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Posts Tagged ‘Mark Steyn’

The house of Islam

by Mojambo ( 132 Comments › )
Filed under Al Qaeda, Iran, Islamists, Israel, Jihad, UK at June 18th, 2010 - 11:30 am

Mark Steyn in his usual succinct way points out what many of us have written – that once a territory is part of the Dar al-Islam – it always remains so in the eyes of the Muslims and this includes Spain. The Jewish community of Morocco is now 1% of what it once was several decades ago.  Ironically in the 1930’s the cry of the anti Semites was “Jews to Palestine”, now it is “Jews out of Palestine” – as Helen Thomas so hatefully  put it “Go back home to Poland and Germany”.

by Mark Steyn

Thanks to the wonders of globalization, I’m writing this in a fairly decrepit salon de thé off the rue de la Liberté in Tangiers, enjoying a coffee and a stale croissant grilled and flattened into a panini. What could be more authentically Moroccan? For some reason, the napkins are emblazoned with “Gracias por su visita.”

Through a blizzard of flies, I can just about make out the plasma TV up in the corner on which Jimmy Carter, dubbed into Arabic, is denouncing Israel. Al Jazeera doesn’t so much cover the Zionist Entity as feast on it, hour after hour, without end. So here, at the western frontier of the Muslim world (if you don’t include Yorkshire), the only news that matters is from a tiny strip of land barely wider at its narrowest point than a rural Canadian township way down the other end of the Mediterranean.

Notwithstanding saturation coverage of the “Massacre In The Med” (as the front page headline in Britain’s Daily Mirror put it), there are other Jewish stories in the news. This one caught my eye in Canada’s Shalom Life: “No danger to the Jewish cemeteries in Tangiers.” Apparently, the old Jewish hospital in this ancient port city was torn down a couple of months back, and the Moroccan Jewish diaspora back in Toronto worried that their graveyards might be next on the list. Not to worry, Abraham Azancot assured Shalom Life readers. The Jewish cemetery on the rue du Portugal is perfectly safe. “Its sanctity has consistently been respected by the local government that is actually providing the community with resources to assist in its current grooming.”

[…]

You can sense the same process already under way in, say, London, the 13th-biggest Jewish city in the world, but one with an aging population; and in Malmö, Sweden, where a surge in anti-Semitism from, ahem, certain quarters has led Jewish residents to abandon the city for Stockholm and beyond; and in Odense, Denmark, where last year superintendent Olav Nielsen announced he would no longer admit Jewish children to the local school. The Jewish presence almost anywhere on the map is as precarious as, to coin a phrase, a fiddler on the roof. And Israel’s enemies are determined that the biggest Jewish community of all should be just as precarious and prove just as impermanent.

In 1936, during the Cable Street riots, the British Union of Fascists jeered at London Jews, “Go back to Palestine!”, “Palestine” being in those days the designation for the Jewish homeland. Last week, Helen Thomas, the doyenne of the White House press corps, jeered at today’s Jews, “Get the hell out of Palestine,” “Palestine” being now the designation for the land illegally occupied by the Jewish apartheid state. “Go home,” advised Miss Thomas, “to Poland and Germany.” Wherever a Jew is, whatever a Jew is, he should be something else somewhere else. And then he can be hated for that, too.

North Korea sinks a South Korean ship; hundreds of thousands of people die in the Sudan; millions die in the Congo. But 10 men die at the hands of Israeli commandos and it dominates the news day in, day out for weeks, with UN resolutions, international investigations, calls for boycotts, and every Western prime minister and foreign minister expected to rise in parliament and express the outrage of the international community.
Odd. But why?

Read the rest here: The lesson of a Jewish cemetery

The man who would be King

by Mojambo ( 81 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama at June 13th, 2010 - 9:00 am

Someone once said of George Washington’s first postmaster general Timothy Pickering who was promoted to be our third Secretary of State – “President Washington  took a capable  enough postmaster and raised him up to be a lousy Secretary of State”. Barack Obama was a capable “community organizer” who has risen to be  a disastrously  incompetent president. His arrogance is such that he  feels that the job of president is too confining and  beneath him, he wants to be Emperor of the World!  Mark Steyn lays it all out in his usual way.

Hat tip – Powerline

by Mark Steyn

So a man swept into office on an unprecedented tide of delirious fawning is now watching his presidency sink in an unstoppable gush. That’s almost too apt.

Unfortunately, in the real world, a disastrous president has consequences. So let me begin by citing the Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in Canada. Whoa, whoa, don’t stampede for the exits!

The Canadian thing’s just a starting point, I promise. If I’m still droning on about inside-Ottawa stuff five paragraphs down, feel free to turn the page to our exclusive 12-page pictorial preview of “Sex And The City 3,” starring Estelle Getty as Kim Cattrall.

Anyway, a couple of years back, Michael Ignatieff, a professor at Harvard and previously a BBC late-night intellectual telly host, returned to his native land of Canada in order to become prime minister, and to that end got himself elected as leader of the Liberal Party. And, as is the fashion nowadays, he cranked out a quickie tome laying out his political “vision.” Having spent his entire adult life abroad, he was aware that some of the natives were uncertain about his commitment to the land of his birth. So he was careful to issue a sort of pledge of a kind of allegiance, explaining that writing a book about Canada had “deepened my attachment to the place on Earth that, if I needed one, I would call home.”

Gee, that’s awfully big of you. As John Robson commented in The Ottawa Citizen: “I’m worried that a man so postmodern he doesn’t need a home wants to lead my country. Why? Is it quaint? An interesting sociological experiment?”

Indeed. But there’s a lot of it about. Many Americans are beginning to pick up the strange vibe that for Barack Obama, governing America is “an interesting sociological experiment”, too. He would doubtless agree that the United States is “the place on Earth that, if I needed one, I would call home.” But he doesn’t, not really: It is hard to imagine Obama wandering along to watch a Memorial Day or Fourth of July parade until the job required him to. That’s not to say he’s un-American or anti-American, but merely that he’s beyond all that. Way beyond. He’s the first president to give off the pronounced whiff that he’s condescending to the job – that it’s really too small for him, and he’s just killing time until something more commensurate with his stature comes along.

Read the rest This job, too, is beneath Obama

Turkey causing instabilty and 9/11 Mosque Imam’s ties to Gaza Flotilla

by Phantom Ace ( 37 Comments › )
Filed under Gaza, Hamas, IDF, Islamic hypocrisy, Islamic Invasion, Islamic Supremacism, Israel, Jihad, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Progressives, Tranzis, Turkey at June 6th, 2010 - 11:30 am

The Turks, under the Muslim Brotherhood linked AKP and the Fascist Erdogan, have become a force for trouble. At one time, via it’s membership in NATO and alliance with Israel, Turkey was a pillar of stability. Now it is angling itself as a leader of Dar Al Islam. As their Ottoman forefathers, they are in Jihadi mode and have Israel in their sights. Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan is now threatening to go to Gaza in the next Flotilla and will have Turkish warships escort. This is a recipe for a conflict between a NATO nation and Israel. Mark Steyn gives a great analysis of the situation..

Foreign policy “realists,” back in the saddle since the Texan cowboy left town, are extremely fond of the concept of “stability”: America needs a stable Middle East, so we should learn to live with Mubarak and the mullahs and the House of Saud, etc. You can see the appeal of “stability” to your big-time geopolitical analyst: You don’t have to update your Rolodex too often, never mind rethink your assumptions. “Stability” is a fancy term to upgrade inertia and complacency into strategy. No wonder the fetishization of stability is one of the most stable features of foreign-policy analysis.

Unfortunately, back in what passes for the real world, there is no stability. History is always on the march, and, if it’s not moving in your direction, it’s generally moving in the other fellow’s. Take this “humanitarian” “aid” flotilla. Much of what went on — the dissembling of the Palestinian propagandists, the hysteria of the U.N. and the Euro-ninnies — was just business as usual. But what was most striking was the behavior of the Turks. In the wake of the Israeli raid, Ankara promised to provide Turkish naval protection for the next “aid” convoy to Gaza. This would be, in effect, an act of war — more to the point, an act of war by a NATO member against the State of Israel.

Read the rest: Israel, Turkey, and the End of Stability

Erdogan and the AKP are a menace who seek to make Turkey at the forefront of Jihad. They are Neo-Ottoman and we must be aware of what we are dealing with.

Update: The Imam involved in the 9/11 ground zero Islamic Center is also linked to the Gaza Flotilla.

The imam behind a proposed mosque near Ground Zero is a prominent member of a group that helped sponsor the pro-Palestinian activists who clashed violently with Israeli commandos at sea this week.

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is a key figure in Malaysian-based Perdana Global Peace Organization, according to its Website.

Perdana is the single biggest donor ($366,000) so far to the Free Gaza Movement, a key organizer of the six-ship flotilla that tried to break Israel’s blockade of the Hamas-run Gaza Strip Monday.

Read the rest: Imam unmosqued

This proves the reason for the Cordoba House is to celebrate what is perceived as an Islamic victory.

Update II: Iran is now offering to use the Revolutionary Guard Navy to escort ships to Gaza. This would be a clear act of war.

We Can’t Afford To Be Stupid!

by Iron Fist ( 156 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Economy, Misery Index, Politics, Progressives, Socialism, Tea Parties at May 27th, 2010 - 4:00 pm

Mark Steyn brings us this gem:

Back in 2008, when I was fulminating against multiculturalism on a more or less weekly basis, a reader wrote to advise me to lighten up, on the grounds that “we’re rich enough to afford to be stupid.”

Two years later, we’re a lot less rich. In fact, many Western nations are, in any objective sense, insolvent. Hence last week’s column, on the EU’s decision to toss a trillion dollars into the great sucking maw of Greece’s public-sector kleptocracy. It no longer matters whether you’re intellectually in favour of European-style social democracy: simply as a practical matter, it’s unaffordable.

How did the Western world reach this point? Well, as my correspondent put it, we assumed that we were rich enough that we could afford to be stupid.

As they say, read the whole thing. The bill for our grand stupidity is coming due. Will we be able to afford it? My answer is “No!” I don’t want to pay for the cable bills of hookers hangin’ in their crib with their pimps and a couple of the “price of doing business”, if you know what I mean. Enough! We are Taxed Enough Already! Instead of promising more things to more people, I want a government that will let me keep what I earn, and let my business thrive without complete oppression from the State. I don’t expect to get rich, but I’ve worked hard to get to where I am. Excuse me if I think others might ought to expend a bit for themselves as well.