The new threat to the West is a vile and ignorant
Islamic religious fascism
coming out of the Middle East.
It is based on ancient Islam,
but in its modern globalised form,
and its attacks on western cities,
it is more like a modern, 20th century, utopian totalitarian movement,
similar to violent utopian communism
or to mid-20th century European
fascism.
It is opposed to democracy, human rights, free speech,
freedom of religion and freedom of sexuality.
It is at war with everyone who is not an Islamic fundamentalist fascist.
It has killed vast numbers of Muslims.
The western left, to some people's surprise,
are on the side of the fascists.
The Islamintern
- Islamism is the 21st century's Communism -
the vast, global, utopian ideology of world revolution.
And as there were with Communism,
there are many useful idiots for Islamism in the West - notably in the media
and the academy.
He is a convert to Catholicism, so we won't agree on some things.
But the counter-jihad is a grand alliance of Christians, atheists, Jews, Hindus, liberal Muslims and others.
All who oppose jihad and sharia are welcome.
Chart showing a left-wing activist's level of interest in topics of oppression, until they discover who the oppressor is.
Found here.
Chew on This
by Christopher Hitchens
- "Ever since that morning, the United
States has been at war with the forces of reaction."
- and the left supports the reactionaries.
Baudrillard's
decadent applause for 9/11:
"That we have dreamed of this event, that everyone without exception has dreamed of it,
because no one can avoid dreaming of the destruction of any given power
that has become hegemonic to such a point, is unacceptable for the Western moral conscience
but it is still a fact which is measured precisely by all the pathetic violence
of all the words that would erase it.
Ultimately, they did it but we asked for it."
Baudrillard on the WTC:
"The horror for the 4,000 victims of dying in those towers
was inseparable from the horror of living in them
- the horror of living and working in sarcophagi of concrete and steel."
The fabulously wealthy multi-millionaire
Damien Hirst's
decadent applause for 9/11:
"The thing about 9/11 is that it's kind of like an artwork in its own right.
...
Of course, it's visually stunning and you've got to hand it to them on some level
because they've achieved something which nobody would have ever have thought possible
- especially to a country as big as America. So on one level they kind of need congratulating,
which a lot of people shy away from, which is a very dangerous thing."
Norman Mailer on 9/11:
"The WTC was not just an architectural monstrosity, but also terrible for people who didn't work there,
for it said to all those people: 'If you can't work up here, boy, you're out of it.'
...
Everything wrong with America led to the point where the country built that tower of Babel,
which consequently had to be destroyed.
And then came the next shock. We had to realize that the people that did this were brilliant.
...
Americans can't admit that you need courage to do such a thing. For that might be misunderstood.
The key thing is that we in America are convinced that it was blind, mad fanatics
who didn't know what they were doing. But what if those perpetrators were right and we were not?"
Mary Beard
(Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge)
Mary Beard's depraved reaction to 9/11,
London Review of Books, 4 October 2001:
"when the shock had faded, more hard-headed reaction set in. This wasn't just the feeling that, however tactfully you dress it up, the United States had it coming. That is, of course, what many people openly or privately think. World bullies, even if their heart is in the right place, will in the end pay the price.
But there is also the feeling that all the 'civilised world' (a phrase which Western leaders seem able to use without a trace of irony) is paying the price for its glib definitions of 'terrorism' and its refusal to listen to what the 'terrorists' have to say."
Of course, Mary Beard hasn't a clue what the terrorists have to say.
She simply projects western values onto them, that they do not share.
The people who actually listen to what the terrorists have to say
want the terrorists destroyed.
She attacks the use of words like
"'fanaticism', a term regularly applied to extraordinary acts of bravery when we abhor their ends and means. The silliest description of the onslaught on the World Trade Center was the often repeated slogan that it was a 'cowardly' attack."
He says:
"Far from being the terrorists of the world, the Islamic peoples
have been its victims - principally the victims of US fundamentalism, whose power, in all its forms, military, strategic and economic, is the greatest source of terrorism on earth."
"The attacks on Tuesday come at the end of a long history of betrayal of the Islamic and Arab peoples:
the collapse of the Ottoman Empire"
[Oh how sad - every leftist should regret the collapse
of an unelected tyranny
that carried out the genocide of the Armenians.]
"the foundation of the state of Israel"
[How dare dhimmis
try to set up a state!]
"four Arab-Israeli wars"
[As if it is Israel's fault that the Arabs keep trying to exterminate them!]
"Their distant voices of rage are now heard; the daily horrors in faraway brutalised places have at last come home."
9/11 was carried out by 15 Saudis
(whose country was saved from extinction by America in 1991),
and 4 other jihadi scum from the UAE,
Lebanon and Egypt
(whose country gets billions of dollars in aid from America
for no return).
And these rich, young, pampered Saudis
and other Arabs
were somehow responding to "oppression"
by slaughtering American civilians?
Pilger does not understand the jihadis of 9/11.
They are motivated by religion, not by "oppression".
Richard Landes
has the best response to Pilger:
"what about the people scarred by Islamic imperialism,
like Jews and Christians, Kurds, Armenians, and Berbers
- shouldn't they be justified in blowing up the Muslim world?"
Departure of Mehmed VI,
last Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, 1922.
Apparently every leftist should regret
the collapse of the Ottoman Empire,
according to John Pilger.
Image from here.
"Only one faction in American politics has found itself able to make excuses
for the kind of religious fanaticism that immediately menaces us in the here and now. And that faction,
I am sorry and furious to say, is the left. From the first day of the immolation of the World Trade Center,
right down to the present moment, a gallery of pseudointellectuals has been willing to represent
the worst face of Islam as the voice of the oppressed."
"George Bush may subjectively be a Christian, but he
- and the U.S. armed forces
- have objectively done more for secularism than the whole of the
American agnostic community combined and doubled."
The Transformation of "Jihad Jack" and John Walker Lindh
by Christian Beenfeldt
- How can you go from trendy western liberal-left godlessness
to Islamic religious fascism?
You can if your trendy, non-judgemental godlessness is based on feelings
rather than on reason:
"Consider the typical "progressive" leftist, with his non-judgmental relativism.
He is the embodiment of subjectivism: he holds that there are no absolute principles,
that truth is "in the eye of the beholder," and that
"what's right for you might not be right for me."
...
the subjectivist makes clear that his choices are ruled by blind feelings."
"This is precisely also the basic policy of the religious dogmatist.
There are an infinite number of opposing religious sects.
How does the religionist decide
which faith to embrace, which revelations to follow and which authority to obey?
Does he scientifically gather the evidence, carefully weigh it,
and then adopt the conclusion to which reason and logic point? Obviously not. He feels it.
He feels that Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, astrology or whatever,
is the right faith for him."
"So while the religionist may claim to uphold absolute truths, his beliefs are as arbitrary and baseless as those of the subjectivist. Thus, the paradoxical conversions of Jack Thomas and Walker Lindh
- from subjectivist to religious dogmatist
- aren't so paradoxical after all; in both cases, the switch was merely from one form of emotionalism to another."
Australian Taliban Feted Again - Via the Medium of Dance
- Scott Burgess is hilarious on
Australian leftists' mad support for
the Australian Islamic convert and jihadist
David Hicks.
If he was a Christian violent fundamentalist nutcase
the leftists wouldn't touch him with a bargepole.
Pimp my Soviet ride, Tim Blair, January 05, 2008
- On Australian leftists' support for David Hicks.
Open Letter from an Arab-American Student
by Oubai Mohammad Shahbandar
- A Syrian disgusted with the western left.
- "They have never known the humiliation of living under the iron rule of an Islamic despotism. I have."
The left-wing solicitor
Gareth Peirce's bland whitewashing of
the women-hating, gay-hating, atheist-hating,
mass-murdering religious savages, the Taliban.
Afghans and the Guardian
by Matthew Leeming
- Afghan women, who suffered under the Taliban,
listen to how left-wing writers in the west defended the Taliban,
and get angry.
Zachary Roth, May 22, 2009, at the left-wing
Talking Points Memo,
illustrates the double standards.
On jihadis who planned to slaughter Jews at American synagogues:
"It's easy to laugh at this gang of goons -- and we've done our share of that. But, frankly, it's also hard not to feel some compassion for what looks like a group of struggling, credulous, under-educated men, existing on the fringes of society, who lacked the intelligence or willpower to avoid getting taken in by a government informant anxious to mitigate his own situation, and by their own vague understanding of radical Islam and the hole it might fill in their lives."
Can you imagine, just for one second, him saying that if these were
white right-wing skinheads who planned to slaughter Jews at American synagogues?
The Huffington Post runs Islamic religious apologetics:
Because it's a
"religion their parents don't belong to",
the left-wing Huffington Post runs endless reactionary Islamic religious apologetics.
It would never do this for right-wing Christianity.
Defence of shariah law, Huffington Post, 4 Nov 2011.
It's so edgy and transgressive to support right-wing medieval religious oppression.
Is it really that hard to choose sides?
The photogenic
Ukrainian protest group
FEMEN
protests topless in Paris against Islamic sharia, 31 Mar 2012.
Getty Photos.
Copies here.
When I was young, it was a no-brainer for lefties to be on the side of women
demanding sexual freedom
against right-wing male religious mullahs.
How can the left now support the latter?
The left's support for Islamism is the main reason I regard myself as part of the western right.
Shirley Williams (Liberal Democrat)
represents the inability (or unwillingness) of the centre-left to confront Islamism for what it is.
BBC "Any Questions?", 16 Nov 2012, featured this disgusting, bigoted question about Israel:
"Despite all the foreign aid and support, Israel has spectacularly failed to get on with its neighbours. Does Israel deserve a future?"
The BBC allowing such a question was bad enough.
But listen to how Shirley Williams answered.
She said that
Gaza is "a slum.
Not just a slum, it's a slum worse than anything one would have seen in Britain at the end of the 19th century
...
It's crowded out to the gills. It's full of people struggling to find a box in which to live. It's full of people who see their land slowly eaten up by more and more Israeli settlements."
Douglas Murray replies, 19 Nov 2012:
"What settlements? What 'slow eating up'? Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005. There is not a Jew in Gaza. ... The last Jew in Gaza was Gilad Shalit. Does Shirley Williams think he was there building settlements for five years, rather than holed up in captivity as a hostage of Hamas?"
iPhone 5 on sale in Gaza before Israel, report Oct 2012.
Yet Gaza is
"a slum worse than anything one would have seen in Britain at the end of the 19th century",
according to Liberal Democrat Shirley Williams, Nov 2012.
Liberal Democrat Shirley Williams in 2007
attacks Salman Rushdie for offending Muslims,
and complains about taxpayers' money being spent protecting him from being murdered.
Christopher Hitchens delivers a classic rebuke:
"I think that's a contemptible statement
and I think everyone who applauded it should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves."
The writer
Chris Hedges
(and search)
is typical of the confusion
of the modern left over Christianity ("bad") and Islam ("good").
He writes an entire book,
American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (2007),
on Christian fundamentalists in America,
who, it is true, are nuts,
but who
have little power,
little ability to change laws
(e.g. the laws on pornography and gay rights got more liberal under
Reagan and George W. Bush),
and who violently
oppress nobody and kill nobody.
It's fair enough to attack them, just in case they become a real threat,
but it seems like he has a more sinister agenda
when he ignores
the vast, rolling, international Islamic jihad
that oppresses millions in Islamic states
and kills tens of thousands of innocents every year all over the world.
This, surely, is what any enemy of "religious fascism" should be primarily focused on.
Not just does Hedges not see it that way,
but he even makes excuses for the Islamic Fascists.
See debate:
Christopher Hitchens vs. Chris Hedges, May 24, 2007.
Hedges says the
Islamic religious maniac suicide killers
are desperate and unemployed.
Hitchens replies:
"God forbid a KKK'er ... be unemployed,
for Hedges would think it okay to noose black folks."
For confused lefties like Hedges, religious fascism is bad only if it comes from
their own tradition.
If it comes from strange third world people, it needs to be "understood".
A Gaza Diary, Chris Hedges, Harper's Magazine, October 2001,
claims the IDF shoots children for fun:
"The camp waits, as if holding its breath. And then, out of the dry furnace air, a disembodied voice crackles over a loudspeaker.
"Come on, dogs," the voice booms in Arabic. "Where are all the dogs of Khan Younis? Come! Come!"
The boys dart in small packs up the sloping dunes ...
They lob rocks toward two armored jeeps parked on top of the dune and mounted with loudspeakers.
...
A percussion grenade explodes. The boys, most no more than ten or eleven years old, scatter
...
There are no sounds of gunfire. The soldiers shoot with silencers.
...
I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport."
Why Israel Lies, Chris Hedges, 3 Aug 2014,
repeats the claims:
"I saw small boys baited and killed
by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza refugee camp of Khan Younis. The soldiers swore at the boys in Arabic over the loudspeakers of their armored jeep. The boys, about 10 years old, then threw stones at an Israeli vehicle and the soldiers opened fire".
Well, first of all, I don't believe a word Mr. Hedges writes, about anything.
I don't believe the "baiting".
I don't believe the loudspeakers.
CAMERA, 7 Nov 2001, examines his claims
and doesn't believe them either.
It is true that teenage boys (and even younger) are encouraged by adults
(parents, schools, TV, mosques)
to throw stones and petrol bombs at heavily-armed troops
and also at Jews.
This is a real and terrible story.
But Hedges does not analyse it.
He should frame it as a war crime
and as child abuse.
Hedges should ask himself, even if this "baiting" tall story is true, why on earth would it work?
If heavily-armed troops
broadcast insults outside Hedges' house,
would Hedges' children come rushing out to attack them with stones?
Of course not.
CAMERA points out that in previous writing, Hedges was well aware that children are encouraged by adults to fight.
The appalling Hedges compares the parliamentary democracy of Israel
to the genocidal totalitarian savages of the Islamic State.
Foul stuff from a man with no moral compass.
Paul Iddon, 27 Dec 2014, replies, calling this:
"one of the most facile pieces of moral equivalence and ahistorical nonsense published in some time."
He points out that Hedges seems to think Israel is some kind of oppressive Jewish religious state.
In reality, of course, it is the only roughly secular liberal state in the Middle East.
With incredible arrogance and rudeness,
Chris Hedges
wrecked the graduation ceremony of students
at Rockford College, Illinois, in May 2003,
by forcing a
rambling anti-American rant
on the captive audience.
If people have actually come to hear his offensive left-wing theories about the world that's fine.
But he should not inflict them on people who aren't interested, and
who are having a special, important day in their lives.
Even if Hedges' ideas made any sense, it would still be rude.
As TimesWatch says:
"Hedges seems to be droning in a world of his own, oblivious to context or nuance or even where he was, not acknowledging the hostile audience, who were understandably wondering what became of their graduation ceremony."
He actually said, as jihadis and Baathists organised to kill brave Americans to stop democracy:
"This is a war of liberation in Iraq, but it is a war now of liberation of Iraqis from American occupation".
This patronising, sneering cynic,
with his Masters in "Divinity" from Harvard,
actually described the brave American soldiers as
"poor kids from Mississippi or Alabama or Texas who could not get a decent job or health insurance
and joined the army because it was all we offered them."
As opposed to smart, strong, brave people
making their own decisions to protect the West against its enemies.
The videos are hilarious, as many of the audience display their disgust with
having this anti-American crap inflicted on them.
One woman shouts:
"You've already ruined our graduation. Don't ruin it any more, sir."
They boo and hoot at this fool, as he ploughs on and on.
Good for them.
Chris Hedges spews anti-American and anti-Israeli bigotry
at the Rockford College graduation ceremony.
He has a Masters in "Divinity" from Harvard,
but he cannot recognise evil
or make the simplest moral judgements.
He absurdly claims that the
Casablanca bombings
were caused by some logical grievance,
rather than coming from Islamic religious madness.
He describes the blood-soaked Iraqi jihad as
"a war now of liberation of Iraqis from American occupation".
Hurray for everyone booing this fool.
Good for you.
Frankie Boyle joke on Israel in 2010:
"People think that the Middle East is very complex but I have an analogy that sums it up quite well.
If you imagine that Palestine is a big cake, well ... that cake is being punched to pieces by a very angry Jew."
The joke is actually quite funny, and yet at the same time reveals his total ignorance.
Frankie Boyle, 20 Nov 2012,
runs interference for Hamas
rocket attacks on Israel.
His Twitter picture is of the black racist
Malcolm X.
Frankie Boyle, 25 Nov 2019, is angry that the White House is honouring
Conan, the Delta Force dog that was injured in the
raid that killed the leader of ISIS.
I have no idea why this tosser is angry - other than he hates anyone who fights the jihad.
Note that the children killed in the raid were
killed by the leader of ISIS,
contrary to his creepy implication that the brave Americans killed them.
Scottish dhimmi
Frankie Boyle went on a hunger strike in July 2013 in solidarity with Guantanamo prisoner
Shaker Aamer,
a Saudi arrested in Afghanistan in 2001.
I have repeatedly asked
Frankie Boyle
and other Shaker Aamer supporters
what Shaker Aamer was doing in Afghanistan in 2001.
They all decline to answer, and seem not to care.
Shaker Aamer claimed to be working for an "Islamic charity" in Afghanistan in 2001.
Of course, "Islamic charity" is often code for some jihadist organisation.
Strangely, campaigns for him and
news articles on him do not ever name the "charity".
None of his supporters will name the "charity", even when asked directly.
They seem not to care.
Roger Waters
writes entire article about Shaker Aamer, 23 December 2014, without naming the "charity" he was working for.
The file has a huge amount of information on his alleged extensive Al Qaeda and other jihadist connections.
The claims come from many different sources
and different intelligence agencies.
Frankie Boyle, 22 July 2013,
expresses solidarity with all of the Islamic terrorists in
the POW camp in Guantanamo.
I presume he also would express solidarity with all the poor sods in
POW camps in
Britain
and
America
during WW2,
who were held without charge
while the war was on.
My last attempt
to get an answer from Frankie Boyle,
when Shaker Aamer was released
in Oct 2015.
No reply.
I later discovered he blocked me.
Is David Hukari an Islamist?
Apparently not.
He is a leftist who loves Obama and gets his news from leftie TV shows (see following).
It takes a special kind of stupid to hate the counterjihad, not the jihad.
And it's no surprise that that kind of stupid votes for Obama.
In any struggle between the West and its enemies,
leftists' instincts are to criticise their own side.
Leftists like to think of themselves as intelligent dissenters
and neutrals,
certainly not traitors, or enemies of the West.
Intelligent dissent cannot be unpatriotic, surely?
The sad fact is, though, that much as many leftists may not mean it to,
such dissent does encourage the enemy,
and may even create a climate that breeds new enemies:
It is no coincidence that
Islamism took off not in the early 20th century
but since the 1960s-70s,
when self-criticism of the West took off exponentially.
It is also no coincidence that
Islamism is stronger among European Muslims than among American Muslims,
when Europe is far more left-wing and anti-West than America.
The world's left, and left-leaning media, have
created a more friendly world
for anti-American hatreds like communism and Islamism to flourish.
It is no coincidence that
modern Islamist terror started in 1968 -
that era of late 1960s revolution
that also gave birth to the IRA, ETA,
and the 1970s terrorists.
Marxist revolution was in the air then,
and we are still living with the consequences of that time.
Modern Islamism is utopian, international, anti-American
- appealing to violent, idealistic young people.
It is the heir of violent revolutionary communism.
The Islamism attacking us was
born not centuries ago
but rather in the revolutionary 1960s and 1970s,
and is kept alive by the constant anti-Americanism spread by the media
throughout the world, not least in Ireland.
It has
intellectual origins in the western left
and is
supported by the western left.
See for example the fact that
Michael Moore's book encouraged the Bali bombers.
In summary,
the marxist left could be said to be the origin of
modern Islamism
as much as ancient Islam is.
The radical loser
by
Hans Magnus Enzensberger
- "the Islamists are perfectly happy to plunder the arsenal of their predecessors.
It is often overlooked that modern terrorism is a European invention of the nineteenth century.
Its most important ancestors came from Czarist Russia,
but it can also look back on a long history in Western Europe.
In recent times, the left-wing terrorism of the 1970s
has proved a source of inspiration, with Islamists borrowing many of its symbols and techniques.
The style of their announcements, the use of video recordings,
the emblematic significance of the Kalashnikov,
even the gestures, body language and dress, all this shows how much they have learned from these western role models."
Certainly, if the liberal left supported America,
as they did in WW2 and Korea,
Islamism would be far weaker,
and the world would be a much better place.
Holy War in Europe
by Reuel Marc Gerecht,
argues that Islamists in Europe are a product of
leftist anti-Americanism
almost as much as a product of their ancestral cultures.
In short,
the left is breeding Islamists.
The left is partly responsible for creating these people.
"The jihadists of Europe have drunk deeply from the virulently anti-American left-wing currents of
Continental thought and mixed it with the Islamic emotions of 1,400 years of competition with the Christian
West. It's a Molotov cocktail of the third-world socialist Frantz Fanon and the Muslim Brother Sayyid
Qutb."
The anti-American left exists also in America,
but has been far less successful at breeding Islamists there:
"the modern European
experience seems much more likely to produce violent young Muslims than the American. Europe may be
competitive with the worst breeding grounds in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan."
The French Path to Jihad,
John Rosenthal,
1 Oct 2006.
This fascinating discussion of interviews with French jihadis
challenges many current myths about where Islamism comes from:
The French jihadis are not poor and oppressed:
"Lest anyone still cling to the illusion that the root cause of Islamic terror
is poverty and economic inequality, for instance,
the interviews massively reinforce the findings of
the already substantial body of research
on Arab Islamists showing that jihadists are largely recruited
from relatively more privileged social strata in their countries of origin.
As a rule, the inmates interviewed are highly educated, well-traveled, and multilingual."
France gives them great opportunities,
but it never accepts them as truly French.
(It is true that Europe needs to learn from America on this.)
As a result, they develop a great hatred of France,
which morphs
(as is the way with illogical hatreds)
into a hatred of countries of which they have no experience
(US and Israel).
Why? Because of what they see on the TV.
And what TV is this?
"It is important to recall in this connection that the first language
of most of the inmates interviewed is French.
Some, like Jacques, do not speak Arabic or have at most only a very limited knowledge of it.
"The tv" to which they allude for the most part is undoubtedly French television."
They feel supported by mainstream French intellectual ideas:
"The French Islamist inmates are evidently well aware that their ideas about the malevolence of American power,
like their ideas about the exemplarity of Israeli "oppression,"
place them well within the French intellectual mainstream.
Thus "Karim," for example, in admitting to having given lodging to Jihadists, remarks nonchalantly:
'If they engaged in jihad, they had their reasons. When they revolted against the Americans, they weren't the only ones.
A large part of the French are also against American policy
with respect to the Palestinians
and others'"
In short, regular French TV and society may be breeding jihadis.
Europe's standard, unthinking left-wing anti-Israeli prejudice
and anti-Americanism
may be breeding jihadis in Europe.
"In any case, the "Islamism" of the inmates ...
is clearly a product not of the "Muslim world" alone,
but rather of a certain encounter between Islamic traditions and modern European culture and society.
When one considers that many of the leading intellectual figures in the history
of the Islamist movement lived for extensive periods in Europe
and did advanced studies in European universities,
there is reason to believe that this mixed heritage
is also characteristic of Islamist ideology more generally."
In summary, one should be very careful when criticising the democracies
in a conflict with a tyranny.
I am not proposing any government restraint on you.
I am proposing some self-restraint.
Why?
Because of the risk that you might encourage the enemy.
Many well-meaning critics of the democracies do not want to encourage the enemy tyranny.
They simply don't think about it,
and are surprised to learn that the enemy was encouraged
by their actions,
and they may even have added to the violence.
Hamas: Left-Wing Encouraged Us to Attack
- Hamas leaders say
the behavior of Israel's left-wing
encouraged them to continue terrorist attacks:
"It was the Israeli left and your peace camp that ultimately encouraged us
to continue with our suicide attacks.
...
We tried, through our attacks, to create fragmentation and dissention within Israeli society,
and the left-wing's reaction was proof that this was indeed the right approach.
When we heard about the "Pilots' Letter"
...
and the elite soldiers who refused to serve
...
it strengthened those in our camp who promoted the idea of suicide bombers."
Saddam "overjoyed" when Spain left Iraq
- In his prison cell, Saddam is encouraged by
Spain's surrender.
"He was very happy to know that Spanish forces had left Iraq."He also conveys his appreciation to "France and Germany" for their support.
Are Spain, France and Germany proud?
Kenan Malik, 1 Feb 2009, recalls a friend who in 1989 made the short journey from West-hating leftist to West-hating Islamist:
"The Hassan I had known in London had been a member of the
Socialist Workers party
(as had I). His other indulgences were Southern Comfort, sex and Arsenal. We had watched the Specials together, smoked dope together, argued together about football. He was secular through and through: the only god he worshipped was Liam Brady, Arsenal's magical midfielder. But here he was in Bradford, an errand boy to the mullahs, inspired by book-burners, willing to shed blood for a 1,000-year-old fable that he had never believed in."
An election during war
Orson Scott Card,
September 26, 2004,
on John Kerry's
shameful election campaign of 2004.
Campaigning during a war is tricky
- given that it must involve criticising the government.
Nothing you say must give any encouragement to the enemy that they are winning,
and that if they just hold out (or make one final push)
the current administration will fall.
The Democrats have in no way taken this on board in their campaign.
Their entire campaign sends the message to America's enemies
to keep going and stay the course.
It could have been so different. The Democrats could have scared the enemy
into thinking they might even be worse than Bush.
And then they could have campaigned away against Bush
on the many areas where he is vulnerable.
"It's actually possible to conduct a political campaign in which you don't encourage enemies
of the United States to kill Americans."
As Orson Scott Card points out, the people in the West who bear guilt
for encouraging Islamism,
for encouraging Al Qaeda and the Iraqi resistance,
are precisely the "anti-war" party.
Anybody, in fact, who says anything about the
War on Islamism
that is not basically supportive of the democracies' fight against Islamism
- that is not simply a disagreement about tactics.
You may not like it, but it's true.
Hope is what keeps the jihadis going,
and the western left gives them hope.
If you don't want blood on your hands, don't open your mouth.
And
William Blum is happy
that his book is inspiring fascist killers.
"This is almost as good as being an Oprah book. I'm glad.
...
I was not turned off by such an endorsement.
I'm not repulsed, and I'm not going to pretend I am.
...
I think bin Laden shares that view"
[Blum's view of geopolitics]
"and that is why I'm not repulsed by his embrace of my book,
because that is one of my major themes."
The Shocking Truth About Osama bin Laden:
Apparently, he reads our blogs,
by Brendan O'Neill,
points out that many of Bin Laden's talking points seem to come from the left.
Rather than entirely a creature of
ancient religious hysteria,
Bin Laden seems to be partly a creature of the modern western age.
His beliefs are a
violent modern utopianism
like 20th century communism and fascism,
and can be destroyed like those modern beliefs were.
We do not have to war with Islam,
only with this modern Islamist utopianism.
Ayman al-Zawahiri cynically appeals to anybody who might be anti-American,
even if they are not an Islamist religious maniac.
He appeals to the non-white and non-American infidels that he plans to slaughter:
"That's why I want blacks in America, people of color, American Indians, Hispanics,
and all the weak and oppressed in North and South America, in Africa and Asia, and all over the world,
to know that ... we aren't waging jihad to lift oppression from Muslims only;
we are waging jihad to lift oppression from all mankind
... I want every oppressed one on the face of the earth to know that our victory over America and the Crusading West
... is a victory for them".
And then they shall be rounded up for conversion or death.
He appeals to environmentalists,
complaining that America
"went out and ruined for the entire world,
the atmosphere and climate with the gases emitted by its factories".
As if Al Qaeda gives a shit about the environment.
Is There an "Emboldenment" Effect? Evidence from the Insurgency in Iraq, Radha Iyengar and Jonathan Monten, Feb 2008.
"Using data on attacks and variation in access to international news across Iraqi provinces, we identify an "emboldenment" effect by comparing the rate of insurgent attacks in areas with higher and lower access to information about U.S news after public statements critical of the war. We find in periods after a spike in war-critical statements, insurgent attacks increases by 5-10 percent. The results suggest that insurgent groups respond rationally to expected probability of US withdrawal."
The War Against World War IV
by Norman Podhoretz
- on defeatism
in WW2,
in WW3 (the Cold War),
and in WW4 (the current war):
"During World War II there was scarcely any defeatist sentiment in the air,
not even in response to actual defeats - and we suffered many, especially in the early years.
Nor was there a fixation on the mistakes made by Roosevelt and Churchill
- and, great men though they indubitably were, they made many.
What is more, some of their mistakes were so large and consequential that by comparison
those of which Bush and Rumsfeld stand accused seem insignificant"
"In World War III, by contrast, great bouts of defeatist sentiment
did get aroused by critics of the Left and the Right alike."
And is it possible that such defeatism prolonged
the Cold War by years, even decades?
Victor Davis Hanson, October 29, 2004,
on how the Islamists cannot win on the battlefield.
They can only win if we lose heart ourselves.
"Because of our astounding weaponry and superb military, the terrorists in Fallujah count on
the help of such postmodern Western guilt and internecine blame to supply constraints
on the American military every bit as effective as the old Soviet nuclear deterrent.
Again, a Michael Moore
- or so they believe - is worth an entire jihadist cell.
...
The truth is that war remains the same the more it changes. For all the technological gadgetry,
foreign landscapes, baffling global communications, and endemic pacifism of the present age,
war is still a struggle of the human spirit."
Press Pile-On
by Douglas Mackinnon, December 11, 2004
- "I have yet to talk with a member of our military
who does not strongly believe that the Abu Ghraib
prison scandal [was] blown out of all proportion.
Worse, they feel that the ensuing media feeding frenzy
had a direct result in
fueling the insurgents attacking our troops and innocent civilians
in Iraq."
The Iraq Panic:
Zarqawi's bombs hit their target in Washington
- General George Casey, the Iraq theater commander,
replies to the defeatist loser
Senator Ted Kennedy.
Casey says:
"I thought I was fairly clear in what I laid out in my testimony about what's going on in Iraq,
that you have an insurgency with no vision, no base, limited popular support,
an elected government, committed Iraqis to the democratic process, and you have Iraqi security forces
that are fighting and dying for their country every day. Senator, that is not a quagmire."
As the article points out:
"defeatism can be a self-fulfilling prophecy".
On the media:
"The inaccurate picture they paint has distorted the world view of the daily realities in Iraq.
The result is a further erosion of international public support for the United States' efforts there,
and a strengthening of the insurgents' resolve and recruiting efforts while weakening our own.
Through their incomplete, uninformed and unbalanced reporting, many members of the media covering the war
in Iraq are aiding and abetting the enemy."
The Fallujah operation:
"In Fallujah, the enemy death toll has already exceeded 1,500 and still is climbing.
...
Given all of this, why don't the papers lead with
"Coalition Crushes Remaining Pockets of Insurgents"
or "Enemy Forces Resort to Suicide Bombings of Civilians"?
This would paint a far more accurate picture of the enemy's predicament over here.
Instead, headlines focus almost exclusively on our hardships."
On the talking heads of the media,
he says with wonderful understatement:
"So what are the credentials of these self proclaimed "experts"? The fact is that most of those on
whom we rely for complete and factual accounts have little or no experience or education
in counter-insurgency operations or in nation-building to support their assessments.
How would they really know if things are going well or not?
War is an ugly thing with many unexpected twists and turns. Who among them is qualified to say
if this one is worse than any other at this point?"
Account of the jihadis in Guantanamo
by a U.S. Army male nurse who worked with them.
They believe they will win this war.
The nurse says:
"Their leaders consistently stress that jihad is working and our culture is a hollow shell.
They point to VietNam, Somalia, 9/11, Madrid (both the bombings and the elections immediately following),
and the anti-war propagandists here in the United States.
... The jihadists are constantly told that America is weak-willed and will turn and run
if they can be inflicted with enough damage and peace can be delayed long enough."
The lesson of Vietnam has been learnt by the jihadis.
The left of the 1960s is responsible for prolonging
even this current war.
"There is no doubt, my brothers, that raiding American [web] forums
is among the most important means of obtaining victory in the fierce media war
... and of influencing the views of the weak-minded American"
(That's you, lefties.
You're the kind of westerner they love.
If only we were all like you, they think.)
"Obviously, you should post your contribution
... as an American ...
You should invent stories about American soldiers you have
[allegedly] personally known
...
who were drafted to Iraq and then committed suicide while in service by hanging or shooting themselves
...
Also, write using a sad tone, and tell them that you feel sorry for your [female] neighbor or co-worker
who became addicted to alcohol or drugs ... because her poor fiancé, a former soldier in Iraq,
was paralyzed or [because] his legs were amputated ...
[Use any story] which will break their spirits,
oh brave fighter for the sake of God
...
Your concern should [only] be introducing topics which
... will cause [them to feel] frustration and anger towards their government
..., which will ... render them hostile to Bush ... and his Republican Party
and make them feel they must vote to
bring the troops back from Iraq
as soon as possible"
There is another group of people in the West
whose ideas fit well with the jihad
- 9/11 conspiracy theorists
and "right wing" Israel-haters.
These people despise America (they think it bombed itself on 9/11),
defend traitors (like those in Wikileaks),
defend enemy Islamists like those in Guantanamo,
despise Israel and Jews,
and defend Iran from attack.
Since they hate America and its allies, and defend America's enemies, it is hard to see
how they are "right wing".
They seem the opposite of the right rather than the opposite of the left.
Conspiracy theories and anti-semitic material are common in the Islamic Middle East,
and do not represent a departure from the jihadist world view.
To say, as some leftists did, that because they liked this material
the Boston jihadists were therefore "right-wingers"
not jihadists
is an absurd distortion.
Jihadists love conspiracy theories and anti-semitic material of all forms.
Is this material even "right wing" anyway?
To call sites that despise Israel
and run defence for Islamism
"right-wing"
is rather strange.
Maybe they are different to all the
left-wing sites that despise Israel and run defence for Islamism.
But not that different.
They certainly have nothing in common with
the Tea Party, Zionists and neo-cons.
How can sites that believe the opposite of the Tea Party, Zionists and neo-cons
be in the same category as the Tea Party, Zionists and neo-cons?
Mainstream left journalist
Helen Thomas
says in May 2010 that the Jews should "get the hell out" of Israel and "go home".
Her parents were Lebanese Christian immigrants to America.
Mark Steyn, June 17, 2010, notes that:
"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"".
He thanks the western left for their support,
but says they will still go to hell (ooh, scary!)
unless they actually convert to Islam:
"As for those who have expressed their respect and admiration for Islam,
and acknowledged that it is the truth,
and demonstrated their support and sympathy for the Muslims and their causes,
like George Galloway, Robert Fisk, and countless others,
I say to them "Isn't it time you stopped sitting on the fence and came over to the side of truth?"
Don't take as your role model Abu Taleb, the uncle of the Prophet who stood by his nephew
and the Muslims in thick and thin,
and protected and aided them and testified to the truthfulness of Mohamed,
peace be upon him, and to the truth of his message,
yet died an unbeliever,
and entered the hellfire,
because he didn't want it to be said that Abu Taleb abandoned the religion of his forefathers."
This religious maniac asks
Seymour Hersh
to help him:
"And here we challenge investigative journalists like Seymour Hirsh
to reveal the extent of this coverup and let Americans and the rest of the world
see for themselves the extent of the cowardice of the current regime."
Adam Gadahn was charged with treason in
Oct 2006.
The first American charged with treason since the Axis Japan collaborator
Tomoya Kawakita
in 1952.
A conviction on treason carries penalties up to the death penalty.
Al Qaeda generally praises MSNBC in an internal document.
From captured letter
written in Jan 2011 by Al Qaeda spokesman Adam Gadahn
to an unknown recipient within Al Qaeda.
Al Qaeda criticises MSNBC for firing
Bush-hating nutcase
Keith Olbermann
and
Hizballah-lover
Octavia Nasr.
"The war in Iraq in itself didn't cause the London bombers
to blow up the Tube and a bus last summer.
It was rather the story that the western media is promulgating,
that the Iraqis are victims of the west rather than of
their real persecutors in al Qaeda and the remnants of the Ba'ath party,
that surely gave the death cult which for various reasons finds such purchase
among certain Muslim youths its point of detonation.
It is that utterly mendacious presentation which is the recruiting sergeant for terrorism"
- Melanie Phillips
(or via here), 2006.
The Agony of the Left
- article by Andrew Sullivan
on the strange phenomenon of modern leftist support for racist, religiously sectarian,
women-hating, gay-murdering
Islamic fundamentalist fascists.
Anti-Jewish? Anti-gay? Welcome to Britain
- article by Anthony Browne
on the left's tolerance of anti-semitic gay-haters.
"If these were old-style anti-Semitic homophobes
the Left would be campaigning to have them locked up."
Nick Cohen
is, like me, baffled at the modern left:
"Why is it that apologies for a militant Islam which stands for everything the liberal left
is against come from the liberal left? Why will students hear a leftish postmodern theorist
defend the exploitation of women in traditional cultures but not a crusty conservative don?
...
why after the 7/7 attacks on London did leftish rather than right-wing newspapers
run pieces excusing suicide bombers who were inspired by a psychopathic theology
from the ultra-right?
...
In short, why is the world upside down?"
Victor Davis Hanson
Feeding the Minotaur
- "It was hard for the Islamic fascists to find ideological support in the West,
given their agenda of gender apartheid, homophobia, religious persecution,
racial hatred, fundamentalism, polygamy, and primordial barbarism."
And yet they succeeded - with the left.
Year Three
- "Right after 9/11, some of us thought it was impossible for leftist critics to undermine a war against fascists who were sexist, fundamentalist, homophobic, racist, ethnocentric, intolerant of diversity, mass murderers of Kurds and Arabs, and who had the blood of 3,000 Americans on their hands. We were dead wrong. In fact, they did just that."
It's been a good year
- Mark Steyn on the left-Islamist alliance:
"The extreme Left has made a terrible strategic mistake shacking up with
the Islamists. In one sense, they're not as incompatible as they might
appear: Islamism may be religious in origin
but in its political form it is
simply this decade's brand of oppressive statism, as communism was
before it."
The Islamic fascist threat has made many on the modern left
re-think their most basic instincts.
Their instinct,
in a war between democracy and fascism,
is always to take the side of fascism.
But the horror of the evil we face
is making at least some of them oppose fascism
for the first time:
Anti-Americanism: The "anti-imperialism" of fools,
David North and David Walsh, 22 September 2001
- Leftists (in this case extreme socialists)
who recognise
Islamic fundamentalism
as "one of the most reactionary ideologies on the face of earth".
Many leftists had such a moment of clarity after 9/11.
For most, it soon faded.
The disgusting,
anti-American
Arizona 9/11 Memorial
(see
photos)
illustrates the left's complete inability to understand 9/11.
This memorial should be destroyed.
Why is the left sympathetic to Islam, Islamism and the jihad?
Let me suggest some reasons for this bizarre support.
Why the left favours the jihad:
The left is all about some kind of vague "revolution" to destroy the West, or capitalism, and introduce something "better". And basically, no one wants to do that any more except the Islamists. The Soviet Union is gone, so the left is stuck supporting a bunch of religious maniacs.
Obsessed with Daddy. The left is all about rebellion against Daddy. Daddy is Christian. Rebelling against Islam means nothing to the left.
Still fighting the last war. The left are still fighting against Christianity, even though they won, and Christianity no longer oppresses anyone. I have moved on to the next war.
Pure ignorance. Most leftists know nothing about jihadist slaughters that do not involve the West - Nigeria, Thailand, Philippines, Egypt, Algeria, Sudan, India, Pakistan, Russia, Somalia - and get angry if you bring them up. They think jihad only happens with westerners.
White people are the bad guys. The left loves its white guilt, and is only interested in situations where the white man can be blamed. The left tends to support anyone fighting against "the white man".
It ignores conflicts where there are no "white" people involved.
I use sneer quotes here since the left's racial categories are usually ludicrous.
Violent people are exciting. The left loves violent "resistance" of all forms. If Islamists desired the same goals - sharia law - but used entirely peaceful methods, the left would find them very uninteresting.
Why the left does not like Hindus.
He only likes her because she is violent.
The greatest speaking of truth to a mob that I have ever seen.
Counter-jihad hero
Robert Spencer
speaks truth to a mob of
left-wing and communist jihad supporters,
Stuttgart, Germany, June 2, 2011.
And
here.
Spencer
made a great speech,
that could be given to the Islamism-supporting left all over the West:
"I came from the United States of America
to stand for freedom, with all free people,
against the forces of oppression and darkness which you are representing.
...
You are fighting for the most radically
intolerant and hateful ideology on the planet.
...
You are already subjugated! You are already their useful idiots.
You are already their tools. You are out here in their service.
And you think your fight is for freedom. You are fighting for your own slavery!
You are fighting for your own enslavement.
And it will come. It will come to you.
...
You are fighting for the destruction of all the freedoms that you enjoy.
You are fighting for the .. defeat of your own selves, of your own lives.
You are slaves seeking slavery.
...
you are the most foolish, you are the most evil, foolish people on Earth.
We are standing for the human rights of all people.
Of the oppressed Christians in Indonesia, in Pakistan, in Egypt, in Sudan ...
And so, in closing, I have to say: Shame on you!"
My view of the cause of jihad comes from reading the words of jihadists, not the words of leftists.
This is a classic:
A liberal Egyptian woman, who has to live with jihadism and Islamism, promotes my site.
She uses even stronger language against those ideologies than I do.
From comments on
Buzzfeed
on 5 Nov 2015.
But her being a liberal Egyptian means nothing to a
confident western leftist, who dismisses her, and says I am not to be trusted because I am "anti-jihad".
Just eight days later, the jihad
kills 130 people in Paris.
The attitudes of leftists like this are one reason why the jihad against the West will continue for decades.
"When I ran into trouble with the so-called "human rights" commissions up in Canada, it seemed bizarre to find the progressive left making common cause with radical Islam. One half of the alliance profess to be pro-gay, pro-feminist secularists; the other half are homophobic, misogynist theocrats. Even as the cheap bus 'n' truck road-tour version of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, it made no sense."
- Mark Steyn.
Sanctuary
(and part 2)
- Bill Whittle on the sickness of the left,
as they compound their error
in opposing the liberation of Iraq
with shameful tacit support for the post-war fascist "resistance":
"I, for one, can not get past the idea that millions of Western Progressives
would rather see a nation re-enslaved, or erupt in civil war,
or have twenty thousand of their countrymen come home in boxes
than admit that they were wrong."
He says this war has shown us the left in all its horror:
"But this war has done much more. It has shown us just how many people
here inside the walls of our Sanctuary
wish for - work for - its destruction."
If you must read just one essay attacking the left for its lack of support
for the War on Islamism, read this one.
Wafa Sultan
on how the left supports the enemy:
"As an Arab woman who suffered for three decades living under Islamic Sharia, it is clear to me that Islam's political ideology and Sharia must be fought relentlessly by Western civilization to prevent its application in a free society.
However, I have found myself fighting on two fronts. The first front is against Islamists, a daunting fight indeed. But the other front is one shaped by too many uninformed individuals who like to view themselves as open minded "progressives"."
written in Jan 2011 by Al Qaeda spokesman Adam Gadahn
to an unknown recipient within Al Qaeda.
