backtalk to that elite should be punishable by law.
But... John Kerry has no set convictions. His pole star is his belief that supreme power over others is his by right, like a divine-right monarch. His conduct during this campaign, his twenty years in the Senate, and his many lies and traductions reaching all the way back to his four months in Vietnam, are ample evidence of this. Since the greater part of the country does agree with President Bush about the necessity of Operation Iraqi Freedom and the overall methods by which the aftermath has been managed, Kerry must strive to appear in agreement with those things, even as he undercuts them to mollify his hard-left electoral base.
It’s not really about “alliances,” or “U.N. authorization,” or “the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.” It’s about John Kerry, his belief that authority over everyone and everything is deservedly his, and his willingness to say or do anything at all if it might bring him nearer to power.
God help this country if he gains what he seeks.
Argument, Coercion, And Religion
Regular readers of this site already know that I’m a Roman Catholic. Some other Catholic bloggers prattle merrily away on religious topics, always from a religious perspective. In consequence, they have relatively little power to alter the opinions of others.
Religious belief is a special category of mentation: one accepts or rejects it based on something other than conventional logic and evidentiary proof. So, inasmuch as the point of this blog is to persuade through reasoned argument, as a rule I avoid religious topics. I always avoid arguments that are founded on a theological premise: there’s no way to get your argumentative partner-opponent to match premises with you, such that he must either accept or refute your evidence and your chains of logic.
One of the tests of a good premise for argumentative purposes is whether one’s opponent can be seduced into using it himself. Ayn Rand once noted in an essay that those who were most vociferous against the concept of individual rights always seemed to employ it as a support for their own arguments. The same can be said for the premise of an objective, knowable reality. But it cannot be said for a religious belief.
Does this mean my religion is unimportant to me in a practical sense? Of course not. But it’s my religion, to which I came on the basis of private experiences and interior events that can never be made into evidence for others’ eyes or hearts. It’s appropriate to use it as a guide for my conduct; it would be entirely inappropriate to ask others who don’t accept its premises to conform to it.
The great wonder of the ages is that so many people have elected to follow Christ. Christianity doesn’t offer the coercive possibilities of a political creed such as Islam. Its offer of salvation is couched in strict terms, without loopholes or qualifications. Its Ideal is literally impossible to emulate, having been God made flesh. It requires that we act with love even toward those who wish us harm, which contravenes every impulse inherent in Man.
No one comes to Christ through mere argument, not against adverse currents such as those. It has to be another kind of event, something that occurs within the affected individual, rather than outside him where he can observe and evaluate it.
This is why I’ve come to believe that to impose a religion on an unready mind—for example, the mind of a prepubescent child—is inherently unfair, destructive, and self-defeating. Most children treated thus reject the imposed religion as soon as they’re free to do so, even if they return to it later in life. Worse, the experience of having been coerced into mouthing beliefs that one does not truly feel can fill up a reservoir of resentment toward those responsible for one’s subjugation. When the list of the resented includes one’s parents, or otherwise worthy and generous persons such as priests and nuns, it’s a terrible thing indeed.
Men are simply too limited to argue for ultimate propositions. We cannot know enough; we cannot test our theses adequately; we can never eliminate all the alternative explanations. If you’re a religionist, who believes that the world is as it is because God intended it to be thus, then you must accept that God intended us to be thus as well.
The most constructive thing anyone can do to spread the acceptance of his religion is to live according to its doctrines, and describe them clearly to anyone who asks about them. One must be an example to be emulated, rather than a polemicist who strives to capture the inexpressible in a net woven of words.
That’s the way Christ did it. His parables were notable for being free from explicit commands; they were stories of how right prospers and wrong is brought to grief. He displayed great, unique powers, some of which He conferred upon His closest disciples, but He never used them to force His dictates on anyone. When the authorities of Judea came for Him, He submitted, and commanded His followers not to resist on His behalf:
“Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword. Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then would the scriptures be fulfilled, which say it must happen in this way?”
God does not coerce. He has laid down the laws of nature; that is all. One of those laws is that Man’s mind is free. To impose a belief on a free mind by force is impossible. Even God could not do it; it would make that mind something other than free, and its owner something less than a man.
Example is the ultimate teacher. In religious matters, it’s the only one. Which is why all the arguments about God’s will, or Christ’s divinity, or the authority of this or that theologian or cleric are fundamentally wrongheaded.
Make your choice. Then live it. But don’t argue about it—or for it. He who opened your heart will offer the same to every man that lives. It’s up to each of us to decide whether to yield to that caress, or shrug it aside.
Friday, October 01, 2004
Commitments
They say no news is good news, but it surely makes things tough on a would-be commentator.
I can’t write about the debate last night; I fell asleep before it started. That sort of thing happens a lot to one who rises at 4 AM. Anyway, numerous other Internet pundits have covered it extensively. Start with Stephen Green, whose approach to these things—get as soused as possible, consistent with the ability to type, and let fly in real time as the exchanges progress—I find immensely appealing.
The bloodshed in the Middle East has become something like a severe chronic ache. We can’t eliminate it. In the near term, we might not be able to reduce it, either. But a sufficiently protracted period of stability in Iraq, intensified pressure on Iran and Syria, and the completion of the Israeli security fence should have the necessary effects, given time. Not that we can expect that part of the world to become peaceable by civilized standards. I often wonder if God intended it as a reservation for idiots and villains, so the rest of the world would always have a negative example to reinforce our good sense.
The important thing about our incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq is our degree of commitment.
Commitment is of several kinds. One can be committed to an outcome, to a degree of participation, or to a premise. For example, in World War II, the United States committed itself to the prosecution of the war until Germany and Japan had proffered unconditional surrenders: an outcome. In Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, our coalition partners, while they would certainly prefer victory to other outcomes, committed themselves only to providing a certain number of troops: a degree of participation. President Bush has committed himself to the position that the terror campaigns being waged by Islamists around the world are absolutely and incontrovertibly morally wrong: a premise.
Though the first two kinds of commitment appear more substantive, it’s the third kind—commitment to a premise—that has the longest lasting and most dramatic effects on the world around one.
At the end of World War II, the victorious Allies held the famous Nuremberg War Crimes trials, in which they imposed upon the defeated Axis powers a standard of justice that was antithetical to the one that had been enacted, by legal procedures, by those powers’ governments. For example, Hitlerine Germany had enacted a law, entirely in accordance with the prevailing constitutional prescriptions, that mandated the involuntary sterilization of certain categories of people. Yet the Nuremberg tribunals held that the enforcement of that law was itself a crime—because of its moral premise that to do such a thing to an innocent was absolutely wrong, regardless what legal or procedural peregrinations were followed in enacting the law.
Several very smart people have lamented the Nuremberg Trials, specifically because of the application of that moral premise. They’ve opined that to prosecute a defeated nation’s officials for following the nation’s duly enacted laws is merely an exercise of sheer power: “victor’s justice,” which is no justice at all. But note their premise: that if one complies with the strictures of the duly enacted laws, then one should be indemnified against all odium for one’s deeds, no matter what they are.
Clashes such as those are irresolvable unless one or the other party surrenders his premise.
There’s been some turmoil, and some acrimony, over moral premises these past fifty years. One large community holds that right and wrong are mere bludgeon-words, that moral pronouncements are inevitably an expression either of an arbitrary tradition or of someone’s self-interest, and that therefore, given the proper context, any deed, no matter how superficially horrible, possesses some conceivable justification. Its opponent holds that right and wrong are inherent in the nature of Man and the universe in which we live, that choosing to do wrong will inevitably bring about punishment by the laws of Nature, and that therefore, there are some deeds that cannot be justified by any exercise in sophistry. Marxists, “progressives,” and a fair number of atheists (though far from all) align with the first camp, the party of “moral relativism.” Conservatives, libertarians, and most religionists align with the second camp, the party of “moral absolutism.”
These are actually “meta-premises,” since from each can be derived a huge sheaf of lesser statements about particular cases. But it’s the conflict between the two that matters most to the future of civilized Man.
In a tremendous irony, it’s the moral relativists who are most willing to spray defamation and opprobrium onto those who differ with them. The moral absolutists, who mainly follow the precept that one should not judge others unless it’s inescapably pressed upon one, tend to disapprove of particular sins, but refrain from condemning the sinner. But if we consider the implications of the premises more deeply than most would do, the paradox proves to be more apparent than real. Moral relativists are committed to a view of the world free of all moral norms; their standard is “what works for me.” Thus, they are free of any moral weight for what they say; all that matters is whether it’s strategically relevant and tactically effective. Conversely, moral absolutists hold that justice demands that, whatever their ends, their means must be morally acceptable; therefore, even in the heat of combat, they will not recur to methods that they know to be foul. Knowing that anyone can go astray, they will deprecate the deviance while holding the door open to the deviant, in the hope that he will return to the straight path.
A moral relativist will condemn for any reason, or none; his commitment is to his current needs. It takes a horrible, long-sustained career in evil to persuade a moral absolutist that there’s no hope for the evildoer; his commitment is to his conception of justice and his belief that all men can be led to conform to it.
In a recent discussion with reader Pascal, we entertained the proposition that even a single incontrovertibly true moral statement, from which honest, informed disagreement is impossible, is death to the premise of moral relativism. They understand this, and the magnitude of the threat it presents to them. But this brings their central commitment—a standard of no standards whatsoever—into high contrast. It compels them to decry the very notion of truth preemptively, as a global stroke against the possibility that some inconvenient fact might penetrate their defenses.
It makes them iconoclasts of the worst kind: the kind that will pull down anything solid, and deface anything widely revered, rather than permit the notion that some things really are absolute to gel in the minds of men.
Since reality is colloquially understood to consist of those things one’s opinions have no power to alter, they are the enemies of reality itself.
Did you tune in hoping for a political topic? Apologies. As I said earlier, all the good ones are already adequately covered. But then, this is a political topic; didn’t I mention Afghanistan and Iraq at the outset? Besides, politics is the art of gaining and wielding power over others, and there’s no activity in which one’s moral commitments are more significant.
More anon.
Thursday, September 30, 2004
Elephant Grins And Donkey Frowns
In a column on the interaction of economic confidence with political allegiances and outcomes, British financial writer Amity Shlaes notes that:
On Sept. 18, the confidence rating of the average Republican was a merry +39. But the average Democrat felt bleak. His confidence in the economy stood at -36.
The implications of so wide a difference between the two allegiances are extraordinary. In particular, confidence in any important area of thought tends to translate into confidence in other areas, and electoral attitudes as well. Shlaes pursues this line of reasoning to several striking ends:
That September [1992] the ABC/Money consumer comfort figure, for example, stood at a frigid -42. James Carville, the Democratic strategist, capitalized on negative sentiment with the motto “It’s the economy, stupid.” Voter-consumers believed the politicians; politicians believed voter-consumers; the two sides reinforced one another. President George H. W. Bush duly lost.
But not in a poor economy. As President Bill Clinton’s own economists reported 13 months later, real third-quarter growth for 1992 was actually 3.4 percent; in the fourth quarter, when disillusioned consumers defeated Bush, the growth rate was more than 5 percent. Keynes’ demand-focused economics had contributed to a political outcome that he would never have predicted.
What about this year? Pollster Gary Langer of ABC points out that the average consumer confidence rating for 2004 fits into the range in which postwar incumbents have tended to get re-elected. Still, it would be wrong to take that trend too seriously. Perception is only reality when we make it so.
But perception ought to be about reality—and at the moment, the general public suffers a sort of hysteresis of economic confidence, on average believing that the economy isn’t as good as it is in fact. Conservatives ought to devote a large chunk of their efforts to correcting that misperception. It could be critical on November 2.
Totalities
As with most wage earners, my early-morning routine is essentially invariant: get up, get clean, feed the livestock, gulp down some coffee, and drive to work. It’s so regular that I sometimes wonder if I’m awake when I do it. My conscious record of the day’s events doesn’t really start until I’m ensconced in my office and pounding away at the keys.
Now and then, I do wake up...if what I’m about to describe isn’t in some larger sense a kind of dream.
I’d had an unusually good night’s sleep, and woke free from the usual complaints of an aging male body. The morning routine proceeded smoothly, with no hassles. I packed my lunch and other impedimenta, kissed the C.S.O., and got into Chrissy the Chrysler feeling as good and relaxed as a middle-aged man can feel on a Thursday morning. Out of the garage, onto the road, and light the afterburners: the workday looms ahead.
There’s a flat, straight stretch of divided highway, starting not far from my house, which is part of my commuting route. Long Island being the traffic nightmare that it is, even at the early hour at which I travel (5:30 AM), that road is usually quite full. Hundreds of cars go clipping along at 65 MPH while their drivers attend to such last-minute needs as shaving, toothbrushing, or checking their investments in the Wall Street Journal.
Not today. By some coincidence, everyone in the area slept late this morning, except for your humble Curmudgeon.
There was no one else on the road. The darkness was a blanket of peace. By another coincidence, the road had been resurfaced only a few days before; the humming of the tires against the asphalt was a perfect, smooth hum, a single low cello note played by a bow of infinite length. I was doing what I was meant to do, in an appliance perfectly mated to its application, under conditions that could not have been better.
I broke free of time.
What meaning has time, when all is exactly as it should be? What function has the time-binding element in human consciousness, when there’s nothing to think about, worry over, or work on? At such a moment, those things, seemingly an inseparable component of Man’s earthly experience, cease to trouble us. For that brief space, they are not.
Where do they go? No one can say. But go they do.
It didn’t last long. How could it? Eventually, I encountered traffic lights, and other drivers, and ultimately, my destination. But it was real: a moment clipped free of the bondage of time and stretched out to eternity.
A moment of bliss on Eternity Road.
If you’ve ever had such a moment, no doubt its character has posed you some problems in recollection. It’s an unnatural state for human consciousness. Our dominant mental mode is time-bound: memory, prognostication, and cause-and-effect reasoning. One cannot apply that mode to an experience that utterly omits the time element from its matrix. Such a moment will remain forever opaque to our understanding.
Yet it was real. It had its own character, distinct from the sequential progression of the instants we experience in normal reality. It left traces in my psyche that I can still feel. In some ineffable sense, I remember it, though describing it seems impossible and I could not recreate it by any purposive means.
Do all persons have such experiences? What do they mean? Is it even fair to ask if they have a meaning?
Under that cloak of timelessness, do we devolve to some lower, animal-like state from which Reason must win free, or do we approach a higher one, in which all things are complete, all knowledge is known, and eternity is revealed as a single event?
Only one thing about it is certain: it is good. That’s not a conclusion drawn from any rational evaluative process, but a direct perception of quality, a news flash hot off the nerve wires. In all other ways, it teases at our reason, being the very antithesis of the faculty that strains to encompass it.
It is good, but it is not a good. It cannot be grown, mined, manufactured, or hunted down. It comes on its own schedule, and its own terms.
It’s a brief immersion in totality.
M. Scott Peck observed in his book The Road Less Traveled that the experience of reality as a oneness is the goal of all mystical and spiritual yearning. This corresponds exactly to the obliteration of time. But if such an experience is beyond our powers to produce by conscious effort, then what is its genesis? Is it coincidental, a product of the fortuitous collision of just the right temporal elements at just the right moment? Is it entirely subjective, a matter of possessing a particular mental state independent of one’s objective circumstances?
Or is it a teaser? A foretaste of the totality to come when we have at last shuffled off this mortal coil?
When You and I behind the Veil are past,
Oh, but the long, long while the World shall last,
Which of our Coming and Departure heeds
As the Sea’s self should heed a pebble-cast.A Moment’s Halt—a momentary taste
Of Being from the Well Amid the Waste --
And Lo!—the phantom Caravan has reach’d
The Nothing it set out from—Oh, make haste!
From here on out it will be an ordinary Thursday, I’m sure. I have meetings to attend, memos to write, and assorted persons to wheedle and cajole. If I’m lucky, I might even get to write a little code; it’s a blessing I don’t often have in these latter years. But however the trials and travails of today or tomorrow might eventuate, I have my gift from this morning: one instant of timeless perfection, when all was exactly as it should be. I shall savor that gift for as long as I may.
Praise God, from Whom all blessings flow.
Wednesday, September 29, 2004
Do Not Adjust Your Television Set
...don’t turn the page, don’t answer the phone, don’t respond to the three-year-old yowling from the next room…
(Thanks to Bunker Mulligan.)
Us…And Them
Please pardon the marginal grammar. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to cite Pink Floyd.
I’ve been thinking hard about this fine essay by Michael Ledeen ever since I first read it. Ledeen, a fine analyst who minces no words, is surely onto something here: “This is not about us—it is about them.” But the matter ought not to be put to rest without reflecting on what it means for there to be an “us” and a “them” in the first place, especially given the nature of the two camps as they present themselves to the world.
Definition is inherently relational. It’s the practice of creating subsets, whose members all possess a characteristic not shared by other members of the enclosing set. “This is an X because it’s a Y that has characteristic Z.” In the classical terminology of philosophy, the enclosing set is called the genus, and the subset’s distinguishing characteristic is called the differentia.
By their videotaped beheadings—among many other things—the Islamic terrorists have marked themselves with a differentia that calls to the worst elements among men. One must be a Muslim (the genus) to join them, but one must also possess a supremely vicious bloodthirst that would surely disqualify him from participating in any “polite” society.
According to Ledeen’s analysis, the point of this differentia is to call forth similar persons who lurk in the interstices of society. The terrorists seek to activate those lurkers as Muslim terrorists, by appealing to the worst trait a man can possess: the desire to make others suffer.
Is it working? I couldn’t say. I don’t have that kind of information. But I find it ominous that, in this country, Islam is the most successful maker of converts among our prison population.
The mean IQ of the Islamic world is about 85. Remember that. It’s a critical fact.
There are other reasons why one might want to join a very publicized group with dramatic, if horrifying, objectives. But one could never remain in such a group without the willingness to confront and participate in the brutal slaughter of innocents in complete equanimity.
The terrorists’ overt objectives include the expulsion of the United States from the Middle East, the destruction of Israel, and the re-establishment of the Islamic Caliphate over as broad a region as possible. They cannot achieve these things. All three are impossible, and any bright lights among them, such as they are, would know it. In the very best case (for them), they can exact an ongoing blood rent for America’s anti-terror efforts, kill a few Israelis now and then in a suicide bombing, and sway a few Islamic states away from aligning with the West. In the worst case, a joint American-Israeli effort would depose every Islamic state in the region by any means necessary, including nuclear bombardment, and would impose a degree of martial law on the survivors so harsh as to make a Nazi concentration camp look like a vacation spot. That would be all they could achieve even if a million psychopathic would-be murderers were to flock to their banner.
This should lead us to wonder whether the terrorists have covert objectives greatly different from their overt ones. Are they clever enough to play a two-level game? If so, toward what goals are their actions really directed?
If this is the true structure of the Islamic terror movement, one would think there would be some evidence of a hidden agenda. We would find pointers toward the real objectives buried among the unachievable surface goals. I can’t find any.
The lack of such evidence has compelled me to consider two alternative explanations. They’re not pretty ones, but they’re all that remains.
The first explanation is that the terrorists either cannot understand or will not concede that their overt goals are unachievable. That requires them to be uniformly stupid, from the bottom-most cadre of bomb fodder to the top echelon of their leaders and planners. It’s just barely thinkable that they could be that dim, but given the meager intellectual attainments of the Muslim world, it is thinkable.
The second explanation is truly horrifying: that the terrorists’ true and immutable aim is to kill and torture, and any “objectives,” overt or covert, are mere window dressing.
This dovetails with the Ledeen thesis. The beheadings videos and the innumerable news stories about jihadi atrocities against the defenseless are the terrorists’ means of recruiting others to their cause. They scream indisputably that “we are not like them: we get to rape, torture, and kill as we please.”
A sharp mind would see at once that such a career can have only one ending, and not a pleasant one. But sharp minds are not often found among psychopaths, Hannibal Lecter and his fictional kindred to the side. They’re even rarer among jihad-minded Muslims.
Whichever of these theses is nearer to the truth, we have a long, hard slog before us. Even one such marauding predator is too many, and there are far more than that ravaging the Middle East at this time. Our desire to spare the innocent from any cost for the crimes of the guilty will complicate matters. If the terrorists manage to kidnap and kill many more innocents, the frustration that results will drag the “worst case”—an all-stops-out military campaign to destroy every Islamic regime in the Middle East, regardless of the cost in blood or treasure—much nearer.
No, we are not like them. But we can be more frightful than they could ever imagine. As Ann Coulter has said, we’ve bombed cities and killed civilians before, in a campaign to expunge a greater evil. Muslims everywhere should pray that we never indulge that degree of ferocity toward them and their states. As developments in the Middle East unfold, they should think hard about whether their best interests lie with us...or with them.
Spencer Does It Again
Robert Spencer is becoming, not merely one of my heroes, but foremost among them:
One thing that has been overlooked in the whole recent Yusuf Islam/Cat Stevens imbroglio is that if he is indeed telling the truth, the implications are even worse than if he is lying.
[...snip...]
DHS wouldn’t have had to work very hard to portray the ex-Cat as a supporter of the terrorists of Hamas. The connections to Hamas in particular are more recent: in 1998, Yusuf Islam spoke at a fundraising dinner sponsored by an organization, the Jerusalem Fund for Human Services, that has been identified by the Canadian government as a Hamas front group. He exhorted his hearers to donate to the group in order to “lessen the suffering of our brothers and sisters in Palestine and the Holy Land.” In 2000, he was denied entry into Israel for donating thousands to Hamas. Again, Islam denied it all, saying: “I want to make sure that people are aware that I’ve never knowingly supported any terrorist groups — past, present or future. It’s simply an attempt to cast doubt again on my character and good intentions.”
So in essence, if Cat Stevens is not a proponent of the global jihad, he is, by his own admission, a dupe. He sent thousands to Israel to support his “brothers and sisters in Palestine”; even if he really didn’t intend it to go to Hamas, it did. This is an indication of what Muslims who do not support terrorism face daily: so many Islamic “charities” have turned out to be terrorist fronts that many whose intentions were quite different have ended up being supporters of terror unwittingly. There is no separation in mosques and Islamic communities between moderate and radical Muslims, and neither camp has shown any indication of wanting to create one.[...snip...]
His statements supporting the Rushdie fatwa are a case in point: now he says he spoke out of new convert’s enthusiasm and based his answer on abstract considerations of Islamic law, not intending actually to support the novelist’s murder — thereby saying something about both Islamic law and converts. Khomeini’s fatwa, as the Cat the student of Islam had no doubt recently learned, was no innovation, but entirely consistent with Islamic law mandating death for blasphemers. And his convert’s zeal, anxious as he was to act upon the newly-absorbed lessons of Islam, has manifested itself in more ominous forms more recently: witness “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh, shoe bomber Richard Reid, dirty bomb hopeful Jose Padilla, and on and on. They didn’t set out to learn “radical Islam” or “moderate Islam.” They just wanted to learn Islam.
Thus if Cat is telling the truth about not supporting terrorism, his case is a striking reminder of the deep crisis within Islam: terror has intertwined itself with the religion so tightly today that it cannot be separated even by those who claim to abhor all that the terrorists stand for. Muslims today can’t seem to ride the peace train even if they want to.
That is clarity—and bravery. How much braver can you be than to speak the truth as you see it, knowing that it will call the wrath of more than a billion people—the world’s least tolerant and most violent billion people!—down onto your head?
You Knew This Was Coming
Israel will not permit Iran to possess nuclear weapons:
Israel will consider “all options” to prevent Iran from producing nuclear weapons, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said in an interview published Wednesday, marking the latest in a series of Israeli threats against Iran’s nuclear program.
[...snip...]
Israel considers Iran its most dangerous enemy and worries that Iran’s nuclear weapons program is intended as a threat against it. Iran denies it is developing nuclear weapons, saying its nuclear development program is aimed at generating electricity.
Mofaz told the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot that Israel had to be prepared to deal with what he called the Iranian “threat.”
“All options have to be taken into account to prevent it,” he was quoted as saying.[...snip...]
Earlier this month, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Israel is “taking measures to defend itself” — a comment that raised concern Israel is considering a pre-emptive strike against Iranian nuclear installations along the lines of its 1981 bombing of an unfinished Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak near Baghdad.
An Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear facilities is the worst of the alternative courses, but it would be less bad than allowing Iran to possess weapons of mass destruction. The course of the 1979-1986 Iran-Iraq War proves beyond dispute that the mullahocracy would be perfectly willing to condemn Iran to total annihilation if it could first destroy Israel, or strike a mighty blow against the “great Satan,” America.
Far better that the United States, already established by its deeds in Iraq and Afghanistan as a benign force, should decapitate the mullahs’ regime and free the country from theocratic bondage. Better yet if the Iranian people, 70% of whom want the regime dissolved, were to liberate themselves with only our encouragement and modest assistance.
President Bush has gone on record, on national network television, as saying that we will not permit Iran to have a nuclear weapon. One way or another, the mullahs will be thwarted, and they know it—which calls into question their motives for embarking on a course that must eventuate in their downfall.
Bravo For The Governator!
He might not be a textbook conservative, but he’s no dummy:
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (search) signed a law requiring that all electronic voting machines produce paper records of every ballot cast, beginning in 2006.
Under the bill, signed Monday, voters will not be able to touch or keep the records; instead, election officials will put them in lock boxes in case a recount becomes necessary.Computer scientists and voter advocates have warned that touch-screens and other electronic voting machinery are vulnerable to hackers, software bugs and hardware failures, and that a paper trail is needed in case something goes wrong.
This is technically called “good sense.” It’s a pity that the law couldn’t have been in effect for the upcoming election, but one must make do. Let’s hope the other states put similar laws in place, pronto.