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HAHN, Germany — As President Obama prepared to leave Washington to fly to the Middle East, he conducted several television and radio interviews at the White House to frame the goals for a five-day trip, including the highly-anticipated speech Thursday at Cairo University in Egypt. In an interview with Laura Haim on Canal Plus, a French television station, Mr. Obama noted that the United States also could be considered as “one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.”... This may seem a minor matter, but I think it otherwise for two reasons. The further we move away from the judeo-Christian identity, the more the fabric of our society rends. Obama, speaking from the bully pulpit, will effect the American paradigm and lessen the already greatly waning influence of the Church. Two, his most recent statement will no doubt be seized upon to increase Islamic proselytizing in and out of our borders and gloss over the real truths of Islam - it is a religion deeply in need of reform and wherever it holds sway, it results in a dysfunctional nation.
In Turkey, Obama declared that we are no longer a Christian nation. Now, in an interview with French media, Obama said that the U.S. could be considered a "Muslim nation."
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We are, or were, the last repository of Western civilization - a civilization founded on the Judeo-Christian ethic. We were, until the left began their war on Christianity in America through activist courts, a Christian nation overlaid with freedom for all religions to be freely practiced. The left, through activist Courts, have made us into a radically secular nation, ripping Chrisitianity out of the public square with severe damage to the fabric of our society. For a detailed discussion of this, please see here.
The history of Western civilization and the history of the Church - both Catholic and Protestant - as well as Judaism, are inextricably entertwined. Socialism seeks to remake society - with the starting point being the destruction of Christianity. That was an explict goal of the left dating back to the French Revolution and their war on the Catholic Church inside France. Marx called religion - in particular Christianity and Judaism - the "opiate of the masses," finding no place for their fixed moral strictures in the coming worker's paradise.
The latest steps in that war come from Obama. In Turkey, he famously said that America is "not a Christian nation." Now, in France, he has gone one further. This from Gateway Pundit, via The Caucus, via Jihad Watch:
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
You've Got To Be Kidding - The One Declare's Us A Muslim Nation?
This Day In History - June 3: Tiananmen Protest, Khomeini, and The Goddess of War
350 – After the revolt of Magnentius, Roman usurper Nepotianus proclaimed himself "emperor" and entered Rome with a band of gladiators. His reign in Rome would only last four weeks. Magnentius, hearing of the revolt, sent a force to deal with the Nepotianus and retake Rome. They slew Nepotianus, put his head put on a spear and paraded it about the city.
1140 – Peter Abelard was a famed French scholar, secret husband to the Abbess Heloise and later made into a castrati by Heloise's uncle when the uncle thought Abelard had wronged her. He was found guilty of heresy on this date in 1140. He was responsible for the creation of the Church's doctrine as regards limbo.
1539 – DeSoto claims Florida for Spain. He would then travel overland north through Georgia and into South Carolina before turning West, all the while in search of gold and a passage to China. He died in 1542, having reached the Mississippi River.
1621 – The Dutch West India Company receives a charter to create trading posts and settlements in New Netherlands - parts of parts of present-day New York, Connecticut, Delaware, and New Jersey.
1658 – Pope Alexander VII appoints François de Laval vicar apostolic in New France - Canada, Acadia, Hudson Bay, Newfoundland, and Louisiana. He was evidently such a zealot and such an enemy of liquor that the other Jesuits petitioned the Pope to name him to the post of Bishop in Petra, a diocese on the Dead Sea, about as far away from them as he could travel.
1665 – James Stuart, Duke of York (later to become King James II of England) defeats the Dutch Fleet off the coast of Lowestoft. It had little effect on the war. Two years later, the Dutch would actually sail up river and raid the Chatham Dockyards in Medway in what was to be a major embarresment for the Crown.
1800 – President John Adams took up residence in a tavern in Washington, D.C.. Construction of the White House wasn't completed until November.
1839 – Governor of Liangguang Province, China, Lin Tse-hsü destroyed 1.2 million kg of opium confiscated from British merchants. This provided Britain, and more specifically, the British East India Company, with justification to open hostilities with China, resulting in the First Opium War. The British were seeking to force China to open trade, and they succeeded. The war forced an end to China's isolation and is today marked as the start of modern Chinese history.
1885 – Last military engagement fought on Canadian soil occurred when the Cree leader Big Bear escaped from the North West Mounted Police.
1889 – The first long-distance electric power transmission line in the United States is completed, running 14 miles between a generator at Willamette Falls and downtown Portland, Oregon.
1937 – The Duke of Windsor abdicated his crown to marry on this date Wallis Simpson, a twice divorced American socialite.
1940 – Was having been declared three weeks prior, the Luftwaffe bombed Paris as German forces closed in. Paris would raise the white flag of surrender ten days later.
1965 – Launch of Gemini 4, the first multi-day space mission by a NASA crew. Crew-member Ed White performs the first American spacewalk (EVA).
1968 – Valerie Solanas, author of SCUM Manifesto, attempts to assassinate Andy Warhol by shooting him three times.
1989 – China brings a close to the seven-week old pro-democracy protest at Tiananmen Square. China ordered it troops to open fire on protesters, killing hundreds.
1991 – Mount Unzen erupts in Japan in Kyūshū killing 43 people, all of them either researchers or journalists.
2007 – USS Carter Hall (LSD-50) engaged pirates after they boarded the Danish ship Danica White off the coast of Somalia.
Births
1808 – Jefferson Davis, American politician and President of the Confederate States of America (d. 1889)
1917 – Leo Gorcey, American actor and member of the Bowery Boys (d. 1969)
Deaths
1899 – Johann Strauss II, Austrian composer (b. 1825)
1963 – Pope John XXIII (b. 1881)
1989 – Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder, with the help of Jimmy Carter of Iran's theocracy, finally goes to meet Allah.
Holidays and observances
Roman Empire – Ancient Roman Festival of Bellona, Roman goddess of war who is described as the companion of Mars. Appius Claudius the Blind vowed a temple to Bellona that was erected on the Campus Martius.
Confederate Memorial Day observed in Kentucky, Louisiana, and Tennessee.
Today is the feast day for the Virgin Mary in Russia, Vladimirskaya, and the feast of Saint Paula of ancient Rome who died in 273. A very wealthy woman and mother of four, Paula turned to religion after being widowed at 32. She became a follower of St. Jerome and, indeed, their relationship may have been more than simple friendship. Paula makes an appearnance in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Chaucer played upon the relationship between Jerome and Paula in the Wife of Bath's Prologue.
Lawfare, Pakistani Style
A three-judge panel of the Lahore High Court has ordered the release of Lashkar-e-Taiba / Jamaat-ud-Dawa leader Hafiz Saeed. Read the entire article.
Warfare and criminal law do not mix. We know that from trying for years to deal with al Qaeda through the Court system. It did nothing to stem the attacks against us, culminating in 9-11. Yet since then, when we put away the law books and took up the spear, there has not been another al Qaeda attack against U.S. interests outside of Iraq and Afghanistan. Someone needs to inform Pakistan of this bit of reality.
One would think that, with the Taliban occupying terrain but 100 miles from the capital and imposing a brutal Sharia regime everywhere they hold sway, the Pakistani's might realize that they are, in fact, in an existential war. But apparently not. A Pakistani Court just ordered the release of Lashkar-e-Taiba leader Hafiz Saeed. He has extensive links to al Qaeda and was behind the Mumbai terror attack. Pakistan's problems are severe indeed, and attempting lawfare only compounds the troubles exponentially.
This from the Long War Journal:
Saeed was placed under a loose house arrest in mid-December 2008 after the United Nations Security Council declared the Jamaat-ud-Dawa a terrorist entity and front group for the Lashkar-e-Taiba just weeks after the deadly terror assault on Mumbai in late November that killed more than 170 people and locked down the city for more than 60 hours. Saeed and Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, Haji Mohammad Ashraf, and Mahmoud Mohammad Ahmed were identified as Lashkar-e-Taiba leaders.
Today Saeed was ordered released by the Lahore court, despite the government’s presentation of evidence that linked him to al Qaeda. The evidence was presented in a closed session, as the information was deemed a national security secret.
The court did not give a reason for Saeed's release. His lawyer claimed, however, that the detention had been unconstitutional and that the release was a victory for Pakistan's legal system.
"The arrest violated the constitution, therefore Hafiz Saeed and his colleagues are being released," A.K. Dogar, Saeed's lawyer said, according to Dawn. "Today's verdict shows that sovereignty lies in Almighty Allah," Dogar proclaimed as a crowd of supporters chanted "Allahu akbar," or "God is greater," outside the courthouse.
Yahya Mujahid, a spokesman for the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, celebrated Saeed's release. "The order shows that courts in the country are free now and people are getting justice despite pressure," Mujahid told AFP. "We hope the authorities will now withdraw police guards deputed outside his residence which had been declared a sub-jail."
US intelligence officials are dismayed at Saeed's release and say the move shows that Pakistan has a long way to go to defeat terror groups operating on its soil.
"Forget what you are seeing in Swat," an intelligence official closely watching Pakistan told The Long War Journal. "More than six months after Mumbai, there has yet to be a single conviction or even a trial of anyone involved in the attack. Pakistan does not have the capacity to try and convict known terrorists."
"Saeed is untouchable, and don't think the courts and the police don't know this," another official said, warning that the continuous policy of releasing of leaders like Saeed, Red Mosque leader Maulana Abdullah Aziz, and others is sending a terrible message to those on the front lines against the terror groups.
"As long as he and others like him are free, Pakistan will remain a terror state," the official said. "Until Pakistan shows it is serious about taking down the leadership of the Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, these groups will regenerate and prosper. And law enforcement in Pakistan will shy away from taking them on."
Saeed and Lashkar-e-Taiba have extensive links with al Qaeda and Pakistan's military intelligence service
Hafiz Saeed is the founder and leader of the al Qaeda-linked Laskhar-e-Taiba, or Army of the Righteous. India has implicated Lashkar-e-Taiba and Saeed as being behind the Mumbai terror attack. Saeed and the Laskhar-e-Taiba have strong links with elements within Pakistan's military and the Inter-Service Intelligence agency, or ISI.
Osama bin Laden and his mentor Abdullah Azzam encouraged Saeed to form Lashkar-e-Taiba in the late 1980s, and helped fund the establishment of the terror outfit. Lashkar-e-Taiba, like al Qaeda, practices the Wahabi strain of Islam, and receives funding from Saudis and other wealthy individuals throughout the Middle East. Lashkar-e-Taiba is an ally of al Qaeda; the two groups provide support for each other, and their operatives train in each other's camps. Lashkar-e-Taiba has established training camps in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province and the tribal areas.
Lashkar-e-Taiba has an extensive network in Southern and Southeast Asia, where it seeks to establish a Muslim caliphate. The group essentially runs a state within a state in Pakistan; the group has established an organization that is as effective as Lebanese Hezbollah. Its sprawling Murdike complex, just northwest of Lahore in Punjab province, is a town of its own. Lashkar-e-Taiba runs numerous hospitals, clinics, schools, mosques, and other services throughout Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. . . .
One Illegal Immigrant Person, One Vote
DOJ has thrown open the door for activist organizations such as ACORN to register non-citizens to vote in Georgia’s elections, and the state has no ability to verify an applicant’s citizenship status or whether the individual even exists. DOJ completely disregarded Georgia’s obvious and direct interest in preventing non-citizens from voting, instead siding with the ACLU and MALDEF. Clearly, politics took priority over common sense and good public policy. This is a travesty. Once something approaching a majority comes to believe that their vote no longer counts because the system is corrupt, then the only way to effect change comes by the gun. That is something the left should ponder as they pull out all stops to make of our country a banana republic with a rigged electoral system that acts as a rubber stamp for their candidates.
A little over a year ago, a six member majority of the Supreme Court upheld an Indiana state law requiring voters present a photo i.d. when voting. The court reasoned, rightly, that nothing is more central to a democracy than fair elections devoid of fraud. Once the voting system becomes corrupt, we no longer live in a functioning democracy. Yet the left seems hell bent on insuring that the system is corrupted.
The left has, for years, fought against any sort of identification system to protect the validity of our democratic system. We have Obama enlisting ACORN to take part in the 2010 Census which will determine the number of representatives to which each state will be entitled. We have Obama pulling responsibility for the Census Bureau and putting it directly under Obama's Chief of Staff. It was only a few days ago that Obama's DOJ took the unprecedented step of dropping charges of voter intimidation against three New Black Panther thugs who clearly engaged in precisely that - it was on YouTube for crying out loud. And now the latest, giving the finger to the Supreme Court and their decision mentioned above, Obama's DOJ has rejected Georgia's plan to verify that those who cast ballots are American citizens entitled to vote.
Georgia recently passed a law requiring voters to prove, by documentation or social security number, that when they vote, they are in fact entitled to vote. But because Georgia is still under a Court order dating back to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 for a history of systemic racism, feds must approve of any change to the state's election laws. It matters not that Georgia voted heavilly for Obama in the last election, apparently. And now, Obama's civil rights division has rejected this law, reasoning that making a person prove that they are entitled to cast a vote places "erroneous burdens on the right to register to vote" and disproportionately effects blacks and hispanic voters.
This is just amazing. Secretary of State Karen Handel stated the obvious when she opined that the DOJ's decision "opens the floodgates for non-citizens to vote in the state." No kidding. Read the story here.
Redstate adds the entire statement from the Georgia Sec. of State:
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Time For An End to Affirmative Action
A bit of late blogging. Victor Davis Hanson wrote the other day on the need to bring an end to affirmative action as the justification for establishing it half a century ago no longer exists and, as currently perpetuated, and as VDS documents with numerous examples, affirmative action creates gross distortions in society. His conclusion:
. . . [C]reating, recreating, and emphasizing racial identity, especially among elites, currently involves so many contortions that it has descended from the absurd to the outright pernicious-and is becoming a sort of racism itself. One gets the uncomfortable feeling that the perpetuators of the present system-mostly elite whites-find some sort of psychological absolution in such a system that allows them to alleviate guilt without living among poorer people of color, or sending their own children to the “diverse” public schools-two concrete steps that might quickly indeed ensure better neighborhoods and better education for the “other.” In any case, most white elites count on their own connections, wealth, and education, to find exemptions from the unfairness of racial identification. A Ted Kennedy, after all, had affirmative action well before it was based on race.
Unfortunately, unlike a Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, or Alberto Gonzales, President Obama has embraced identity politics in unprecedented fashion-and we are reaping what he has sown. In these first days of the Sotomayor nomination, we are not discussing Justice Sotomayor’s judicial competence as much as her Latina identification-and the political ramifications of such tribalism.
But then only in these race-conscious times could a Barack Obama have entered the racial labyrinth as a well-educated youth of mixed and foreign ancestry, and middle-class prep school lineage, and exited as a representative totem of the African-American underclass.
By virtue of that metamorphosis it matters not at all that he once subsidized the racial hatred of Rev. Wright’s Church, carelessly tossed out the epithet ‘typical white person’, stereotyped the white working class as ‘clingers,’ had his privileged Attorney General call Americans “cowards” on matters of race, and nominated a candidate for the Supreme Court who, despite all the tortured exegeses of exculpation, declared that white males could not possess the judicial wisdom and temperament of someone of her own race and gender.
You see, in matters of racial politics, we deal now only in fantasies rather than reality.
Do read the whole essay. Indeed, it is no more than Thomas Sowell has been screaming from the rooftops for years. For example, see:
The Grand Fraud: Affirmative Action For Blacks, Capitalism Magazine, April, 2003
Affirmative Action Around The World, Hoover Digest, 2004
The problem, of course, is that the politics of race defines Obama and the far left. As I've written before, it is their raison d'etre. Not until they screw us up so badly that we are nearly beyond recovery (which should take no longer than another year or two) will it be possible to use the backlash against Obama and his base to end this bit of incredibly pernicious grievance politics.
Rank Amateur Finds Comfort With Other Rank Amateurs
A bit of late blogging on this one. Its the NYT story about 31 year old political appointee Brian Deese -
- who is not schooled in economics,
- who has no experience in business,
- who has never met a payroll
- who has heard of Wall St. but never been there,
- who has no association with the automobile industry beyond occasionally driving a car, and
- whose entire work resume consists of working on political campaigns,
and who is now, in the words of the NYT, Obama's go-to guy "in charge of "dismantling General Motors and rewriting the rules of American capitalism.".
This is beyond comprehension. Is anyone going to start holding Obama to account before he completely destroys us.
Exceptionalism, Moral Relativism & Foreign Policy - All Men Are Not Created Equal
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
United States Declaration of Independence, adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776
"The danger, I think, is when the United States . . . thinks that we can simply impose [our] values on another country with a different history and a different culture."
President Obama, quoted in Obama Hopeful on Mid-East Peace, BBC, 2 June 2009
With Obama, we see a retreat from the policy of promoting democracy, and a fundamental shift in philosophy from American exceptionalism as defined by our ideals to a world of moral relativism, where we must now accord equal respect to philosophies antithetical to our own.
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We, as a nation, are unique. Unlike almost every other nation on earth, we are not defined by our genetic similarity, nor by a single coherent culture. We are instead defined by devotion to an ideal. It is the ideal summed up in the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence, that that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That idea is what has animated our political philosophy for centuries. It is by its very terms universal, an ideal not limited to our borders.
We have fought to defend that philosophy through many wars, though we have not until recently attempted to explicitly export it. That changed with 9-11. The vile radicalism and racism of Salafi Islam that animated the 9-11 attackers thrived under the autocratic and corrupt autocracies of the Middle East. Thus Bush came to view exporting our philosophy to these autocracies as a method of self defense. Indeed, for all of the talk about WMD and the truly evil nature of Saddam Hussein, the ultimate goal of the Iraq invasion was to establish a nascent democracy in the heart of an autocratic Arab world, and a democracy that as closely as possible gave voice to the philosophy expressed in our Declaration of Independence.
Bush planted a seed in the Middle East which seems once again to be growing. This today from the WSJ:
The results of Kuwait's elections last month -- in which Islamists were rebuffed and four women were elected to parliament -- will likely reinvigorate the movement for greater democracy in the region that has stalled since the hopeful "Arab spring" of 2005. It also puts pressure on the Obama administration to end its deafening silence on democracy promotion.
Although ruled by a hereditary monarch, Kuwait is the most democratic of the Arab countries. The press is relatively free, parliament has real power, and politicians are chosen in legitimate elections. However, Kuwait is a part of the Persian Gulf, where the subordination of women is traditionally most severe. Historically, Kuwait's political process was for males only. But in 2005 parliament yielded to female activists and approved a bill giving women the right to vote and hold office.
In 2006 and 2008, several women ran for parliament, though none won. The women that captured four of the 50 seats last month weren't aided by quotas; they won on their own merits. Their success will undoubtedly inspire a new wave of women's activism in nearby countries.
Almost as significant as the women's gains were the Islamist losses. The archconservative Salafist Movement's campaign for a boycott of female candidates obviously fell flat, and the number of seats held by Sunni Islamists fell sharply.
Thus continues a string of defeats for Islamists over the last year and a half from west to east. In September 2007, Morocco's Justice and Development Party, a moderate Islamist group, was widely forecast to be the winner. Its support proved chimerical: It came away with 14% of the seats, trailing secularists. Iraq's provincial elections this January signaled a turn away from the sectarian religious parties that had dominated earlier pollings. This trend, capped by Kuwait's elections, has important implications. . . .
But now, with Obama, we see the triumph of secularism and multiculturalism in our country. And with that, a sort of moral relativism encapsulated in Obama's view that we should not seek to fan our values. In other words, life, liberty and the pursuit of happines are not the right of every person. We must now accord equal respect to others whose views are antithetical to our concept of natural rights - including to the Salafists and Khomeinists who are at war with America, not to mention at war with Judaism, Christianity and every other relgion on this planet. Promotion of democracy abroad is no longer a priority. In its stead is "respect."
This is not any sort of surprise. It has long been apparent that Obama has no particular belief in American exceptionalism nor the natural rights of men. To the contrary, as I've written before:
. . . Obama sees the worlds problems and solutions through the naive and distorted lens of Karl Marx. By this paradigm, he divides the world up into victim groups. He sees America as the victimizer, and economic concerns as the panacea for all ills. For example, in the wake of 9-11, Obama identified the primary cause of Islamic violence as "a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair." We know that is not true – the typical terrorist is just as likely if not moreso to be educated and middle class. Then there was his comment that the "bitter" folk of our nation, those who take principled stands on their religion and Constitutional rights, only do so because they lack economic opportunity. Obama has expressed a similar view of Iran, positing that between his dynamic personality and just the right economic incentives, the mad mullahs can be divested of their religious principles that now drive their world-wide mayhem and murder. Indeed, he even held out WTO membership as the economic key to defusing the mad mullahs, not realizing that Iran had rejected WTO membership in 2006. They value their religion and their revolution far more than they care about the Iranian economy. For all of his intelligence, it would seem that Obama views the world through a naïve and distorted prism that, in the current circumstance, would prove not merely ineffectual, but highly dangerous.
And on Thursday, Obama is about to go further down this road, treating all of Islam as a single bloc, thus putting the screws to all those who would try to reform the Islamic religion. Salafi Islam and Shi'ite Khomeinism are vying to dominate the Sunni and Shia worlds. Both are deadly enemies of American ideals and neither is subject to change by economic incentive. Many in the Islamic world, here and abroad, are opposed to these sects. Yet Obama sees no apparent difference - a circumstance both naive and dangerous.
Amir Taheri, writing on this topic at WSJ, explains:
For the past week or so, the Middle East has been abuzz with speculation about Barack Obama's “historic address to the Muslim world” to be delivered in Cairo on Thursday [June 4]. . . .
. . . [Obama] granted his first interview as President to Saudi television and, later, made a speech at the Turkish parliament in Ankara. On both occasions he highlighted the Islamic element of his background and solemnly declared that the “United States is not and will never be at war with Islam”.
. . . The choice of the date for Obama's address indicates his attention to detail. It coincides with the anniversary of the start of the first battle between Islam, under Prophet Muhammad, and Christendom in the shape of a Byzantine expeditionary force in AD629. The “address to Islam” also marks the 30th anniversary of Ayatollah Ruhallah Khomeini's demise and the appointment of Ali Khamenei as the new “Supreme Guide of the Islamic ummah”. More importantly, it also coincides with the rebuilding of the Ka'abah, the stone at the heart of Mecca, which had been destroyed in a Muslim civil war.
Rich in symbolism, Obama's “address to Islam” is also full of political implications. Obama is the first major Western leader, after Bonaparte, to address Islam as a single bloc, thus adopting the traditional Islamic narrative of dividing the world according to religious beliefs. This ignores the rich and conflict-ridden diversity of the 57 Muslim-majority nations and fosters the illusion, peddled by people such as Osama bin Laden and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that Islam is one and indivisible and should, one day, unite under a caliphate.
By adopting the key element of the Islamist narrative, that is to say the division of humanity into religious blocs, Mr Obama also intends to send a signal to the Middle East's nascent democratic forces that Washington is abandoning with a vengeance George W. Bush's “freedom agenda”.
Mr Bush's analysis had been simple, or as Mr Obama suggests, simplistic: the 9/11 attacks were the result of decades of US support for repressive regimes in the Middle East that had produced closed systems in which terror thrived. In an address to university students in Cairo in 2005, Condoleezza Rice explained the “Bush doctrine” in these terms: “For 60 years, the United States pursued stability at the expense of democracy in the Middle East - and we achieved neither. Now we are taking a different course.”
That different course transformed the US from a supporter of the status quo to an active agent for change - including the use of force to remove two obnoxious regimes in Kabul and Baghdad. It also coerced traditional Arab states to adopt constitutions, hold elections, grant women the vote, ease pressure on the media, and allow greater space for debate and dissent.
Mr Obama has started scrapping that policy in the name of “political realism”,
. . .In her recent visit to Cairo to prepare for Mr Obama's visit, his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, made no mention of human rights, democratisation and good governance. Vice-President Biden's visit to Lebanon, where a crucial election is due on June 7, was designed to hammer home a similar message: Mr Obama is more interested in the country's stability than the victory of democratic forces.
The problem is that the status quo in the Middle East was and remains unstable. Sixty years of “political realist” support for the regimes in the region produced five Arab-Israel wars, civil wars in Lebanon and Yemen, military coups d'état in eight Arab countries, the Islamic revolution in Iran, and two wars between US-led international coalitions and Iraq under Saddam Hussein. . . . .
We will wait to see what The One has to say on Thursday. I fully expect Obama to continue down his incredibly naive path of treating Islam as a rational and single entity that can be tamed with whitewashing of its ills - which, after all, seems to be what Obama means when he says 'respect' - and just the right amount of economic incentive. No promotion of democracy is necessary. If we are lucky, Salafi Islamists will not be able to recover quickly enough from the Bush years to take advantage of all the opportunities the Obama administration presents to them.
This Day In History - 2 June: The Queen, Witches, Vandals & Sadists
Photo: Queen Elizabeth II At Her Coronation, 1957
455: Geiseric, King of the Vandals, began a two week sack of Rome. The damage wrought by Geiseric's people saw the name of the Vandals enter the common tongue as a word to describe people who cause wanton destruction.
1098 – First Crusade: The first Siege of Antioch ends as Crusader forces take the city. The First Crusade was called by the Pope in response to, one, Islam's massive wars of conquest waged against Christendom for 400 years, and two, the decision of the Fatimid Caliph in 1009 to destroy the holiest Church in Christendom, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The First Crusade ended three years later with the capture of Jerusalem.
1692 – Bridget Bishop is the first person to go to trial in the Salem witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts. She is found guilty and hung several days later. She was the first of nineteen who would be hung for witchcraft. Five others died in captivity and one was crushed to death.
1763 – Pontiac's Rebellion begins at what is now Mackinaw City, Michigan. Chippewas Indians captured Fort Michilimackinac by diverting the garrison's attention with a game of lacrosse, then chasing a ball into the fort. Once inside, they began a slaughter of most of the British inhabitants of the fort.
1774 – The Quartering Act, one of a series of laws known collectively as the Intolerable Acts and adopted in the wake of the Boston Tea Party, was enacted, allowing a governor in colonial America to house British soldiers in uninhabited houses, outhouses, barns, or other buildings if suitable quarters were not provided.
1793 – Jean-Paul Marat recites the names of 29 people to the French National Convention. Almost all of these people are guillotined, followed by 17,000 more over the course of the next year during the Reign of Terror - an appropriate event to commemorate the birth of modern socialism. Marat was famously murdered in his bathtub by a royalist woman.
1835 – P. T. Barnum and his circus start their first tour of the United States. As he most famously said, there is a sucker born every minute.
1924 – U.S. President Calvin Coolidge signs the Indian Citizenship Act into law, granting citizenship to all Native Americans born within the territorial limits of the United States.
1925 – Lou Gehrig starts at first base for the New York Yankees, beginning a streak of 2,130 consecutive games played, topped only by the Orioles' Cal Ripken, Jr. in 1995. Exactly 16 years to the day, in 1941, Gehrig passes away from Amyotropic lateral sclerosis (ALS).
1946 – Today is the birth of the Italian Republic. In a referendum, Italians decide to turn Italy from a monarchy into a Republic. After this referendum the king of Italy Umberto II di Savoia is exiled.
1953 – Elizabeth II, is crowned queen of England in a ceremony televised from Westminster Abbey, London.
1967 – Protests in West Berlin turn into riots, during which Benno Ohnesorg is killed by a police officer. His death became a rallying cry for German's leftists and contributed greatly to their radicalization. Within the past week, it has come to light that the officer who killed Ohnesorg was actually an East German agent.
1979 – Pope John Paul II visits his native Poland, becoming the first Pope to visit a Communist country. John Paul II is credited with being one of the keys to the downfall of communism in Eastern Europe.
1997 – Timothy McVeigh is convicted on 15 counts of murder and conspiracy for the 1995 terrorist bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
2004 – Question - On this day in 2004, he began his 74-game winning streak on the syndicated game show Jeopardy? Answer - who is Ken Jennings.
Births
926 – Murakami, the 62nd Emperor of Japan (d. 967)
1535 – Pope Leo XI was born in Italy. He would eventually be voted Pope, but only served in the position for a month before dying.
1740 – Marquis de Sade, French author whose extreme sexual proclivities gave us the word, sadism, for a person who gets sexually excited by inflicting pain on others.
1835 – Pope Pius X. He ascended to the papacy in 1903, during a period when socialism and science were posing new challenges to the Church. Pius opposed the theological school of thought known as modernism, which claimed that Catholic dogma itself should be modernized and blended with nineteenth century philosophies.
1840 – Thomas Hardy, English writer (d. 1928)
Deaths
1716 – Ogata Korin, Japanese painter (b. 1658)
1806 – William Tate, English painter (b. 1747)
1990 – Rex Harrison, English actor (b. 1908)
2005 – Melita Norwood, British spy (b. 1912)
Holidays and observances
Today is the Festa della Repubblica (Republic Day), in Italy, and the Feast of Saint Elmo
Monday, June 1, 2009
Morality, the Murder of Dr. Tiller (Update - Gov. Palin's Remarks)
In 1859, John Brown was castigated in the South as a murderer who tried to free the slaves at Harper’s Ferry and start an insurrection. He paid with his life. Union troops went into battle 2 years later singing “John Brown Lies a’Mouldering in His Grave.” Today, John Brown is considered a righteous hero for giving his life to end a moral horror called slavery. So is Roetner a modern day John Brown? Slavery was ensconced in our Constitution in 1859 to the same degree that abortion is today. I would argue that even if you take the view that Roetner is the same as Brown, you have to regard what Roetner did as an evil for which he must be punished to the full extent of the law. To do otherwise, you must both excuse a moral evil - murder - and accept the consequence of a breakdown in the rule of law. You should only do that if you feel the evils so great and the ability to end them so out of reach of the ballot box that you are willing to fight an actual war over the issue. It goes without saying that the majority of us do not feel that way.
Art: John Brown at Harper's Ferry
Yesterday, Dr. George Tiller, one of the few doctors in the country to perform late term abortions, was murdered by Scott Roeder as Mr. Tiller attended church. Late term abortions are highly controversial as they occur at a point when the foetus is or may be viable outside of the mother's womb. Most states ban them. Dr. Tiller was long controversial for performing such abortions and indeed, drew protests from numerous anti-abortion groups and public criticism from many quarters including, most notably, Bill O'Reilly.
According to reports, Mr. Roeder suffered mental illness and had previous criminal convictions, though not for abortion violence. He had become involved in abortion protests. The NYT reports that someone named Scott Roeder "posted a message on the Operation Rescue blog about Dr. Tiller that read, in part: 'Tiller is the concentration camp ‘Mengele’ of our day and needs to be stopped before he and those who protect him bring judgment upon our nation.'"
Many on the left are using this murder as an excuse to claim that, because people expressed dismay and condemnation of Dr. Tiller, that fanned the violence that led Scott Roeder to murder him. Their goal is to cut off all speech with which they disagree. But no rational person could confuse condemnation with a call to violence. Bill O'Reilly, for example, never crossed the clear line between condemnation and the solicitation of violence. He never mused on the air "who will rid me of this turbulent late term abortion doctor." Indeed, this seems little more than projection on the part of the left - today's repositories of hate speech and vitriolic calls for death to whom they disagree with.
Our nation has the ballot box so that it need not turn to the gun to effect political change. Indeed, the reverse of that was the basis for the American Revoulution. So long as we can vote and change laws in free and fair elections, then there can rarely if ever be justification for resorting to the gun.
That said, abortion is unique. Many people consider it to be murder and thus, an abomination. Others see it differently, and no one wants a return to back alley abortions that endanger the life of women. It is clearly a moral and a social issue.
There is no language within the four corners of the Constitution that would suggest abortion is a federal Constitutional issue, nor is there any evidence that any of the drafters of our Constitution considered abortion when they were in fact drafting the Constituion. Thus, whether to allow abortion and under what restrictions are issues be decided by voters at the state level without interference from the federal government. Nonetheless, an activist Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade pulled abortion out of the states' ballot boxes. In the most devisive and destructive decision of the last century, the Supreme Court announced their policy preference that abortion be treated as a Constitutional Right.
I think that wholly wrong, and I think it clearly contributed to the violence involved in the death of Dr. Tilley. The perception that abortion is a penultimate wrong and that it is beyond the power of the individual to effect that through the ballot box will inevitably produce the frustration that, like the issue of slavery prior to 1861, is more likely to lead to violence. It is one of the reasons that Courts should stay out of the business of deciding social policy as a matter of Constitutional law for the nation.
There is an interesting exchange in the book Shogun where the protagonist, Blackthore, speaking with the daimyo Toranaga, comes out in favor of an attack on a government by its people. Toranaga responds that such an act is treason and never to be tolerated, to which the Blackthrone says, not always - its not treason if you win.
Probably no one exemplifies that truism more than Civil War era abolitionist John Brown. As James Marsden wrote in a comment on a post at Q&O:
Which leads me into a segue to a fascinating post at Q&O that I mentioned briefly above. The author asks, "[h]ow big would a moral outrage have to be before you turned to violence?" The question and the comments garnered to this point are fascinating, and I highly recommend you read the post and give it some thought.
Update: From Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin: "I feel sorrow for the Tiller family. I respect the sanctity of life and the tragedy that took place today in Kansas clearly violates respect for life. This murder also damages the positive message of life, for the unborn, and for those living. Ask yourself, 'What will those who have not yet decided personally where they stand on this issue take away from today's event in Kansas?' Regardless of my strong objection to Dr. Tiller's abortion practices, violence is never an answer in advancing the pro-life message."
Update: I rarely am in full agreement with Megan McCardle, but in this case, our essays on this issue are pretty much interchangable.
This Day In History - June 1: Scotch, Marilyn Monroe & The Beatles
1215 – Beijing was captured by the Mongols under Genghis Khan, ending the Battle of Beijing. Ghengis Khan was the greatest conqueror of the Medieval Era - and he lived by his famous dictum, "the greatest thing in life is to scatter your enemy before you and bring to your bosom their wives and daughters." That was no idle chit chat. According to a recent DNA study, it is estimated that 16,000,000 people alive today are descended from the the great Khan. As one commentor so dryly put it: "If you feel an irrational urge to torch your neighbour's yurt and carry off his daughters, now you'll know why."
1495 – Friar John Cor records the first known batch of scotch whisky, or as it was known then, aqua vitae, the water of life. May God bless this man, and why has he not been beatified yet?
1533 – Anne Boleyn is crowned Queen of England. She was Henry VIII's second wife, the sister of one of Henry's consorts, and the mother of the future great Queen, Elizabeth I. Henry tired of Anne after a few years when she did not produce a male heir, and had his divorce from Anne performed by the executioner's axe.
1660 – Mary Dyer was hunged for repeatedly defying a law banning Quakers from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
1779 – His plot to surrender West Point to the British exposed, the gifted General Benedict Arnold was court-martialed for treason, though never convicted of it. He was convicted instead of several lesser counts. U.S. military courts have never been kangaroo courts.
1812 – President James Madison asks the Congress to declare war on the Britain.
1813 – James Lawrence, the mortally-wounded commander of the USS Chesapeake, cries out "Don't give up the ship!"
1855 – American adventurer William Walker conquers Nicaragua.
1879 – Napoleon Eugene, the last dynastic Bonaparte, is killed fighting for Britain in the Zulu War.
1918 – Allied Forces under Gen. John J. Pershing and James Harbord engage Imperial German Forces in the Battle for Belleau Wood, one of the bloodiest battles of the war for U.S. forces. The Germans had gone on the attack and were advancing through Belleau Wood. The battle is famous for the heroism of the newly arrived American forces. In one of the more notable moments, the Germans had pushed back a French unit that was in full retreat as they passed a column of advancing Marines. The French commander advised the Marines to fall back, to which Marine Captain Lloyd W. Williams of the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines uttered the now-famous retort "Retreat? Hell, we just got here."
1941 – Battle of Crete ends as Crete capitulates to Germany.
1941 – Following years of Nazi provocation, the Farhud, a pogrom in Iraqi Jews, takes place in Baghdad.
1967 – The groundbreaking Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album by The Beatles is released. It was their 8th albumn and, in 2003, was ranked as the greatest rock albumn of all time.
1974 – The Heimlich maneuver for rescuing choking victims is published in the journal Emergency Medicine.
2001 – A Hamas suicide bomber kills 21 at a disco in Tel Aviv in the Dolphinarium Massacre.
2005 – The Dutch referendum on the European Constitution results in its rejection. That did not slow down the EU. In one of the most cynical end runs around democracy in world history, the EU took the Constitution, renamed it the Lisbon Treaty so that none of the electorate in any country had to vote on it for it to be approved, then reintroduced it. Under this guise, it has now been imposed across virtually all of Europe but for Ireland.
Births
1563 – Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, English statesman and spymaster to James I.
1637 – Jacques Marquette, French Jesuit missionary and explorer wh founded Michigan's first European settlement, Sault Ste. Marie, and later founded St. Ignace, Michigan. Father Marquette and Louis Jolliet were the first non-Native Americans to see and map the northern portion of the Mississippi River.
1762 – Edmund Ignatius Rice, Irish founder of the Christian Brothers, an order that today runs schools around the world.
1907 – Frank Whittle, English inventor of the jet engine. (d. 1996)
1926 – Andy Griffith, American actor
1926 – Marilyn Monroe. She was the great sex symbol of the 1950's, in addition to being Joe Dimagio's wife and, later, JFK's Monica. She committed suicide in 1962.
Deaths
1616 – Tokugawa Ieyasu, was the founder and first shogun of the Tokugawa shogunate of Japan which ruled from the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 until the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Ieyasu seized power in 1600, received appointment as shogun in 1603, abdicated from office in 1605, but remained in power until his death in 1616. He is immortalized in one of the greatest novels ever written, Shogun, by James Clavell.
1968 – Helen Keller, She was the first deafblind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. The story of how Keller's teacher, Annie Sullivan, broke through the isolation imposed by a near complete lack of language, allowing the girl to blossom as she learned to communicate, has become known worldwide through the dramatic depictions of the play and film The Miracle Worker.
In Canada, today is the National Day Against Homophobia. No further comment on that one. In Mongolia its Mothers' and Children's Day.
In Ancient Rome, today marked the festival in honour of Carna, a nymph who lived where Rome would eventually be built. She was worshiped as the Roman's ‘goddess of the hinge,’ whose power is to open what is closed and to close what is open. . . . She favors domestic concerns and can be petitioned to open new opportunities and to close the door against things unwanted. She also has authority over the physical body, ruling the heart, lungs and liver; which is why Offerings of beans and bacon fat (once considered by Roman’s to promote health in those organs) are her traditional offerings.
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