Don Singleton

Monday, September 25, 2006

McCain Names Practices

WaPo reported A Republican senator who played a leading role in drafting new rules for U.S. interrogations of terrorism suspects said yesterday that he believes a compromise bill embraced by party leaders and the White House will bar some of the most extreme techniques said to have been used by the CIA.

McCain should be waterborded, sleep deprived, and put in a cold room until he reveals why he thinks he has a snowball's chance of getting the Republican nomination in 2008.

Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) named three measures that he said would no longer be allowed under a provision barring techniques that cause serious mental or physical suffering by U.S. detainees: extreme sleep deprivation, forced hypothermia and "waterboarding," which simulates drowning. He also said other "extreme measures" would be banned.

I am sure the Jihadists will be happy to hear what they should and don't need to train their people to deal with.

McCain's remarks were unusual because public officials involved in the lengthy public debate about U.S. interrogation practices have rarely made specific references to the CIA's actions. Instead, they have made general claims about the need for rough interrogations or a desire to stop abusive behavior.

Senior militant 'killed in Iraq'

BBC News reported British forces have killed a senior al-Qaeda fugitive in a raid on a house in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, security sources say.

It is a good thing they did not have to tell him ahead of time about the raid, like is happening now in Londonistan

Officials named the dead man as Omar al-Farouq, a top lieutenant of Osama Bin Laden in south-east Asia.

Doughnut Hole

WaPo reported Millions of older Americans are confronting a temporary break in their Medicare drug coverage this month that will require them to pay the full cost of their prescriptions or face the painful prospect of going without.

Before part D was enacted, they would have been paying for all of them all along.

This is the "doughnut hole" in the new Medicare drug benefit that began in January, and advocates for seniors say there is nothing sweet about it. Some seniors knew nothing of the coverage gap until they were hit with a bigger drug bill, advocates say.

Then they were not paying attention. I knew about it from the start. I decided not to sign up for Part D because the premiums would be more than my drug costs, but I knew if I had, the doughnut hole was there.

"Virtually everyone who calls to say they've been denied coverage, they're shocked," said Robert M. Hayes, president of the Medicare Rights Center, a nonprofit that helps seniors navigate Medicare. "Trying to explain that this is the way the program was created by Congress angers folks who think it makes no sense. Many people feel blindsided."

Would they have preferred paying for all of their drugs all year, or would they have preferred to pay more up front to avoid the doughnut hole?

The coverage gap was one of the most contentious elements of the 2003 legislation that created the new benefit. It ends federal payments for a person's drug purchases once an annual spending limit is reached, resuming them only after the beneficiary has spent thousands of dollars out of pocket.

Proponents saw the unusual setup as a way to provide some help to all beneficiaries, and substantial help to those with catastrophic drug costs, and yet not break the bank in a federal program that is expected to cost hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade.

Precisely. They could have paid more up front and avoided the doughnut hole, but that would have been more unfair to those that did not need that many prescriptions. I think doctors prescribe a lot more than people really need. With too many drugs you get serious drug interactions.

Nine months into the program, as more and more seniors reach the threshold that puts them in the gap, many see it as a headache -- or worse.

Frances Acanfora, 65, had been paying $58 for a three-month supply of her five medications. But this month the retired school lunchroom aide learned that her next bill would be $1,294. She had entered the doughnut hole.

Without the program, she would have been paying $1294 all along.

"It's not my fault that I take this medicine," the Brooklyn resident said. "I've got to take it. And they make a limit. That's not fair."

Who made a limit? They paid for a lot of your drugs, but not all of them? That is not a limit.

Sunday, September 24, 2006

Police to brief Muslims before terror raids

Times Online reported Police have agreed to consult a panel of Muslim leaders before mounting counter-terrorist raids or arrests. Members of the panel will offer their assessment of whether information police have on a suspect is too flimsy and will also consider the consequences on community relations of a raid.

They will also determine whether a raid would interfere with Jihad.

Members will be security vetted and will have to promise not to reveal any intelligence they are shown. They will not have to sign the Official Secrets Act.

So if they do decide to alert the Jihadists, they can't be prosecuted.

The first panel, expected to consist of four people, will be set up initially in London. Tomorrow representatives from police forces across England and Wales will decide whether to make the scheme national.

If you are going to do something this stupid, why not make it national.

Friday, September 22, 2006

Death penalty for moderate views

Jerusalem Post reported A Bangladeshi Muslim journalist arrested in the past for advocating ties with Israel now faces charges of sedition, a crime punishable by death in Bangladesh, and will likely be put on trial by the end of the month, The Jerusalem Post has learned.

Islam must be a weak religion if it cann't stand any criticism.

In a court session on Tuesday in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, a state-appointed judge ruled that the government's case against Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury could proceed to trial and that the hearings would commence within 15 days. As editor of The Weekly Blitz, an English-language newspaper published in Dhaka, Choudhury aroused the ire of Bangladeshi authorities after he printed articles favorable to Israel and critical of Muslim extremism.

The Muslims must really fear Israel if they kill anyone who speaks favorably about it.

Bangladesh does not recognize Israel's existence and refuses to establish diplomatic relations with the Jewish state.

A non-profit organization I am associated with provided computers to an orphanage in Bangladesh, and because there was a Christian component to the donation, we could not even say the name of the country; we had to refer to it as Southeast Asia or something like that.

In November 2003, Choudhury was arrested at Dhaka's international airport just prior to boarding a flight on his way to Israel, where he was scheduled to deliver an address on promoting understanding between Muslims and Jews. His visit to Israel would have been the first by a Bangladeshi journalist.

These nutcases don't want undertanding between Muslims and Jews; they just want violence.

Choudhury was charged with sedition, held in prison for 17 months and was reportedly tortured before being freed in April 2005. But the authorities in Bangladesh, which is ruled by a coalition government that includes Islamic extremists, decided to continue pursuing charges against him. Dr. Richard Benkin, an American Jew who led the fight to win Choudhury's release, told the Post that the situation facing the beleaguered journalist was dire.

"Choudhury has angered the Islamists, who both engineered his arrest and continue to see this as an important case," Benkin said. "He is a pro-Israeli, anti-terrorist Muslim who will not be cowed into silence."

After his release from prison last year, Choudhury proceeded to reopen his weekly newspaper, continuing to publish articles calling for greater interfaith understanding and warning of the dangers posed by fundamentalist Islamic terror.

Last month, unknown assailants set off explosives outside the newspaper's offices and planted a bomb in the press room that failed to detonate.

A letter to the editor would have been much better.

According to Benkin, Choudhury's family has been subjected to various forms of what appear to be orchestrated harassment. These have included pressure from the Bangladeshi authorities to denounce Choudhury, angry crowds gathering outside their home and even physical attacks. The intimidation has stopped "for the moment," he said.

In a May 20, 2005 opinion piece published in the Post, Choudhury wrote: "As a journalist, I counteracted the biased 'news' that promoted hatred of Israel and Jews, condemned terrorism, promoted the free exchange of ideas and urged Bangladesh to recognize Israel."

Describing the moments immediately before his 2003 arrest, he wrote: "Though physically still in Dhaka, my heart ached to kiss Israel's holy soil."

Europe pathetically caves in

Gerard Baker wrote in Times Online [In Afganistan] German aircraft are not permitted by their national rules to undertake night flights. Now to those who survived the Blitz and Barbarossa, the news that today’s Luftwaffe will not fly at night in potentially hostile environments might be regarded as a welcome historical development. But when you are trying to fight a war against a ruthless band of terrorists who operate 24/7, never pausing to consider the dangers of venturing out in the dark, limiting yourself to daytime operations is a little constraining.

And what is even worse, the Western forces have the technological equipment to enable them to be much better than the enemy in the dark.

The Germans are not alone. Many of the European nations with forces in Afghanistan are operating under similarly ludicrous restrictions. Though their soldiers and airmen are highly capable and indeed eager to take the fight to the Taleban, their governments are desperately fearful of the public reaction should their soldiers suffer significant casualties. They don’t think that their voters will stomach it. And the tragedy is, they are probably right.

I was reminded of my unscheduled night in Herat, and what it said about Europe’s dwindling commitment to its own survival, by a series of disheartening developments in the past week on the political and diplomatic front.

Last week we had the tragicomic spectacle of European Nato countries lining up to decline politely the request to beef up their forces in Afghanistan, many of whom are now fighting in perilously under-resourced conditions against a resurgent enemy.

Then on Monday Jacques Chirac went to New York to upend the long, delicate diplomacy designed to deny Iran nuclear weapons. He said France no longer thought the UN should impose sanctions if Iran did not end its uranium enrichment programme. Various explanations were offered by commentators for this volte-face — from the thought that France might be fearful of the economic consequences of sanctions, to the possibility that M Chirac was trying to curry favour with sanctions-opposing Russia and China, to the suggestion that Paris worries that its new peacekeeping force in Lebanon might come under fire from Hezbollah if France acted tough with its Iranian sponsors.

How about the truth. The French are cowards and they love stabbing people in the back.

Whatever the proximate cause of this latest French surrender, the basic reality is that Europeans have been extremely reluctant to press Iran with sanctions all along — the same noises are coming out of Berlin now — and are content instead to acquiesce in the nightmare of a nuclear-armed Tehran.

But once Iran gets the Bomb, Europe will expect the USA to rescue them yet again.

Then, of course, we have had the predictable European outrage following the latest apparent provocation of Islamic extremists by free speech in the West — Pope Benedict XVI’s remarks last week on Islam. I actually heard a senior member of the British Government chide the Pope this week for what he described as his unhelpful comments. This minister went on to say that the Pope should keep quiet about Islamic violence because of the Crusades.

He was pretty sure the Pope would not cut off his head, while he was not at all sure that the Islamofascists would not do it.

It was a jaw-dropping observation. If it was meant seriously its import is that, because of violence perpetrated in the name of Christ 900 years ago, today’s Church, and presumably today’s European governments (who, after all, were eager participants in the Crusades) should forever hold their peace on the subject of religious fanaticism. In this view the Church’s repeated apologies for the sins committed in its name apparently are not enough. The Pope has no right, even in a lengthy disquisition on the complexities of faith and reason, to say anything about the religious role in Islamic terrorism.

It is apt that Pope Benedict should have received such European opprobrium for his remarks. His election last year looked like a final attempt by the Church to revive the European spirit in the face of accelerating secularisation and cultural morbidity.

But the scale of Europe’s moral crisis is larger than ever. Opposing the war in Iraq was one thing, defensible in the light of events. But opting out of a serious fight against the Taleban, sabotaging efforts to get Iran off its path towards nuclear status, pre-emptively cringing to Muslim intolerance of free speech and criticism, all suggest something quite different.

They imply a slow but insistent collapse of the European will, the steady attrition of the self-preservation instinct. Its effects can be seen not only in the political field, but in other ways — the startling decline of birth rates across the continent that represent a sort of self-inflicted genocide; the refusal to confront the harsh realities of a global economy.

Frency cowardace is spreading across Europe.

It may well be that history will judge that Europe’s decline came at the very moment of its apparent triumph. The traumas of the first half of the 20th century have combined with the economic successes of the second half to induce a collective loss of will. Great civilisations die not in the end because of external force majeure but because internally the will to thrive is sapped.

The symptoms of this moral collapse may be far away from the affluent and still largely peaceful cities and towns of the old continent — in the mountains of Afghanistan, the diplomatic reception halls of Tehran and the angry Pope-effigy-burning streets of the Middle East. But there should be no doubt that it is closer to home where the disease has taken hold.

Thursday, September 21, 2006

The Pope was right

George Weigel wrote in LAT In a brilliant lecture at the University of Regensburg last week, Pope Benedict XVI made three crucial points that are now in danger of being lost in the polemics about his supposedly offensive comments about Islam.

The pope's first point was that all the great questions of life, including social and political questions, are ultimately theological. How we think (or don't think) about God has much to do with how we judge what is good and what is wicked, and with how we think about the appropriate methods for advancing the truth in a world in which there are profound disagreements about the truth of things. If, for example, we imagine that God is pure will, a remote majesty with whom our only possible relationship is one of unthinking submission, then we have imagined a God who can even command what seems to be irrational — like the murder of innocents.

And if that is what the nutcase Muslims envision, then why do they seek to manipulate what that God wants to benefit a few despotic leaders here on earth.

Pope Benedict reminds us, however, that mainstream Christian tradition, following its Jewish parent, has a different concept of God. The God of Abraham, Moses and Jesus

All of whom are mentioned in the Koran.

is a God of reason, compassion and love, a God who comes searching for man in history, appeals to the human mind as well as the human heart and invites human beings into a dialogue of salvation.

This God cannot demand the unreasonable or the irrational. This God's revelation of himself, in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament, does not cancel out or abrogate human reason. That is why mainstream Christianity has always taught that human beings can build decent societies by attending to reason.

The pope's second point, which flows from the first, was that irrational violence aimed at innocent men, women and children "is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the [human] soul." If adherents of certain currents of thought in contemporary Islam insist that the suicide bombing of innocents is an act pleasing to God, then they must be told that they are mistaken: about God, about God's purposes and about the nature of moral obligation.

And perhaps they need to be told that Evil frequently tries to pretend to be God, and that perhaps that is what they have been fooled by.

Responsibility for challenging these distorted views of God and the distorted understanding of moral duty that flows from them rests, first, with Islamic leaders. But too few Islamic leaders, the pope seemed to suggest, have been willing to undertake a cleansing of Islam's conscience — as Pope John Paul II taught the Catholic Church to cleanse its historical conscience.

That is because they are cowards. They know that some of the despotic leaders are trying to switch their people's anger at they way they are treated into blaming the West, and they don't want that blame switched to them, for fear that violence will be done to them.

We know that, in the past, Christians used violence to advance Christian purposes. The Catholic Church has publicly repented of such distortions of the Gospel and has developed a deep theological critique of the misunderstandings that led to such episodes. Can the church, therefore, be of some help to those brave Islamic reformers who, at the risk of their own lives, are trying to develop a parallel Islamic critique of the distorted and lethal ideas of some of their co-religionists?

By quoting from a robust exchange between a medieval Byzantine emperor and a learned Islamic scholar, Benedict XVI was not making a cheap rhetorical point; he was trying to illustrate the possibility of a tough-minded but rational dialogue between Christians and Muslims. That dialogue can only take place, however, on the basis of a shared commitment to reason and a mutual rejection of irrational violence in the name of God.

The pope's third point — which has been almost entirely ignored — was directed to the West. If the West's high culture keeps playing in the sandbox of postmodern irrationalism — in which there is "your truth" and "my truth" but nothing such as "the truth" — the West will be unable to defend itself. Why? Because the West won't be able to give reasons why its commitments to civility, tolerance, human rights and the rule of law are worth defending. A Western world stripped of convictions about the truths that make Western civilization possible cannot make a useful contribution to a genuine dialogue of civilizations, for any such dialogue must be based on a shared understanding that human beings can, however imperfectly, come to know the truth of things.

Amen.

Can Islam be self-critical? Can its leaders condemn and marginalize its extremists, or are Muslims condemned to be held hostage to the passions of those who consider the murder of innocents to be pleasing to God? Can the West recover its commitment to reason and thus help support Islamic reformers? These are the large questions that Pope Benedict XVI has put on the world's agenda. Men and women of reason and goodwill should be very glad that he has done so.

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Muslim violence

Boston Globe reported Aa she lay dying in a Mogadishu hospital, Sister Leonella forgave her killers. She had lived in Africa for almost four decades and could speak fluent Somali, but her last words were murmured in Italian, her mother tongue. ``Perdono, perdono," she whispered. I forgive, I forgive.

God received her with honor. He has a special place prepared for those that killed her.

She was 65 and had devoted her life to the care of sick mothers and children. She was on her way to meet three other nuns for lunch on Sunday when two gunmen shot her several times in the back. ``Her slaying was not a random attack," the Associated Press reported. It ``raised concerns" that she was the latest victim of "growing Islamic radicalism in the country."

We have always seen evil in this world. We are just now seeing it more clearly.

Raised concerns? Sister Leonella was gunned down less than two days after a prominent Somali cleric had called on Muslims to kill Pope Benedict XVI for his remarks about Islam in a scholarly lecture last week.

Islam. The Religion of Peace. And they will kill you if you disagree.

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

'Day of Rage': Anger Not Jihad

ABC News reported Three words suddenly have a lot of Westerners worried and, it must be said, likely making some wrong assumptions about modern Islam. "Yaum al Ghadab" is Arabic for "Day of Rage." When the Qatari Islamic scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi called for a Day of Rage this Friday in response to Pope Benedict XVI's remarks about Muslims, it might have sounded like a call for street violence.

Gee, why would it have sounded like that?

But if there is trouble Friday, and there could well be, it will not be because of language but because of what some people choose to do after they have answered the call for "Yaum al Ghadab."

Or maybe because they are not sophisticated enough to realize how they are being used.

Political manipulation of protest crowds is not a uniquely Islamic idea. It happens in the West, as well.

Rarely with as much violence.

But why do Islamic leaders use what many Westerners regard as inflammatory language? Because it is not inflammatory, at least not in the context of Islamic culture.

Then Islamic Culture is pretty warped.

"We must not try to interpret Islamic terms and cultural signals by using our Western ideas," said Fawaz Gerges, a professor in the department of international affairs and Middle Eastern studies at Sarah Lawrence College, and an ABC News consultant. Gerges pointed out that in Islamic culture "ghadab" means anger or frustration. A day of rage does not mean a day of jihad (war), added Gerges.

It means a day of intimidating the West into fearing war.

Mimi Daher, a Muslim woman working in the ABC Jerusalem bureau, explained that the Grand Multi in Jerusalem reflected this cultural mindset today when he said, "Muslims have to express their anger.

Why? Do Christians have a "Day of Rage" everytime some nutcase comes up with some offensive art?

Was the pope expecting Muslims to clap their hands to him while hurting their faith and prophet?

No but he was not expecting them to act as they did either. He was seeking to establish a dialog, a discussion, about the inconsistencies between God and violence.

Of course not. We call on Muslims throughout the world to react in a disciplined manner, according to our Islamic faith."

"Disciplined manner" is a repeated theme among Islamic moderate leaders who encourage people to protest. As Gerges reminded me, when the cleric al-Qaradawi called for a day of rage, he stressed repeatedly that it should be civilized, urging Muslims to behave with civility and dignity.

Do they know how?

"We must show the world that we are still civilized even when we are aggrieved," he said.

You failed.

Pope asked to convert to Islam

news24 reported The elder son of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has called on Pope Benedict XVI to convert to Islam immediately, dismissing last week's apology from the pontiff for offending Muslims.

That is about as likely as Osama accepting Christ as his personal saviour.

"If this person were really someone reasonable, he would not agree to remain at his post one minute, but would convert to Islam immediately," Mohammed Gaddafi told an awards ceremony on Monday evening for an international competition to memorise the Qur'an.

Why on earth would he do something that stupid. He is the head of a major church which truly is a Religion of Peace; why would he want to embrace a faith with no central religious authority, and where people politically try to stir up trouble in the streets to get themselves more power.

"We say to the pope - whether you apologise or not is irrelevant, as apologies make no difference to us."

Then why ask for them? Is Islam so weak that it can be insulted by a cartoon or a 700 year old quotation.

Gaddafi junior also hit out at "those Muslims who look for comfort in the words of a non-Muslim". He said Muslims "should not look for charity from the infidel... but should fight Islam's enemies who attack the faith and the Prophet Muhammad".

Actually they should let the Prophet worry about defending himself, and they should battle the internal struggle that has them so fearful that someone will insult their faith that they respond violently to a question about whether they really are a Religion of Peace

May Pose Risk

WaPo reported McCain's Stand On Detainees May Pose Risk For 2008 Bid

May??? May??? May??? There is no may about it. McCain has completely destroyed any chance he ever had of getting the nomination.

Surge in Anti-Muslim Incidents Reported

- WaPo reported A national Muslim advocacy organization yesterday blamed a "negative and politically charged" environment on the Internet and talk radio for the 30 percent jump in anti-Muslim incidents reported to the group last year.

And why was that negative discussion happening. Could it be because of rioting and calls for the Pope to be killed, and could the murder of an innocent nun have had anything to do with it?

The Council on American-Islamic Relations received 1,972 complaints of harassment, violence and discriminatory treatment in 2005, up from 1,522 in 2004, according to an annual report released yesterday.

Monday, September 18, 2006

You've said sorry, Holy Father - now demand a price

Times Online reported The Pope should have been aware that Islam always reacts to western allegations that it is not a peaceful religion by mass outbreaks of vituperation, denunciation and acts of jihadic violence. That this is a paradox seems not to be even remotely recognised by many Muslims.

I suspect the intelligent ones do, they just don't know how to point out its foolishness without inviting jihad on themselves.

Commenting on the Pope’s speech, Tasnim Aslam, a spokeswoman for the Pakistani foreign ministry, came out with this little piece of doublethink beauty: “Anyone who describes Islam as a religion as intolerant encourages violence.” ... A subtle and astute politician, perhaps Benedict should apologise for having caused offence — and then demand by way of reciprocation that Turkey — Islam’s democratic representative in the West — return to Christian denominations the land it has confiscated from them, allow the Christian churches to open seminaries (which they are barred from doing), make it easier to build new churches, and lock up Turks who terrorise priests. And maybe allow Turks to convert from Islam to Christianity without fear of official or unofficial reprisal. A fair exchange?

That sounds like a good idea. It will never happen, but it it is a good idea.

Sunday, September 17, 2006

Defending Lebanon

Yahoo! News reported A top Hezbollah leader said the Shiite group would have no problems with UN peacekeepers as long as they limit their work to defending Lebanon against Israel and do not pursue other agendas.

Such as defending Israel from attacks by Hezbollah, should Iran decide it needs another war.

"UNIFIL (the UN Interim Force in Lebanon) is here to protect the Lebanese and Lebanon's sovereignty, and we want its mandate limited to that," in which case there "will be no problems," Nabil Qaouk, the group's chief in the south, told AFP Saturday.

"We want the new UNIFIL to do its work in conformity with" UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which led to an August 14 truce in the war between Israel and Hezbollah.

And which calls for Hezbollah to be disarmed.

"Israel is seeking to have this force play a new role, in other words, to place it under its control," Qaouk said. "We hope that Europe and the French will not be under American control and will be the closest friends of the Lebanese and the Arab world."

The cowardly French sell their friendship to whoever can pay the most. How much is Lebanon offerring? How much is Hezbollah offerring?

More than 7,000 troops from EU countries will make up the backbone of an expanded UNIFIL presence in Lebanon, which is expected to total 15,000. Under Resolution 1701, they are deploying in south Lebanon, along with an equal number of Lebanese troops, as Israel progressively withdraws from the country.

Qaouk was speaking two days after the French commander of UNIFIL indicated his men would act to take weapons away from Hezbollah if the Lebanese army failed to do so.

Good for him.

Resolution 1701 calls for establishing "an area free of any armed personnel, assets and weapons other than those of the government of Lebanon and of UNIFIL" between the Israeli border and the Litani River. It stipulates that UNIFIL should "assist the Lebanese armed forces" in achieving that. Pellegrini said that, "if the (Lebanese army) fails to act, we must assume our responsibilities as a UN force. Someone will have to intervene, with all the consequences that this might have for the Lebanese authorities." Hezbollah has resolutely refused to turn over its arms, saying it will keep them until Israel ends its occupation of the country.

And anyone that thinks they will then disarm is an idiot.

Rioters' madness shames Muslim world

Father Raymond J. de Souza wrote in National Post The eruption of rage in some quarters of the Islamic world against Pope Benedict XVI requires that several tough things be said. Painful though it may be, speaking frankly is necessary if there is to be honest and open dialogue between the Abrahamic faiths. Given the reaction to Benedict's address, though, one wonders if that dialogue is even possible.

It could take place with True Muslims only after they find a way to purge their faith of these firebrand clerics that stir up violence for political purposes, and who hijack the faith of Islam.

The Pope devoted almost 4,000 words to examining the relationship between faith and reason, and the prospect for dialogue between modernity and the world of religion. In the course of that address he quoted a dialogue recorded between the Byzantine (Christian) Emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an erudite Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam. The dialogue took place during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402. During their conversation, the Pope said, the Emperor "turns to his interlocutor somewhat brusquely with the central question on the relationship between religion and violence in general, in these words: 'Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.' "

Or perhaps it is just another example of faith being used to try to achieve secular, political objectives.

Benedict was quoting a 14th-century Christian emperor, under siege from the Ottomans, defending the position that spreading religion by violence is contrary to the nature of God. The Emperor, quite reasonably given his circumstances, suggested to his Persian interlocutor such a view did not prevail in Islamic thought. In response to this historical excursus in an academic lecture by one of the world's most erudite theologians, we are witnessing a wave of madness and malice, no doubt an embarrassment to millions of Muslims.

Roman Catholics are likely angry. Relations between adherents of the two religions simply cannot develop without all conducting themselves as mature adults. It does a disservice to children to call the wild-eyed statements and deranged behaviour of the past days childish.

That is a very good point.

It is not only the obscenity of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist terrorist band suppressed in several Muslim states, demanding an apology from anyone, let alone the Holy Father. It is not only the grandstanding Pakistani politicians passing resolutions condemning a papal speech few read, and even fewer understood. It is not only the extraneous charges about the Holocaust and Hitler by the agitated and excited. It is that we have seen this before.

The Cartoon Wars were one such place.

When Pope John Paul II made his epic pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Palestinian Muslim representatives jostled him on the Temple Mount, shouted at him, and, in one episode of maximum rudeness, abandoned him on stage during an interfaith meeting. Bashir Assad, the Syrian President, treated him to an anti-Semitic rant when the late pope visited Syria.

That just shows that some Muslams can be idiots; it does not show that Islam itself leads to idiotic behaviour.

Catholic goodwill toward global Islam is severely attenuated by such continued maltreatment of our universal pastors. And it is well past time that the maltreatment of history ceased too. The irony of the accusations that Pope Benedict has a "Crusader mentality" is that he was speaking about the period in which the Crusades themselves took place.

Most, if not all, of which, involved a Pope. The loudmouths complaining about the Pope's words should give thought to whether they would like to see additioinal Crusades.

Saturday, September 16, 2006

The Pope’s Words

NYT There is more than enough religious anger in the world.

And the New York Times is responsible for aggravating a lot of it, and doing almost nothing to counter it. Where are your editorials about some of the things that Muslim clerics have said?

So it is particularly disturbing that Pope Benedict XVI has insulted Muslims, quoting a 14th-century description of Islam as “evil and inhuman.”

Should he have quoted someone from the 7th century, or someone from the 21st century? I am sure that quotes could have been found from both eras?

In the most provocative part of a speech this week on “faith and reason,” the pontiff recounted a conversation between an “erudite” Byzantine Christian emperor and a “learned” Muslim Persian circa 1391. The pope quoted the emperor saying, “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

Muslim leaders the world over have demanded apologies and threatened to recall their ambassadors from the Vatican, warning that the pope’s words dangerously reinforce a false and biased view of Islam. For many Muslims, holy war — jihad — is a spiritual struggle, and not a call to violence.

Actually you have merged two concepts. It is accurate to say that for many Muslims jihad is a spiritual struggle, within one's self, to do what God wishes. And we have absolutely no problem with those Muslims; we just more of them would speak out against the Islamofascists that have perverted the concept of jihad into that of a Holy War, willing to kill anyone that disagrees with you.

And they denounce its perversion by extremists,

But they do not do it anywhere nearly as loudly as the Jihadists. Show me a street march against Holy War, against Jihad, or for Peace

who use jihad to justify murder and terrorism.

The Vatican issued a statement saying that Benedict meant no offense and in fact desired dialogue. But this is not the first time the pope has fomented discord between Christians and Muslims.

Nor is it the first time a Muslim Cleric has formented discord between Christians and Muslims either.

In 2004 when he was still the Vatican’s top theologian, he spoke out against Turkey’s joining the European Union, because Turkey, as a Muslim country was “in permanent contrast to Europe.”

He may not have visited many parts of Londinistan at that time.

A doctrinal conservative, his greatest fear appears to be the loss of a uniform Catholic identity, not exactly the best jumping-off point for tolerance or interfaith dialogue.

Not at all. John Paul reached out to other faiths, and he was not trying to suppress the Catholic Church.

The world listens carefully to the words of any pope.

I hope they listen to this one.

And it is tragic and dangerous when one sows pain, either deliberately or carelessly. He needs to offer a deep and persuasive apology, demonstrating that words can also heal.

Show him how. Let the New York Times apologize for their printing of Chris Ofili’s portrait of of the Virgin Mary, painted with elephant dung when they were talking about the Cartoon Wars and not printing those cartoons at all.

Allah Pundit blogged Most will lunge at the third paragraph but the whole piece is right there in the opening line. It’s an all-weather rejoinder to any criticism, however meritorious, of Muslims, who happen to be the source of most of that unspecified “religious anger” the Times is so wary of. Don’t provoke them, they’re saying; it’ll only make things worse. Not a word is wasted on the filth that pours regularly from the lips of Islamic religious authorities around the world. Instead they blame the Pope for having “fomented discord” and jeopardized interfaith relations by being a little too much of a stickler when it comes to “uniform Catholic identity.” The Pope. Not, say, the Saudis.

Damian Thompson wrote in Telegraph It is ironic that Benedict XVI finds himself accused of crude anti-Islamic prejudice after quoting a medieval emperor's opinion that Mohammed's violent teachings were "evil and inhuman". For no pope in history has made a deeper study of Islam. Having explored every verse of the Koran, and engaged in long debates with Muslim scholars, he rejects the simplistic notion — held by fundamentalist Christians, and by the Roman Catholic Church until the middle of the 20th century — that Islam is evil. Yet he is convinced that some of its doctrines are morally indefensible.

And he is right in both cases.

In Benedict's view, a profound ambiguity about violence lies at the heart of Islam, arising from the Prophet's belief that faith can be spread by the sword. Mohammed, after all, was a general whose troops beheaded hundreds of enemy captives.

Asked recently whether he considered Islam to be a religion of peace, the Pope replied: "Islam contains elements that are in favour of peace, just as it contains other elements." Christianity, by contrast, he sees as a religion of pure peace — which is why he adopts a near-pacifist approach to conflict in the Middle East.

Where the pontiff differs from his predecessor is in his impatience with what might be termed "Islamic political correctness".

And that Islamic political correctness would say that there can be no criticism of Islam, no matter who makes it, nor about any violent reaction to that criticism, and that people must apologize anytime a Jihadists says he is insulted, thus making him think he is stronger and more powerful than he really is, and making him respond more violently the next time he feels insulted.

John Paul II hoped that prayer could bring Christians and Muslims closer together, and famously prayed alongside Islamic leaders at Assisi in 1986. He also reassured Muslims that "we believe in the same God".

Let us hear that more often from Islamic leaders. They can even quote Surat al-Baqara, 136 (Qur'an 2:136) which says Say ye: "We believe in Allah, and the revelation given to us, and to Abraham, Isma'il, Isaac, Jacob, and the Tribes, and that given to Moses and Jesus, and that given to (all) prophets from their Lord: We make no difference between one and another of them or Surat aal-E-Imran, 3 (Qur'an 3:3) which says It is He Who sent down to thee (step by step), in truth, the Book, confirming what went before it; and He sent down the Law (of Moses) and the Gospel (of Jesus) before this, as a guide to mankind, and He sent down the criterion (of judgment between right and wrong). We are all "People of the Book" (or ahl al Kitâb) Surat Al 'Imran, 64 (Qur'an 3:64) says "O People of the Book! Let us rally to a common formula to be binding on both us and you: That we worship none but God; that we associate no partners with Him; that we erect not, from among ourselves, Lords and patrons other than God."

Benedict would emphasise that the Islamic understanding of God is radically different from that of Christians.

And he is right.

He has also refrained from issuing the apologies for historical misdeeds made by John Paul II, arguing that they are never reciprocated.

Last year, at a private seminar, the Pope implied that he agreed with conservative Muslim clerics that the teachings of the Koran cannot be modified in any way. More-over, Islam, unlike Christianity, makes no distinction between sacred and secular.

"The Koran is a total religious law," he wrote in 1996, "which regulates the whole of political and social life." Therefore, a devout Muslim living in the West must aspire to live under sharia law. A multi-faith society "is not consistent with Islam's inner nature".

If a devout Muslim living in the west wishes to comport his own actions as being consistent with sharia law that is one thing, but if he expects a western country to change its laws, and impose sharia law on everyone, he is crazy. If he wants to live under sharia law, he should move to a Muslim country.

In other words, the Pope subscribes to a version of the "clash of civilisations" theory, which sees a fundamental incompatibility between Western and Islamic cultures. In his opinion, the primary aim of Christian-Muslim discussion is to avoid conflict.

For example, he supports the right of Muslim children to be taught their own religion in European schools — but on the strict understanding that their communities respect human rights.

But that is precisely what the Jihadists do not do.

Benedict's lecture at Regensburg University merely sought to elaborate his existing views. Beautifully written and constructed, it was intended for scholars interested in the relationship between God, rationality and coercion.

Although he described the Muslim approach to violence as defying God-given rationality, the Pope had no intention of offending ordinary Muslims or creating media headlines.

Yet the leader of the world's Roman Catholics has done both. How could a man who is so notoriously careful with words have committed what, in the eyes of liberal society, is a diplomatic blunder? The answer may be that underlying Benedict's nuanced world view is a deep-seated fear of Islam, which crops up in the daily conversation of Italian Catholics and stretches as far north as his Bavarian homeland.

Let us hope that his deep-seated fear of Islam can wake up the heads of some of the European countries before it is too late for them.

He does not believe that the Koran condones terrorism; he bears no animosity towards peace-loving Muslims; but he is worried that the aggressive ethos of authentic Islam may provoke a crisis in Western society. And if the price of making that point is a "diplomatic blunder", then so be it.

Captain Ed blogged All this has shown is that Muslims missed the point of the speech, and in fact have endeavored to fulfill Benedict's warnings rather than prove him wrong. If one reads the speech at Regensburg, the entire speech, one understands that the entire point was to reject violence in pursuing religion in any form, be it Islam, Christianity, Judaism, or Bahai. The focal point of the speech was not the recounting of the debate between Manuel II and the unnamed Persian, but rather the rejection of reason and of God that violence brings.... Islam bullies people into silence, and then obedience. We saw this with the Prophet Cartoons, a series of editorial criticisms that pale into insignificance when seen against similar cartoons from the Muslim media regarding Christians and especially Jews. It is precisely this impulse about which Benedict warns can occur in any religion, but modern Muslims show that they are by far the widest purveyors of this impulse.

Gerald Augustinus blogged By the way, note that the Vatican's statement said the Pope was sorry for the misunderstandings, it did not say he was sorry for what he said. Of course now every stupid media outlet, from Drudgereport to newspapers, headlines "Pope sorry".

Ed Driscoll blogged why would a leftwing newspaper written largely by atheists and agnostics want to lecture two of the world's dominant religions, in the first place?

Mark Finkelstein blogged The Times is only being fair and balanced, I suppose. After all, hardly a week goes by that you can't pick up the paper and read an editorial condemning this or that mullah, imam or ayatollah for the latest fatwa ordering the death of such-and-such infidel or the destruction of entire countries found to be an annoyance. Or not.

But the Times suddenly gets religion, if they'll excuse the expresssion, when it comes to the Pope. Oh well. At least there's one hopeful sign in all this. It was of course Stalin who dismissively asked how many divisions the Pope had. By its editorial according great weight to the words of the Pontiff, the Times would appear to be breaking with Uncle Joe. Might this be the start of a hopeful trend?

Friday, September 15, 2006

No such thing as a moderate Muslim

Sun2Surf reported There is no such thing as a moderate Muslim

Then maybe we should just kill all of them

and US President George W. Bush is mistaken in casting his war on terror in terms of a "struggle for civilisation", former prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad says.

He is right. It is a struggle to maintain civilization, or drop back to the 14th century.

Mahathir, who is known for his frequent barbs against what he has called Western double standard, said he believed even the Sept 11, 2001 attacks on the US were at root linked to Israel's occupation of Palestinian land. "What is happening today has got nothing to do with religion. It has got to do with territorial disputes, mainly the dispute over Palestinian land," he told Reuters after a religious congress here.

Then get the Palestinians off of it. As God said in Joshua 1:1-4 After the death of Moses the servant of the LORD, the LORD said to Joshua son of Nun, Moses' aide: 2 "Moses my servant is dead. Now then, you and all these people, get ready to cross the Jordan River into the land I am about to give to them—to the Israelites. 3 I will give you every place where you set your foot, as I promised Moses. 4 Your territory will extend from the desert to Lebanon, and from the great river, the Euphrates—all the Hittite country—to the Great Sea [Mediterranean] on the west

He said Bush's description of America's "war on terror" as "a struggle for civilisation" on the fifth anniversary of the attacks was flawed, as was the West's hope that moderate Muslims would have a dominant voice. "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."

Then you need to condem the nutcases that do.

On Bush's comments, Mahathir, 81, said: "He's not civilised, he shouldn't be talking about civilising others."

Things were confusing back in the 7th century, wern 't they

Although most of the men who carried out the Sept 11 attacks were Saudis, Mahathir - whom Israel has in the past dubbed anti-Semitic - said he saw the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands as the root cause of Islamist extremism.

You can end the occupation immediately. Get the Palestinians off the land.

"They (the hijackers) had no direct link but there is a great deal of sympathy for the sufferings of the people of Palestine," he said.

Which they caused when they told them to leave Israel when they attacked in 1948, expecting to defeat Israel and then let them claim the Israeli land.

"Maybe that is because they are co-religionists but it is not because their religion urges them to do so. The West tends to blame religion, they blame Islam for whatever happens and associate Islam with terrorism," he said. He said he believed dubbing a fight against Islamic extremism as a struggle for civilisation risked becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. "(Muslims) are without arms, they are weak and they are pushed into a corner. If you are pushed into a corner and the only thing you can do is bite, you bite," he said.

You could die; would you prefer that alternative.

The tactics used by the US and allies such as Britain were an attempt to "out-terrorise the terrorists" and would therefore fail, Mahathir said. - Reuters
Saddam Hussein terrorised his people, he killed many people. But how many did he kill compared to the numbers the Americans have caused to be killed?" he asked.

Many fewer.

Muslims Assail Pope's Remarks on Islam

AP reported Turkey's ruling Islamic-rooted party joined a wave of criticism of Pope Benedict XVI on Friday, accusing him of trying to revive the spirit of the Crusades with remarks he made about Islam. Muslim leaders in the Middle East expressed dismay, and Pakistan's parliament unanimously condemned him.

Actually it is the wave of bitching from Turkey's Islamic rooted party and the IslamoFascists that is trying to revive the spirit of the Crusades, because it points out when Christianity had to whip their butts a number of centuries ago.

The Vatican said the pope did not intend the remarks _ made in Germany on Tuesday during an address at a university _ to be offensive. The pope quoted from a book recounting a conversation between 14th century Byzantine Christian Emperor Manuel Paleologos II and a Persian scholar on the truths of Christianity and Islam.

What truths are there in Islam. It seems to mean whatever the cleric translating it wants it to mean.

"The emperor comes to speak about the issue of jihad, holy war," the pope said. "He said, I quote, 'Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached,'" he quoted the emperor as saying. He did not explicitly agree with them nor repudiate them.

That was wrong. He should have agreed with them.

Turkey's top Islamic cleric, Religious Affairs Directorate head Ali Bardakoglu, asked Benedict on Thursday to apologize about the remarks and unleashed a string of accusations against Christianity, raising tensions before the pontiff's planned visit to Turkey in November on what would be his first papal pilgrimage in a Muslim country. Bardakoglu said he was deeply offended and called the remarks "extraordinarily worrying, saddening and unfortunate."

And just think what we think about your reaction. Cartoonists, ink your pens!!!

On Thursday, when the pope returned to Italy, Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said, "It certainly wasn't the intention of the pope to carry out a deep examination of jihad (holy war) and on Muslim thought on it, much less to offend the sensibility of Muslim believers."

But such an examination is long overdue. The pope is certainly familiar with Fascism, and he knows what Islam says and what the Islamofascists have twisted it to say. Who better to explain to the world the real threat of Islamofascism

Lombardi insisted the pontiff respects Islam. Benedict wants to "cultivate an attitude of respect and dialogue toward the other religions and cultures, obviously also toward Islam," Lombardi said. On Friday, Salih Kapusuz, a deputy leader of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's party, said Benedict's remarks were either "the result of pitiful ignorance" about Islam and its prophet, or worse, a deliberate distortion of the truths.

If there is A TRUTH in the Koran, why do Yusufali, Pickthal, and Shakir come up with different translations in http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/quran/ when translating what the Almighty Himself (swt) gave to the angel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad (saas)? Which were listening to which side of the conversation?

"He has a dark mentality that comes from the darkness of the Middle Ages. He is a poor thing that has not benefited from the spirit of reform in the Christian world," Kapusuz blurted out in comments made to the state-owned Anatolia news agency. "It looks like an effort to revive the mentality of the Crusades."

Blue Crab blogged An official of the ruling Turkish Islamic-rooted party has compared Pope Benedict XVI with Hitler and Mussolini. We have a real-time violation of Godwin's law in record time. The rioting will commence as soon as enough of the proper flags, effigies, fuel and ignition sources can be obtained, one suspects. It takes time to organize a "spontaneous outpouring of rage", after all.

Thursday, September 14, 2006

I'm Back

Sorry the blog has been blank for the past few days. I was in the hospital. It points out that I need to have one or two guest bloggers that can take over when needed. Is anyone interested?

Is that George Bush’s fault?

Byron York wrote in The Hill Ask yourself this question: What actions, or series of actions, could President Bush and GOP leaders in Congress have taken in the war on terror that would cause Democratic leaders to say, seven weeks before mid-term elections, “We are all united in a common effort to defeat the enemy. President Bush and Republicans in the House and Senate have brought us together like never before. We see no need to change leadership.”

They did not even say that right after 9/11. They supported the President's retaliation and security requests, because they knew that if they opposed them, the country would turn against them for so long that they would never have a chance of getting into power in the next 100 years.

Can you argue, with a straight face, that there is there any set of circumstances imaginable today, five years after September 11, that would lead to such a statement? I didn’t think so.

There is nothing Bush could do, regarding not just the war on terror that would cause the Dems to say that. If he shot Cheney on National TV, absolutely guaranteeing his impeachment, and Cheney not able to take over, they still would not be happy, because Hastert would become President. They might try to drag the impeachment out until after the election hoping to have a Dem Speaker sneak in, but that would be the only possible thing. Read More
Their only plan is OEBD (Ooppose Everything Bush Does).

So why do so many people accuse George W. Bush of “politicizing” the war on terror? That war is just the biggest issue facing the United States today, and has been for five years. How could it not be — how should it not be — an issue for intense debate by, well, politicians?

They do not support the war in Afganistan either; they just look at the hole in the ground in a state they must win, and know they can't be too strong against finding those who caused that, but they can certainly lie when he goes after a related matter that is equally dangerous.

After the president’s 9/11 anniversary speech, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) released a statement which read, in full: “The president should be ashamed of using a national day of mourning to commandeer the airwaves to give a speech that was designed not to unite the country and commemorate the fallen but to seek support for a war in Iraq that he has admitted had ‘nothing’ to do with 9/11. There will be time to debate this president’s policies in Iraq. September 11th is not that time.”

By my count — actually by Microsoft Word’s count — the president’s speech was 2,623 words long. Of those words, 516, or a little less than one-fifth of the total, were devoted to Iraq.

The other four-fifths were devoted to general memories of September 11, to the government’s efforts to make the American public safer, and to the president’s steadfast belief that the spread of democracy will end terrorism — all perfectly reasonable topics.

But it also seems perfectly reasonable to argue that if the president were to give a speech about national security on the anniversary of September 11, that part of that speech — perhaps a little less than one-fifth — should be devoted to Iraq.

In fact, given that the war is a major part of the government’s strategy in the post-9/11 world, wouldn’t it have seemed a little weird if Bush’s speech hadn’t mentioned Iraq at all?

Not, apparently, to the Democratic leadership in Congress. Talking about Iraq in a speech on September 11 amounts to “politicizing” a national tragedy.

And the Dems bitching about it is not "politicizing" it?

Okay. So how, looking back on the last five years, could Bush have made Democrats happier?

What could he have done that would have brought Democrats together with Republicans in one united effort to defeat our terrorist enemies?

Listen to virtually any Democrat and you’ll hear the answer: He should have stuck to Afghanistan.

“We all voted to go into Afghanistan,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said recently. “We should have stayed there to get the job done. Instead, the president chose to be distracted from catching Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar, the head of the Taliban, and now, as was described earlier, Afghanistan is in a dreadful, dreadful situation.”

And that is because there are dreadful people there, but their wings have been clipped, and other equally dreadful people in Iraq are now also dead or in jail. Now what is between Iraq and Afganistan? Are there some dreadful people there? What should we do, march back to Afganistan through that dreadful country, taking care of any dreadful people we pass along the way?

“He took our eye off the ball in Afghanistan,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said of Dick Cheney after the vice president’s recent appearance on “Meet the Press.”

“Congress responded in a bipartisan way [after 9/11],” Senate Minority Whip Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) said recently, “overwhelmingly giving the president the authority to go to war against al Qaeda, the Taliban in Afghanistan. We all stood together in that. We understood the enemy. We understood what we had to do.”

But now, Democrats say, we are bogged down in a giant distraction in Iraq. We should have kept our focus on Afghanistan.

But imagine this.

Imagine that George W. Bush had remained focused like a laser beam on the war in Afghanistan.

Not content with toppling the Taliban, he sent 130,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan in a determined effort to kill or capture every single member of al Qaeda.

He accomplished much, but Osama bin Laden remained in hiding, somewhere in the world’s most inhospitable territory in Afghanistan or Pakistan.

Should we have marched into Pakistan, and turned that country, the only Muslim Country with Nukes, against us, rather than being our "friend"?

Meanwhile, resentment against the American presence built. An insurgency rose up, using improvised explosive devices and suicide bombers to kill U.S. soldiers. The American death toll mounted.

Sounds like what Russia did, and they did not succeed.

Now, do you believe that, if that had happened, Democrats would still be supporting the president’s policy in Afghanistan?

Do you believe that Pelosi, Reid, Durbin, and others would not be accusing George W. Bush of pursuing a misguided strategy in the war on terror, charging that the president was so obsessed with tracking down every last terrorist in Afghanistan that he ignored threats from places like Iran, North Korea, and — yes — Saddam Hussein’s Iraq? Do you believe that Democrats today, seven weeks before Election Day, would be united behind the president? I didn’t think so.

Blue Crab blotted Byron York points out, quite correctly, that there is literally nothing whatsoever that the President could have done that would not bring criticism from Democrats in an election year. Nature of the beast and all that

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