Alykhan Velshi and Mahathir Mohamad on moderate Muslims (and the Pope)

Jihad Watch has a dialog between Alykhan Velshi ( a “moderate” Muslim) and Robert Spencer regarding the Pope’s speech on Muslims. Here is the key part of Levshi’s argument:

The problem with Benedict's speech, and it's illustrated perfectly by the quotation I cited above, is that it gives moderate Muslims no option other than to renounce our faith.

And here is the key part of Spencer’s reply:

What I have asked again and again of Muslims who identify themselves as moderate is this: that they acknowledge to exist, and renounce definitively, the elements of Islamic theology that jihadists are using to wage war against non-Muslims around the world. Instead, most of those who are known as moderates simply deny that these elements of Islam exist at all. I'm sorry, but that is not reform. That is deception. In the 16th century, the Protestant Reformers didn't say, "The Church has never taught Transubstantiation and anyone who says otherwise is a hatemonger." They said, "The Church teaches Transubstantiation and it should stop doing so." Why is something like that, mutatis mutandis, too much to ask from Muslim reformers today? Why is it too much to ask that they say, "Jihad violence and the subjugation of unbelievers has been a continuing part of Islam, and we now reject it," instead of denying, in the teeth of the evidence, that these things are true at all?

And one of the comments to the post made a point that needs to be made regarding Muslim leaders:

"Velshi's contention that "Muslim" need not be modified by "moderate" because it is redundant amounts to an assertion that Islam itself is moderate, i.e., peaceful and tolerant. It is interesting to note that Mahathir Mohamad, the "Jews-control-the-world" former Prime Minister of Malaysia, has just made essentially the same assertion: "There is no such thing as a moderate Muslim," he said. "We are fundamentalists in Malaysia. We follow the true teachings of the religion and the true teachings do not teach us to bomb and kill people without reason."

The last two words in that dissertation give lie to the so called religion of peace. If you are not Muslim, or if you refuse to allow Islam to rule you, or if you say something they don't like, that gives them the reason they need to justify your killing. Whenever Muslims make these statements and add these types of qualifiers, they should be asked to explain in detail so we can see the differences.

Read the whole thing.

Victor Davis Hanson: Those Saudi Students. It’s not irrational to be wary of this deal

Bill Press Shows How Conspiracy Theorists Work

When you are a conspiracy theorist, nothing – literally no-thing – will convince you that you are wrong. New information is simply fitted into you worldview or dismissed as part of the conspiracy to discredit your ideas.

When Osama releases a video showing him congratulating the 9-11 hijackers, to the committed conspiracy theorist, it’s a movie produced by the Evil Bush Administration to fool the people.

And it’s not just Bush, wasn’t it the Chinese government who claimed that the moon landings were actually filmed on a sound stage in Hollywood?

So now we have Bill Press, one of the true believers in the “Rove Conspiracy to Out Plame” What is his reaction to the admission that Richard Armitage was the source of the original leak? Why it proves to him that the conspiracy was wider than even he though!

Not kidding, read here:

So where’s my apology to Karl Rove?

That’s what many readers want to know: Having accused Karl Rove of leading a conspiracy within the Bush White House to reveal the identity of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame, don’t I owe Rove an apology now that former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage has admitted that he, not Rove, was Novak’s primary source?

Well, here’s my answer: Hell, no! Armitage’s involvement doesn’t disprove the Rove conspiracy. It only proves it was a lot wider than we originally thought.

Terror Flicks: Movies do a better job covering the war than the news media do.

From the Opinion Journal by Dan Henninger:

"An event of this consequence is very hard to understand." The event former Congressman Lee Hamilton was describing earlier this week is September 11, 2001. But of course September 11 itself is not hard to understand. They came, they killed.

For many people this is sufficient understanding of 9/11. They believe the job now is simple: Resist and stop more of their killing. However, unlike the proponents of apocalyptic Islam, most normal people in time seek a degree of understanding, even of an enemy who fights by the rules of pre-civilization. Mr. Hamilton, the vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission, was commenting on ABC's now-controversial movie, "The Path to 9/11." The hard-to-understand path to which Mr. Hamilton alluded is obviously not a single event but the origins and organization of the Islamic terrorist movement that began years back and besets the U.S. and the world today.

One can only agree with Mr. Hamilton. The war on terror is more complex, nuanced and indeed more interesting than the general public has been given to believe.

For instance, one oft-cited benchmark of its progress is the status of Osama bin Laden. That he is presumably still alive and at large is taken to mean that President Bush's offensive against the post-9/11 terrorists has "failed," as John Kerry noted this week on the eve of September 11. The Bush administration, Mr. Kerry told CNN, "failed to capture and kill Osama bin Laden when they had him in the mountains of Tora Bora. And that's why we are more threatened today with an al Qaeda that has reconstituted itself in some 65 countries."

This is the Alien vs. Predator model of fighting terror. Bin Laden himself has picked up on the tendency of our political culture to reduce complexity to melodrama. For 9/11, al Qaeda released a propaganda documentary on al-Jazeera this week, depicting masked men training, while Bin Laden walks among them. The New York Times described bin Laden in the 9/11 tape as "looking almost regal."

As to the war in Iraq, daily readers of first-line Internet news services such as Yahoo News know that this event has been reduced simply to body-count headlines. Yahoo News's homepage at mid-day Wednesday: "Bombings, mortar attacks kill 39 in Iraq."

If this is the available public context, then serious people have to assemble an understanding of terror as best they can. It isn't easy. In his comment on the ABC movie, Lee Hamilton said that "news and entertainment are getting dangerously intertwined." But given the alternative, it makes sense to me if people seek a better sense of the obsessions and compulsions inside Islamic terrorism in movies such as "United 93" or ABC's remarkable "The Path to 9/11."

Read the rest.

Cassandra has a term for media people who should be reporting on Joe Wilson’s lies: AWOL.

She gives us chapter and verse about when, why an in what venue Wilson lied. Read the whole thing, but she conludes thus:

In other words, Wilson's little junket to Niger was worthless to the CIA. He learned nothing of value, the White House, despite his accusations to the contrary, never requested that he go there, and never saw his report.

And it is becoming very clear that this whole thing was a setup from day one.

Wilson lied about who arranged for him to go, about what he found when he got there, about who saw his report (and really, how would he ever have access to CIA distribution lists anyway? This is WAY above his wife's pay grade, and even if it weren't she would be violating the terms of her employment by sharing that information with him and he would be violating the law by publishing that information in the New York Times, now wouldn't he?). Wilson also lied about what those 16 words in the SOTU address were based on. And he lied about the forgery thing - the "dates and the names were forged" - as he admitted under oath, he never saw those dates and names.

So why have the New York Times and the Washington Post carried his water all these years?

Why is the Post - my hometown paper - still running a grossly inaccurate "Wilson Report" that lies by omission, when not one, but TWO bipartisan Senate Select Intelligence Committees have now concluded that Joseph Wilson IV lied to the American people?

UPDATE:
BizzyBlog says:
AP Reporter Obscures Truth about “The Sixteen Words”

AP reporter Matt Apuzzo was way too clever in his article about Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson adding Richard Armitage to their lawsuit. The second-last paragraph reads:

Wilson discounted reports that then-Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger to make a nuclear weapon. Such a claim wound up in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address.

Very cutely done. One might think that the “discounted” “claim” didn’t belong in Bush’s 2003 SOTU. It’s pretty clear to me that Matt Apuzzo WANTS us to think not only that it didn’t belong, but that it wasn’t, and isn’t true.

Read the rest.

The New Desecraters

The 9/11 conspiracy theorists (or "truthers") were out in force at Ground Zero

How the False Interpretation of “Separation of Church And State” Corrodes Freedom of Speech

Some provocative thought from Vic Rubenfeld.

My review of the Darwin chapters in Ann Coulter's new book is getting a lot of pageviews. At the moment, a Google search for "Ann Coulter Darwin" lists this site as the second entry.

And the comments posted with the review are fascinating. Here's one, from Doc Duke:


I received my Bachelor and PhD degrees from MIT and Princeton, respectively, and am familiar with these arguments, having read the sources some years ago. Ann has done her readers a great service by presenting succinct, humorous, well-documented prose for her readers, of which there are happily very many. I agree with her, and think you have well summarized her arguments (and those in her cited literature), Vik.

I have two children in a public High School, and spend a considerable amount of time evenings and weekends making sure (1) that they know the other side if I don't trust what they are being taught, and (2) ensuring that they know to keep their mouths shut so that this knowledge does not have a negative impact on their grade-point averages.

You will seldom hear from (employed) scientists on this subject, because they to not wish to follow, even in a small way, the path of Natan Sharansky in Russia. Consult his "The Case for Democracy" to see where we could be headed without effective voices such as yours, Vik.

Doc, thanks very much for the good words.

What I can't get over is that not only does Doc have to check what his kids are being taught and personally give them the alternative view when necessary -- since the schools aren't doing so -- but he also has to tell them not to let on at school, that this is happening. This looks to me as though free expression at school is not only not permitted, it's actually being punished. There's the state-approved view of things, and discussing of alternative views is punished. Even thinking about alternative views is dangerous if discovered. This is showing some of the characteristics of a state that lacks freedom of speech.

Designs for Buildings to Replace the World Trade Center Towers

Click on the link to see pictures of the new designs.

Quick, Someone Tell the Intelligence Committee!

The Senate Intelligence Committee has issued Saddam a clean bill of health, as far as international terrorism is concerned. That is, they say he had no relationship with al Qaeda. But Iraq's deputy prime minister, Barham Salih, begs to differ:

"The alliance between the Baathists and jihadists which sustains Al Qaeda in Iraq is not new, contrary to what you may have been told." He went on to say, "I know this at first hand. Some of my friends were murdered by jihadists, by Al Qaeda-affiliated operatives who had been sheltered and assisted by Saddam's regime."

Rosie O'Donnell Says Christians are Dangerous; Michelle Malkin Takes Her On.

According to Rosie Radical Christianity is just as dangerous as Radical Islam.

See here for the video and the "Hot Air" response.

09/14/06 FOX News Poll: 2006 Election Is All About Iraq(51% Support Iraq war)

Don't know if this is an "outlier" but I believe part of the frustration with the war in Iraq comes not from the Left who believes that we should not be there at all, but from the middle and the right who believe that we are not fighting hard enough and our leaders are not getting their message out. When Bush goes to the people, as he has done in the last two weeks, his poll numbers go up dramatically.

Inspirational Iraqi War Vet Speaks in Westminster, MD

This is worth noting:

ANNOUNCEMENT:

Inspirational Iraqi War Veteran to Speak in Westminster, Maryland.

"Christian Bagge Day at North Carroll Community School"

I read a story about this young man, Christian Bagge, earlier this summer.

The summarized version is that Christian was a member of the Army, (Alpha Company, 3rd Battalion, 116th Cavalry). He was seriously injured during a clearing mission near Kirkuk when an IED exploded under his HUMVEE.

Unfortunately, as a result of this tragedy, Christian lost parts of both of his legs. He was sent to Walter Reed Medical Center to recover and receive prosthetic legs, which he also had to be trained to use. While recovering Christian had an opportunity to meet and speak with President Bush and he requested an opportunity to run with the President when he was able.

He accomplished this on June 27th, 2006. He story is very inspirational!

Christian will be speaking at a school in Westminster Maryland this Friday, September 15th, 2006. While it has been difficult preparing for this event in such a short period of time, NCCS would like to welcome any members of the public and we are preparing for this event as though we will receive 200 to 300 visitors.

The nature of Christian's talk will be age appropriate for children 1st through 8th grade, and I expect that anyone who comes will have an opportunity to meet with him personally, as well.

"Christian Bagge Day at NCCS in Westminster"

North Carroll Community School 531 Old Westminster Pike Westminster, MD 21157

12:30 PM to 3:00 PM

BumperStickerist: Just One Minute (Bush is a Lucky B*stard)

I finally admitted to a liberal friend the obvious truth - I voted for Bush because he's both pure evil *and* the luckiest bastard on the face of the earth. I mean, seriously, look at just a couple key events:

Bush joins the Texas ANG - Kerry joins the Navy Reserves.

Bush completes TANG training for jets, flies jets, volunteers for Vietnam only to be told that the pilot skills he has aren't needed.

Kerry joins the Swift Boats at time they were patrolling off the coast - the duty changes to river patrolling; Kerry gets shot at by people intent on killing him and his crew. Kerry leaves by choice after three months.

Advantage: Bush

Bush skates through the last two years of his TANG duty, but does so with such foresight as to bury almost all traces of his duty record leaving only notes from a dental record exam.

Kerry works as an admirals aide for the balance of his active duty stint - but manages to get caught on tape during a meeting where assassination is discussed, travels to Vietnam while on Reserve status to meet with the enemy, has his Silver Star citation amended twice times, publishes an anti-war book that's later debunked.

Advantage: Bush

Bush: Sat for 6.5 minutes after hearing about the 9/11 attacks in a room with a bunch of kids, a teacher, and a camera crew.

Kerry: Sat for an hour, stunned to the point of inaction, in a room full of adult elected officials with no camera present.

Advantage: Bush

Bush: Able to surround himself with a cadre of people able to engineer election fraud on a massive scale in Democratic-controlled precincts undetected, destroy two huge buildings in the middle of a major US city without any actual, you know, evidence left behind, destroy our basic Constitutional rights in pursuit of his neocon vision of a Unitary Executive and still have the energy to clear brush from his ranch while on vacation.

Kerry: Can't get the balloons to release on cue.

Advantage: Bush

There comes a point where you just marvel at the timing of events in favor of Bush and the way the Democrats clusterfuck their way through life and decide 'fuck it - Bush'

Seriously, if the Left can't defeat the Evil that is Bush, how the hell can they be trusted to defeat actual Evil?

Cashin's Comments for 9/14/2006

September 14, 2006
CASHIN'S COMMENTS
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2006

[AN ENCORE PRESENTATION]

On this day in 1812, a very valuable piece of real estate committed suicide - - or at least that's the way it seemed to the guy who had just acquired the property.

His name was Napoleon Bonaparte and the property in question was called Moscow, a metropolis of some cultural and governmental note in the Russian Empire. On this day, Nappy and his boys entered the city to find it virtually deserted by its nearly half million citizens.

As he set up headquarters in town, awaiting the surrender of Czar Alexander (and the Empire) his staff brought him reports of scattered building fires. Napoleon at first thought the fires were the result of his own troops carelessly looting abandoned buildings. He gave the order to shoot looters and put out the fires. But as soon as the fires were put out, the buildings (and others) were in flames again.

What the "Little Corporal" did not know was that the Czar's generals had ordered all the prisoners’ dungeons be unlocked. And they promised freedom and land to any prisoner who stayed behind and set fires in the city. Soon 90% of Moscow was on fire, and Napoleon had to flee his headquarters through streets that one of his general's said looked like "the entrance to HELL!"

The Czar's boys liked the results so well that over the next three weeks they burned barns, stables and grain bins all around Napoleon. And, when the snows came, within a month, Nappy found himself with an army that was ill fed, ill clothed and ill-equipped. Thus one of history's great military minds lost both a campaign and his army. (Of the 500,000 men Napoleon led toward Moscow only 30,000 survived to return home, a nearly 95% casualty rate.)
____________________________________________________________________

The bears escaped the heavy casualties they had suffered in Tuesday’s rally but they did not come near mounting a counterattack. On the other hand the Bulls kept the pressure on with another up day but it lacked the energy and assertiveness of the prior day’s rally.

Stick With The Program Please! – The day was dominated by the program traders trying to start a new parade to the upside. But, although the drums beat and the horns blared they never actually stepped out. To underscore my “program driven” contention, let me note that the Dow closed up 0.4%. The S&P closed up 0.4%. The NASDAQ closed up 0.5%.

As I have noted time and again over the years, indices weighted differently, computed differently and peopled by vastly different components should not show that unique kind of symmetry by accident or coincidence. It was the program button pushers, we contend, that produced such a dead heat.

Despite the unusual parallelism, there was noticeable strength in some of the chips and techs. When rallies narrow down to that group, floor traders tend to fly the caution flag. We’ll see, in the next few days, if the old rule of thumb still has potency.

Today – There should be lots of focus on Retail Sales (8:30). Lagging auto sales may drag the combined number into mild negative territory. Ex-autos there may be a slight plus tick.

Import prices are guessed to rise about 0.3%, a bit of a relief from July’s +0.9%.
Business inventory growth is also expected to slow a bit.

Markets – Bonds produced about half of Tuesday’s rally and most of Wednesday’s. Traders will check off on rates once again.

Consensus – Triple witch weeks are always whacky. They are still pushing against top of range but with slightly weaker internals than back in May.

Art Cashin

LGF: Bush vs. Lauer

It’s President Bush vs. empty suit Matt Lauer, in a serious verbal beat-down. (Hat tip: Sticky Notes.)

Former Head of Washington Islamic Center on Iranian TV

From Little Green Footballs:

Appearing on an Iranian TV 9/11 special, the former head of the Islamic Center in Washington DC, Muhammad Al-Asi, accused the US government of carrying out the September 11 attacks. (Video courtesy of MEMRI TV.)

Have you ever noticed that virtually all of these people seem to be fat? And they say that the US has an obesity problem.

Tony Blair on A Global Alliance for Global Values

Worth a read.

IF ONLY BIN LADEN HAD A STAINED BLUE DRESS ...

If you wonder why it took 50 years to get the truth about Joe McCarthy, consider the fanatical campaign of the Clinton acolytes to kill an ABC movie that relies on the 9/11 Commission Report, which whitewashed only 90 percent of Clinton's cowardice and incompetence in the face of terrorism, rather than 100 percent.

Islamic jihadists attacked America year after year throughout the Clinton administration. They did everything but blow up his proverbial "bridge to the 21st century." Every year but one, Clinton found an excuse not to fight back.

The first month Clinton was in office, Islamic terrorists with suspected links to al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein bombed the World Trade Center.

For the first time ever, a terrorist act against America was treated not as a matter of national security, but exclusively as a simple criminal offense. The individual bombers were tried in a criminal court. (The one plotter who got away fled to Iraq, that peaceful haven of kite-flying children until Bush invaded and turned it into a nation of dangerous lunatics.)

Read the rest...

Heather Wilson on How to Catch Terrorists

That measure, sponsored by Rep. Heather Wilson, R-New Mexico, and endorsed by the GOP chairmen of the Judiciary and Intelligence committees, would require the administration to wait until a terrorist attack to open an electronic surveillance program

Read the whole thing.

I wrote Heather a nice note:

Dear Heather,

I'm sure you are a nice person. Just read about your proposed legislation requiring the administration to wait until AFTER a terrorist attack before monitoring terrorist communications.

Since the terrorists are presumably dead by this time, what purpose would this achieve? And if the terrorists wait for at least 45 days, we have to turn off the surveillance and wait for the next attack?

Would you consider modifying your proposal to allow the President to begin monitoring 5 minutes BEFORE the attack?

That would not make your proposal less ridiculous, but there would be so many more ways we can have fun at the way people in Washington think.

I would appreciate your reply for my blog where your original proposal is being featured.



I'll let you know when Heather writes back. She is such a kind and considerate person, I just know she will. Here's her website and her picture:

The Media Use of Modifiers

You get used to it after a while and you catch yourself grinning as you see the descriptive adjectives that are used to “wink, wink, nudge, nudge” tell you what to think about a fact.

Here are two very recent examples.

The first is from Back Talk blog which is edited by a self described: “professor at a major research university, a registered Democrat, a liberal by most measures, but a radical conservative relative to the large majority of my colleagues.”

He has followed an reported on casualty figures in Baghdad month-to-month and predicted that the earlier, erroneous reports of a 50% drop in deaths was not accurate. But he notices one other thing:

Subtly Shaping your Perception of Iraq
Here is a new story on August casualties in Iraq, which is a topic that I have posted on several times before (e.g., here and here, for example):
U.S. omitted key casualty details

By Patrick Quinn
Associated Press
Published September 12, 2006

BAGHDAD -- The American military did not count people killed by bombs, mortars, rockets or other mass attacks, including suicide bombings, when it reported a dramatic drop in the number of murders in the Baghdad area last month, the U.S. command said Monday.

The story includes this paragraph, which is what I'd like to focus on:

But the types of slayings, including suicide bombings, that the U.S. excluded from the category of "murder" weren't made explicit at the time. That led to confusion after Iraqi Health Ministry figures showed that 1,536 people died violently in and around Baghdad in August, nearly the same number as in July.

Nearly the same as July? Let's look at how the media hysterically reported the apparent increase in casualties that occurred in July compared to June:
The July morgue toll of 1,815 marked a big jump over the 1,595 in June and is the largest since the aftermath of the February bombing of the Shiite Golden Mosque of Samarra, which triggered an explosion of sectarian violence.

Oh, I get it. The reported increase from 1595 to 1885 that occurred from June to July (290 additional deaths) is a "big jump," but the reported decrease from 1885 to 1536 from July to August (349 fewer deaths) is negligible because the two numbers are "nearly the same."

And there you have it. That's how our media subtly influences how you feel about what is happening in Iraq.

The second is from MSNBC.

Remember those poll numbers from spring and summer when Bush’s poll numbers were always accompanied by the adjective “plummeting?” Well they got pretty low, around 32% approval rating in some polls as I recall. And as they hung around that number (not going lower) the term “plummeting” was still being used. Well, guess what, Bush’s approval rating is now at 42% in the NBC/Journal poll. How does Mark Murray, political reporter for NBC News phrase it?

Slight Bush uptick.

To be fair to Murray, it appears that the NBC/Journal poll appears to have Bush bottoming out at 36% approval.

Going from 32% to 32% approval means Bush’s ratings were plummeting. Going from 32% to 42% and this is a “slight uptick.”