The CBC Tries to Pin the Norway Murders on "Christian Fundamentalists"

Ezra Levant has a terrific 9 minute monologue on the media coverage of the Breivik murders in Norway. He shows footage from the CBC that identifies him as a "Christian fundamentalist" and then he gives quotes from his internet manifesto that clearly show (1) that Breivik knew what a Christian fundamentalist is and (2) that Breivik was not a Christian fundamentalist. Insofar as he could be said to be anything (because his manifesto is rambling and incoherent consisting of cut and paste excerpts from everyone from Dan Brown to Charles Darwin to Ghandi to Mark Steyn) he could more plausibly be described as a liberal Protestant.



Here is also a segment of Levant's show in which he interviews Michael Coren about the story. They make it crystal clear that this tragic event has nothing whatsoever to do with Christianity, fundamentalist or otherwise.



The liberal media coverage of this event has been downright creepy.

Liberal Media Exploit Mass Murder to Take A Cheap Shot at Christians

You knew it was coming. Yet when it happens you still shake your head at the hate-filled, extremism that seeks every possible way to attack Christianity.

The New York Times ran this headline: "As Horrors Emerge, Norway Charges Christian Extremist."

It does not matter than he does not belong to a church.
It does not matter that he is not a believer in Christian doctrine.
It does not matter that Christianity condemns murder.
It does not matter that Christians the world over condemned the actions of this likely insane megalomaniac swiftly, totally and without reservation.

No, none of that matters. If the NYT gets a chance to frame a story in such a way as to make Christianity look bad it just salivates with lust for defamation and condemnation. Its moralistic "We told you so . . . Christians are evil" tone is repulsive and should be condemned by all reasonable people whether Christian or non-Christian.

Bill O'Reilly has an eloquent and hard-hitting defense of Christianity from the attacks of those who wish the world was rid of Jesus Christ.



If the Antichrist appeared tomorrow and sat with the New York Times for an interview, he could count on their endorsement. Can there be any doubt of that?

By the way, here are three more reasons why Breivik could not possibly be a Christian.

1. If he really was a Knight Templar he would never kill innocent civilians; his job would be to protect them.

2. If he was a Christian and felt called to fight he would join the army and serve in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban and Al-Quaida, which are violent armed groups threatening world peace.

3. If he was a Christian, he would not have left the political party that opposes high levels of Islamic immigration to Norway, which is to say that he would use democratic means of persuasion to work for a cause in which he believed. By resorting to terrorism he became as bad as what he (supposedly) opposes.

The Religious Left Has Its Head in the Sand

Mark Tooley knows liberal Protestantism. He is president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy and has been involved in trying to prevent a take over of the Methodist Church by radicals. He has a good piece on the tepid and ineffectual response of the Religious Left to the bin Laden killing.

After talking about Rowan Wiliams, Brain McLaren and Jim Wallis, he concludes this way:

"The Religious Left disbelieves or is profoundly uncomfortable with the teachings of their own Jewish and Christian tradition, which declare that there is human evil and that God ordained civil governments to repress evil where possible in a fallen world. Commonly the Religious Left confuses the church's role, which is to offer grace and forgiveness, with the role of temporal authorities, which is to punish and deter wrongdoing. Adding to its confusion, the Religious Left disapproves of national loyalties, especially to the hegemonic United States, and instead dreams of a utopian world government that supposedly would better model God's Kingdom. Naturally, the Religious Left rejects any pleasure over evil's defeat, however imperfect, despite countless biblical celebrations, such as Miriam's joyful song over the drowning of Pharaoh's army during their pursuit of escaping Hebrews. And finally, the Religious Left is smugly elitist and remarkably stews over even the fleeting patriotic display of mostly liberal college students in Washington, D.C., New York, and Cambridge.

Elitist obscurantists like the Archbishop of Canterbury will continue to count imagined angels on needle-heads. But Religious Leftists' inability to confront even an obvious evil like Bin Laden illustrates their moral inconsequentiality."

I believe he is correct to identify the denial of the existence of radical evil in the world and particularly in the human heart as the source of all the errors of liberal theology. This refusal to take the mainstream Christian tradition and the witness of Scripture seriously leads to Utopian dreams of bringing about the kingdom of God by government programs and social engineering. When these approaches fail, as they always do, the liberal response is to double down with even more intrusive, coercive and totalitarian versions of the same sort of thing. The result is the inevitable march toward Fascism in the name of "peace, justice and the environment."

A more sober and realistic assessment of the limits of human perfectibility would lead to an acceptance of certain limits on our ability to change human nature and this would, in turn, lead us to realize that not all problems can be solved and not all people can be negotiated with. Sometimes punishment and killing are necessary precisely because this is a fallen and therefore imperfect world. And this will not change until Jesus returns. To accept this is to adopt the necessary posture of humility (and fearful respect) before God that is, as the Wise Man says, "the beginning of wisdom."

BTW - I just want to say that I am not at all bothered by the cheering crowds celebrating the death of a mass murderer in Washington and New York. I consider that to be a psychologically healthy response. What I think is pathological and disturbing is the non-response of the Western Left to the totally sickening and horrible street celebrations held in places like Gaza after terrorist attacks on the West. If you want to wring your hands over the celebration of killing, start there, not on the celebration of the bringing of a murderer to long-overdue justice.

The Immorality of "Moral Equivalence"

Jeff Dunetz has a good summary of the sequence of events leading up to President Barack Obama's shameful and despicable statement equating Israeli self-defense with Arab barbarism last week at NewsRealBlog:

Wednesday’s terrorist bombing outside the main bus terminal in Jerusalem was not an isolated incident, it was part of a ramp-up of terrorist acts by the Palestinians during the month of March:

• March 6: A sanitation worker from the Jerusalem Municipality lost his hand on Sunday when a garbage bag he was lifting exploded, in what police believe was the first terrorist attack in the capital in more than a year. The garbage bag was on a traffic island in the middle of Derech Hebron, next to the Mar Elias Monastery, in south Jerusalem, almost in the Gilo neighborhood. Another sanitation worker who was working alongside the first victim was lightly injured by the explosion. Magen David Adom paramedics evacuated both men to Hadassah University Medical Center in Ein Kerem.

• March 11: Terrorists Sneak into Jewish Town of Itamar, killing 5 members of the Fogel Family three of which were young children, all of which were brutally massacred.

• March 18-March 23 (the day of the Jerusalem Bombing) : During that six day period 80 “projectiles” were fired into Israel from Gaza–70 Mortars, 3 Grad Missiles, 7 Qassams (3/18 10 Mortars; 3/19 50 Mortars; 3/20 2 Qassam Missiles, 1 Grad Missile, 1 Mortar; 3/21 1 Qassam Missile; 3/22 4 Qassam Missiles, 4 Mortar; 3/23 2 Grad Missiles, 5 Mortars) The attacks on Israel from Gaza continue through today/

On March 22 (the day before the Jerusalem bombing) Israel struck back against the projectiles being fired from Gaza into Israel:

On Tuesday, IDF forces responded to projectiles fired at Israeli territory from the northern Gaza Strip. The attack took place in the afternoon when projectiles were fired toward the area of the Sha’ar Hanegev Regional Council. In response, IDF forces fired mortars to the point from which rockets were launched resulting in the injury of uninvolved civilians. Among them was the boy taken for medical treatment in Israel today.

The IDF regrets harming any uninvolved civilians but stresses that it is the Hamas terror organization which chooses to operate from the heart of civilian activity and uses people as a human shield. The event is currently being investigated.

The day after the Jerusalem bombing the president of the United States could not very well diplomatically avoid issuing a statement, so this is the reprehensible piece of moral equivalence he managed to come up with:

"I condemn in the strongest possible terms the bombing in Jerusalem today, as well as the rockets and mortars fired from Gaza in recent days. Together with the American people, I offer my deepest condolences for those injured or killed. There is never any possible justification for terrorism. The United States calls on the groups responsible to end these attacks at once and we underscore that Israel, like all nations, has a right to self-defense. We also express our deepest condolences for the deaths of Palestinian civilians in Gaza yesterday. We stress the importance of calm and urge all parties to do everything in their power to prevent further violence and civilian casualties."

So what am I so upset about? He did condemn the bombing didn't he? He said the minimum of what had to be said? Isn't that sufficient?

No, it is not for the following reasons:

1. He did not blame the Arabs (Palestinians) for this act of terrorism. He left it open that maybe it was just a random occurrence or maybe a Sarah Palin tea-partier or maybe somebody mad at the bus company over a billing mistake or whatever. I don't know what you call this kind of deliberate obfuscation but I call it covering up for one's pals. Bill Ayers isn't the only terrorist Obama is pals with.

2. He did not condemn Hamas for using civilians as human shield in violation of the rules of war and of all civilized humanity. This is another clear message to the Palestinians that their tactics are working and the US can be fooled (or is letting itself be fooled on purpose) into criticizing Israel for what Hams is doing wrong. This statement helps ensure that more innocent children and women will be killed in the future as Hamas continues to make fools out of Western politicians and the media.

3. If you take the last part of the statement literally you can't help notice that there is something Israel can do to prevent "further violence and civilian casualties." It could remain "calm" and refrain from defending itself even though it has the right to do so. Is that what Obama wants? Or is that how he wants his Muslim friends to interpret his words as he plays both sides of the street? Does he want Israel to just surrender? Sometimes you have to wonder what he really does want.

4. Worst of all - by far - is the way he linked the bully punching the kid in the face and the kid trying to defend himself as if they were both the exact same thing: moral equivalence. The Left is fond of this immoral idea that all violence is morally equivalent including the killing of Jews by Hitler in Auschwitz and the killing of German soldiers on D-Day. Killing is killing, they say. Jews trying to defend themselves from unprovoked attacks is no different than aggressive acts of terrorism. Israel does not kill civilians intentionally. They have no rational reason to do so. Killing civilians unintentionally when the whole world is watching and you know you will be pounced on immediately is counter-productive. But when measured self-defense is equated with deliberately decapitating a baby and knifing a family to death in their sleep, we have passed the bounds of the rational.

Let us be clear: this is a morally depraved attitude and a sign of deep corruption and blindness. It is the result of spouting lies about moral relativism for so long that one actually comes to believe them. It is the process described in Rom. 1:18-32 working out in action. Moral equivalence is immoral.

Short Notices

Here are some stories worth reading that I don't have time to comment on extensively at the moment but which are important enough to take time to draw to your attention.


Michael Moore is a totalitarian who thinks that the total amount of money is finite, that all the money belongs the government, and that jobs are owned by "the people." He knows nothing about economics, yet sees fit to pontificate anyway. He is filthy rich capitalist himself, yet poses as a Marxist. Quite a piece of work! See here for proof.

Kermit Gosnell, abortionist and murderer, may get the death penalty according to CNN. If ever there was a case where the death penalty was warranted, this is it.

Barrack Obama should be considered to be an enemy of the Roman Catholic Church. Father Z comments on William Oddie's article that makes a case for this proposition here.

Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari was recently arrested by the FBI after he was discovered to have been planning a terrorist attack in Texas. One of his potential targets was George W. Bush. This is the 38th thwarted terrorist attack in the US since 9/11.

Ruth Marcus is a left-leaning journalist who is getting tired of Obama's lack of leadership. When you have lost the Washington Post, you are in trouble.

George Will explains why liberals love trains in Newsweek. Short answer: because they love to control other people's lives.

Shahbaz Bhatti, Pakistan’s minister of minority affairs, was assassinated by gunmen today while he sat in a car outside his mother’s house, where he lived. See Nina Shea's article in The Corner. His crime? Trying to reform Pakistan's totalitarian blasphemy laws.

Damian Thompson asks when Britain will wake up to the persecution of Christians by Muslims here. He documents the murder of Pakistan's Minister of Minorities, the massacre of Copts by Muslims, and the persecution of Christians in Iraq. But my question is: "Is Damian right to assume that the governing elites of Broken Britain are really against this sort of thing?"

Will Muslim Women Be Exempted from Full-Body Patdowns at Airports in the US?

From the "You can't make this stuff up department" comes this non-answer by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to a perfectly reasonable question.

When asked today if she will insist that Muslim women wearing hijabs must go through full body pat downs before boarding planes, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano did not say yes or no, but told CNSNews.com there will be “adjustments” and “more to come” on the issue.

“On the pat downs, CAIR [the Council on American-Islamic Relations] has recommended that Muslim women wearing hijabs refuse to go through the full body pat downs before boarding planes,” CNSNews.com asked Napolitano at a Monday press conference. “Will you insist that they do go through full body pat downs before boarding planes?”

“Look, we have, like I said before, we are doing what we need to do to protect the traveling public and adjustments will be made where they need to be made,” Napolitano responded. “With respect to that particular issue, I think there will be more to come.

Why on earth was the answer to the question not a straightforward "Of course Muslim women will not be treated any differently than non-Muslim women. We recognize that this is not pleasant for anybody but we are committed to the safety of the traveling public as our highest priority." Now, I would not have liked that answer, but I certainly could see the logic given the assumptions of the Obama administration about terrorism and political correctness.

Instead, she hints that maybe the answer is "No." Is this because a possible change in the "peek and grope" approach is being planned for everyone? Or it is because an exemption is being discussed by the administration for Muslim women? We don't know at this point. But even if a change for all was being contemplated, that would not prevent the "we will treat Muslim and non-Muslim women exactly alike" answer from being applicable.

Can you believe that the Obama administration would leave itself open to being perceived by the public as even considering exempting Muslims only from a policy caused by Muslim terrorism? Me neither.

A Muslim Speaks Out on the Need for Profiling

Arsa Q. Nomani is a Muslim who is calling for rational profiling at airports. In an article in The Daily Beast entitled, "Airport Security: Let's Profile Muslims," she writes:

In the debate, I said, “Profile me. Profile my family,” because, in my eyes, we in the Muslim community have failed to police ourselves. . .

This is the kind of honesty we need if the Muslim component of Western societies is to become truly a part of Western society. She argues for racial and religious profiling using facts and common sense:

As an American Muslim, I’ve come to recognize, sadly, that there is one common denominator defining those who’ve got their eyes trained on U.S. targets: MANY of them are Muslim—like the Somali-born teenager arrested Friday night for a reported plot to detonate a car bomb at a packed Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in downtown Portland, Oregon. . . .

Profiling doesn’t have to be about discrimination, persecution, or harassment. As my debating partner, conservative columnist Deroy Murdock put it: “We are not arguing that the TSA should send anyone named Mohammad to be waterboarded somewhere between the first-class lounge and the Pizza Hut.”

But to me, profiling isn’t about identity politics but about threat assessment.

According to a terrorism database at the University of Maryland, which documents 60 attacks against airlines and airports between 1970 and 2007, the last year available, suspects in attacks during the 1970s were tied to the Jewish Defense League, the Black Panthers, the Black September, the National Front for the Liberation of Cuba, Jewish Armed Resistance and the Croatian Freedom Fighters, along with a few other groups.

In each of these groups’ names was a religious or ethnic dimension. For that time, those were the identities that we needed to assess. Today, the threat has changed, and it is primarily coming from Muslims who embrace al Qaeda’s radical brand of Islam.

This article reinforces my earlier post on the morality of profiling and the immorality of political correctness. I respect this person's decision to place the safety of her fellow citizens above the her own interests narrowly construed. But above all I admire her desire to protect the innocent from the depredations of the wicked. If all Muslims were like her, no one would need to profile any of them.

Political Correctness is Immoral; Profiling Based on Facts is Just

Last week I traveled to Atlanta for the annual meetings of the Evangelical Theological Society. A friend and I drove to Buffalo and flew from there to Atlanta. At the border, we were asked where we were going, for how long etc. and then waved through. A couple of white, middle-aged, Canadian passport-holding guys were not perceived as much of a threat to national security.

Yet, we knew that the border guards sometimes did random searches of cars for no apparent reason and that if any border guard sensed something suspicious about our answers or anything about us, he could very easily give us the nod to pull over into the section where searches are carried out. That is how it is at the border crossing.

But when we got to the airport, we were forced to endure an electronic strip search after having removed our shoes, belts, watches etc.. We were treated exactly the same way as a middle eastern man between 18 and 35 would be treated. Nuns, grandmothers, children - all are treated as being just as likely to be terrorists as young Muslim men. As Peggy Noonan rightly says in her Washington Post column today, this is not an inconvenience but a humiliation. It also means that we are letting the terrorists win because they sin and our people pay the price.

(Of course, we don't literally all pay the price. There are certain exemptions. I would like to see list of those who can fly today without enduring the electronic strip search or sexual assault. Then we would know exactly who the real members of the aristocracy in America are.)

The problem with political correctness is that it requires us to pretend; it requires that we deny reality. Angela Merkel made this point a few days ago when she said that multiculturalism isn't working in Germany. Of course it isn't; the Muslim populations is never going home and it is not being assimilated. Everyone knows that but no one is allowed to say it. We must pretend. At airports, everyone knows that no elderly nun or white, eight year old boy traveling with his Southern Baptist mother has yet brought down an airliner or even tried. But we must pretend that they are just as much a threat as the people who have done so. If you want to see photos of all the terrorists who have been arrested over the past decade click here. Did you notice anything about those pictures Sherlock Holmes?

The single most shocking thing I read about this whole airport security issue does not relate to the humiliation and ineffectiveness of the "pat downs for all" approach. It was this paragraph from Deroy Murdock :

At a Monday night Intelligence Squared debate on this topic at New York University, one of my interlocutors was Debra Burlingame, sister of Charles Burlingame, the pilot of American Airlines Flight 77, which al-Qaeda smashed into the Pentagon. She cited her conversation with an American Airlines customer-service agent who worked on September 11. He checked in Nawaf and Salem al-Hazmi, two of those who hijacked that Boeing 757. While American's seasoned employee found these two suspicious, Burlingame says he told her he did not flag them for further scrutiny "because I didn't want my colleague to think that I was a racist and a bigot."

He didn't want his colleague to think he was a racist and bigot - and the result was that innocent people died. It is not just that political correctness might result in the inadvertent deaths of innocent people: it already has. The Left now has that on its conscience. The very idea that terrorists are evenly distributed among the entire population, which is a central mantra of the Obama administration, is at least partially responsible for 9/11 and unless it is abandoned more innocent people will die.

(By the way, even if the above story turned out to be untrue, common sense tells us that sooner or later an event like that is bound to happen. The insane political correctness being pushed by the Left practically ensures that.)

How the Left seized the moral high ground on this issue is a textbook example of Machiavellian tactics. But it is time to end the madness. What we have at our North American airports today is a parody of security. It is a bunch of Westerners punishing each other for the sins of non-Westerners. It must be an endless source of mirth for bin Laden as he sits in his cave and watches CNN. And it is not working.

But it must be stressed that we do not grasp the seriousness of the situation until we realize that not only does the detestable "strip and grope for all" approach not work and not only is it intolerable to a free people; it is the product of a mindset that leads those responsible for protecting us to hold back from aggressively seeking out and stopping real terrorists.

Political correctness is immoral precisely because it is a flight from reality into pretend land where children and grandmothers might just as well be terrorists as young, Muslim men. And any set of ideas that refuses to come to grips with reality is highly dangerous.

Is this fair to young Muslim men who are not terrorists? Of course not, no more than it is fair to me when I travel now. Life is inherently unfair. Somebody who is innocent will inevitably be singled out. But the problem is that right now scarce resources are being wasted on treating every passenger as an equal risk.

Who should young Muslim men who are not terrorists blame for their inconvenience? They should blame the terrorists. They should blame the fiery imams who preach jihad against the West. They should maybe even blame their religion and its history of violence, invasion, conquest and imposition of Sharia Law by brute force over the past 14 centuries. If confronting these realities is too uncomfortable, that is not my problem or the problem of the West in general. Maybe profiling will help exert a pressure on them to face up to realities within the Muslim community that they need to confront, oppose and eradicate. If so, then we turn the terrorists tactics back on them and make their strategy blow up in their own faces.

Terrorism is evil and political correctness is evil; both must be opposed and overcome if we are to have peace and justice.

Remembering the Victory of Vienna in 1683

David Warren of the Ottawa Citizen explains why it happened on September 11.

On this ninth anniversary of 9/11, I should like to take my reader back, briefly, to "9/10." But, instead of Sept. 10, 2001, I have selected 1683. There is limited space in a newspaper column, so history buffs among my readers will have to forgive my simple précis.

I refer to the date of a very large, outdoor Papal Mass. It was not sung by the Pope himself -- at the time, Innocent III, one of history's great reformers -- but by his legate. The location was the hill of Kahlenberg, to the west of the walls of the city of Vienna, as they then were. The participants were 16,000 troops assembled by King John III Sobieski of Poland.

They had come to face the armies of Mehmed IV: the Ottoman Sultan and Caliph, unquestionably the greatest power in the Islamic world, and perhaps the world generally, since the fall of Constantinople in 1454 had capped the Muslim conquest of the Byzantine Empire. Constantinople (now Istanbul) had itself only fallen after many attacks and sieges over centuries.

Vienna had been under its own latest siege and bombardment since July. The first had been in 1529; another had continued for more than 20 years. This one was easily the largest: a force of more than 70,000 of the feared Ottoman Janissaries were backed by as many reserves, and all were supplied by a vast logistical network through the Balkans. Every conceivable preparation had been made, with the benefit of a sesquicentury of experience, to assure that finally Vienna would be taken. This in turn would open the Danube to further Ottoman conquests, into the heart of Europe.

Fortified by the Mass, the Polish troops went into action. The main engagement was on Sept. 11, 1683 (making today the 327th anniversary). It was notably the largest cavalry charge in history.

In the space of a few hours, the Ottoman armies were routed. At least 20,000 bodies were left on the field, mostly Janissaries, and all cannon were abandoned as survivors scattered in a wild, disordered retreat. On Sept. 12, there were mop-up operations.

I wonder how many of my readers knew the significance of the date that al-Qaeda chose to launch its terror attacks on New York and Washington? We may not remember history, but they do.

Those who forget their own history will never understand their present.

The West Needs to Start Taking Islamist Terrorism Seriously

The Toronto Star has been reporting yesterday and today about the Islamic terrorism cell that has been busted in Ontario that was said to be months away from exploding bombs and murdering innocent Canadians. The Star, of course, is a reliably left-wing advocacy paper so its reporting follows the standard leftist-Islamist slant. Part of that slant is seen in the following paragraph, which was inserted into a story on terrorist recruitment:

Imam Hamid Slimi, Chair of the Canadian Council of Imams, says he would like to see the end of what he calls the “demonization of Muslims.”

“Unfortunately, when a man is arrested with a machete and chainsaw on the highway in Toronto it’s not called terrorism . . . but when a Muslim person does something it’s Islam, it’s terrorism,” he said.

This is boilerplate Islamist apologetics because it seeks to advance the narrative that Islamist terrorist events from 9/11 on down are just random acts of violence similar to a crazed nut on the highway with a chain saw. They are just individuals who crack for some unknown reason and unleash a torrent of violence on their neighbor for no rational reason. They are just isolated individuals whose actions have nothing to do with the mosques they attended, the ideology promulgated by the Islamists, the theology of Islam or (heaven forbid) the teachings of Mohammed himself.

This is a narrative that Islamists and their leftist fellow-travelers want you to swallow. Stated baldly like this, of course, it is blatantly contradicted by the facts. The men arrested in this case were plotting over a long period of time, not suddenly cracking. They had been "radicalized," that is, propagandized into accepting Islamist ideology. They were acting with a political goal in mind, not just trying to perpetrate violence randomly and irrationally. Some of them, it appears, had been to Yeman for training. (You don't get "trained" to snap and commit random acts of violence for no rational reason.)

But it is important for people with the worldview that drives the Toronto Star to keep on spinning the news in a certain direction. Islamist terrorists are no different that estranged husbands who suddenly shoot their wives, children and themselves or nuts who stalk and kill for a thrill. They are insane individuals with no real ideology or political agenda.

This is propaganda. This is false. And this is dangerous because if we as a society do not face up to the ideology and political goals that drive Muslim terrorists to act the way they do and act decisively to combat their ideology and defeat their political goals, then we will lose this battle. It is not just the terrorists who need to be defeated by good police work; it is the funding sources that support them, the theology that undergirds them and the networks of religious leaders and organizations that breed them that we need to understand. The first step to addressing Islamist terror is to understand that it is rational, ideological and political not irrational, random and individualistic. The theology that drives the determination to impose Sharia Law on Western countries must be delegitimized and refuted either by moderate Muslims or Christians or both .

What we are doing is the equivalent of sending out the park wardens to shoot the crocodile every time one eats a tourist. Instead, we need to be draining the swamp. The swamp is not Islam as a whole, but it is bigger than just a few isolated terrorists here and there. Part of our dilemma is that we don't have good conceptual tools or a good enough understanding of Islamic history, theology and law to make the proper distinctions between those who make up the breeding ground for terror and those who are just trying to make a life for themselves in the West. More propaganda that ignores the political, ideological and theological motivations of the terrorists is the last thing we need.

Islamophobia is Mostly Hype

Jonah Goldberg at National Review Online doses the "Islamophobia fever" exhibited by the excitable Left with a cold splash of facts.

According to the FBI, hate crimes against Muslims increased by a staggering 1,600 percent in 2001. That sounds serious! But wait, the increase is a math mirage. There were 28 anti-Islamic incidents in 2000. That number climbed to 481 the year a bunch of Muslim terrorists murdered 3,000 Americans in the name of Islam on Sept. 11.

Now, that was a hate crime.

Regardless, 2001 was the zenith or, looked at through the prism of our national shame, the nadir of the much-discussed anti-Muslim backlash in the United States — and civil libertarians and Muslim activists insisted it was 1930s Germany all over again. The following year, the number of anti-Islamic hate-crime incidents (overwhelmingly, nonviolent vandalism and nasty words) dropped to 155. In 2003, there were 149 such incidents. And the number has hovered around the mid-100s or lower ever since.

Sure, even one hate crime is too many. But does that sound like an anti-Muslim backlash to you?

Let’s put this in even sharper focus. America is, outside of Israel, probably the most receptive and tolerant country in the world to Jews. And yet, in every year since 9/11, more Jews have been hate-crime victims than Muslims. A lot more.

In 2001, there were twice as many anti-Jewish incidents as there were anti-Muslim, according to the FBI. In 2002 and pretty much every year since, anti-Jewish incidents have outstripped anti-Muslim incidents by at least 6 to 1. Why aren’t we talking about the anti-Jewish climate in America?

Where does this "right-wing backlash" hysteria come from? It is propaganda, pure and simply. It is a way of silencing conservatives who raise legitimate questions about what it means to be a moderate Muslim. Of course only a few Muslims practice terrorism, but that does not mean that there is not a large group in addition to the actual terrorists who want to impose totalitarian Sharia law on every country possible. The Left ignores this - to its own peril.

There are millions of Muslims who want to live in the West under secular law and accept the separation of mosque and state. But we betray them when we treat Muslims who want to impost Sharia law, subjugate women and murder apostates from Islam as moderates. They are closer to the terrorists than to law-abiding, peace-loving, ordinary Muslims. The reason the latter type of Muslims love to move to the West is precisely because Islamophobia is a myth and we have genuine religious freedom - unlike the places they are fleeing.

The Awesome Power of Obama: Defining the Enemy Out of Existence!

We can all rest easy now: there is no such thing as Islamist terrorism. All gone. How, you ask? The Obama administration has defined it out of existence. Poof. Disappeared. Ignore those explosion sounds you hear in the background. There is no such thing as radical Islam or Islamism. As Crethi Pelethi explains with regard to the Fort Hood shooter, the Christmas Day bomber and the Times Square attacker:

On May 13, the following exchange occurred at a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee:

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.): “Do you feel that these individuals might have been incited to take the actions that they did because of radical Islam?”

Attorney General Eric Holder: “There are a variety of reasons why I think people have taken these actions. . . .”

Smith: “Okay, but radical Islam could have been one of the reasons?”

Holder: “There are a variety of reasons why people –”

Smith: “But was radical Islam one of them?”

Holder: “There are a variety of reasons why people do these things. Some of them are potentially religious-based.”

Potentially, mind you. This went on until the questioner gave up in exasperation.

A similar question arose last week in U.S. District Court when Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square attacker, pleaded guilty. Explained Shahzad:

“One has to understand where I’m coming from . . . I consider myself a mujahid, a Muslim soldier.”

Well, that is clarifying. As was the self-printed business card of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, identifying himself as SoA: Soldier of Allah.

Holder’s avoidance of the obvious continues the absurd and embarrassing refusal of the Obama administration to acknowledge who out there is trying to kill Americans and why. In fact, it has banned from its official vocabulary the terms jihadist, Islamist and Islamic terrorism.

Instead, President Obama’s National Security Strategy insists on calling the enemy — how else do you define those seeking your destruction? — “a loose network of violent extremists.” But this is utterly meaningless. This is not an anger-management therapy group gone rogue. These are people professing a powerful ideology rooted in a radical interpretation of Islam, in whose name they propagandize, proselytize, terrorize and kill.

Why is this important? Because the first rule of war is to know your enemy. If you don’t, you wander into intellectual cul-de-sacs and ignore the real causes that might allow you to prevent recurrences.

The Pentagon review of the Fort Hood shooting runs 86 pages with not a single mention of Hasan’s Islamism. It contains such politically correct inanities as “religious fundamentalism alone is not a risk factor.”

Of course it is. Indeed, Islamist fundamentalism is not only a risk factor. It is the risk factor, the common denominator linking all the great terror attacks of this century — from 9/11 to Mumbai, from Fort Hood to Times Square, from London to Madrid to Bali. The attackers varied in nationality, education, age, social class, native tongue and race. The one thing that united them was the jihadist vision in whose name they acted.

To deny this undeniable truth leads to further absurdities. Remember the wave of speculation about Hasan’s supposed secondary post-traumatic stress disorder — that he was so deeply affected by the heart-rending stories of his war-traumatized patients that he became radicalized? On the contrary. He was moved not by their suffering but by the suffering they (and the rest of the U.S. military) inflicted on Hasan’s fellow Muslims, in whose name he gunned down 12 American soldiers while shouting “Allahu Akbar.”

With Shahzad, we find the equivalent ridiculous — and exculpating — speculation that perhaps he was driven over the edge by the foreclosure of his home. Good grief. Of course his home went into foreclosure — so would yours if you voluntarily quit your job and stopped house payments to go to Pakistan for jihadist training. As The Post’s Charles Lane pointed out, foreclosure was a result of Shahzad’s radicalism, not the cause.

There’s a final reason the administration’s cowardice about identifying those trying to kill us cannot be allowed to pass. It is demoralizing. It trivializes the war between jihadi barbarism and Western decency, and diminishes the memory of those (including thousands of brave Muslims — Iraqi, Pakistani, Afghan and Western) who have died fighting it.

See? With the right definitions it is all fixed. The problem goes away. Planes and cars just blow up for no good reason and so the government cannot be held responsible for that sort of thing. And, after all, Islam is the religion of peace. Really. They said that if we did not say that then they would blow us up. So religion of peace is what they are. End of problem.

The Three Terrors

Latma strikes again!



Their message to You Tube?

If someone is in fact trying to silence our voices, they will soon discover that they are messing with the wrong Jews.

"We Con the World" by the Flotilla Choir

If any anti-Jewish (oops, I mean anti-Israel) lefties are still reading this blog you should stop reading right now and navigate away because what is below will make your eyes bulge and put your blood pressure up. Just take a deep breath and click away slowly; don't risk popping a vein just to see what mocking terrorism and leftist complicity looks like.

OK, but I warned you!

Via Stephanie Gutmann at the Daily Telegraph I bring you a spoof of the song "We Are the World" by a group calling itself "The Flotilla Choir." Their version is "We Con the World." This is brilliant and sassy. Enjoy!



We await the Hamas response. But surely terrorists don't do satire, do they?

The Leftist Media and the Times Square Bomber

Andrew Thomas at the American Thinker blog asks a legitimate question: "Did "left-wing media" trigger the Times Square Bomber?" He writes:

What's good for the goose is good for the gander, as they say. If it is legitimate for the MSM to speculate on whether conservative talk radio and Fox News could inflame an unstable right-wing "nut case" into a violent act, then the opposite question can be posed as well. Was would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad "radicalized" by the incessant drumbeat of hatred toward George W. Bush by CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, MSNBC and left-wing talk radio for the years during which Shahzad was a US resident?

In 2004, Shahzad bought a house through real estate agent Igor Djuric. Asked about Shahzad, Djuric recently told a New York CBS affiliate, "He didn't like the war and he didn't like the president (Bush)." Djuric went on to say, "I'm a stranger and just met him and he mentioned that. Normally we don't go like that and tell strangers our feelings like that." Apparently, Shahzad had developed some strong emotional opinions, hateful enough to attempt the slaughter of hundreds of innocent Americans. Did the virulent hatred spewed by leftist MSM commentators push him into becoming a radical Islamic terrorist?

Obviously, there is no proof of this. On the other hand, has the lack of proof prevented President Obama and former President Clinton from decrying the potential for conservative commentators to incite violence? If, as Clinton recently stated, he believes the "right-wing media" and blogosphere could be culpable for any future politically-fueled extremism, then he must now admit that the "left-wing media" and blogosphere could be culpable for Faisal Shahzad.

It seems pretty obvious that the left-wing media hates Western ideals, Western history and Western religion. So it has that in common with Islamofascist terrorists. But the question of cause and effect is tricky. What may be said with little doubt, however, is that there is a moral complicity of the media insofar as it hates exactly that which most ordinary Western people love: freedom, personal moral responsibility, limited government, free enterprise and democracy.

So even if the leftist media did not actually "cause" this act of terrorism, it certainly bears some responsibility for creating an atmosphere in which more radical individuals would act as Shahzad did in this case. The atmosphere of hatred toward George Bush, Republicans, conservatives and all those who fail to endorse the leftist narrative of the West is palpable and irresponsible. It is as if the 1960s hippies took over major cultural institutions and imposed their drug-induced, logic-deprived, naive, utopian Marxism on those institutions. Come to think of it; that actually is what happened.