Just The Links, Please

Wherein I write a sentence or three about each.

• I think the Tories missed an opportunity to win control of Parliament outright and Republicans risk doing the same. What must they do? Follow Barone's advice and propose a bold plan that cuts Fed spending to ~20% of GDP.

• Think moderation of radical Islam is inevitable? Think again.

• That Rush Limbaugh, he's pretty clever.

• Education reform--real reform, not the kind proposed by teachers' unions--remains one of my highest order priorities.

• What's up with Anglo-American relations? Nothing good.

• I'll just use the article title since it's sooo good: No, You Can't Keep Your Health Plan.

• When you make terrorists into run-of-the-mill criminals it does damage to both our ability to prevent terror acts and to American civil liberties.

• Islam and Trotsky.

• There are real limits to Obama/Reid/Pelosi's ability to tax-and-spend--whether they realize it or not.

• Hypocritical Democrats aren't the only ones selling American education down the river--some Republicans do it too. It will come as no surprise to most of you that these Republicans reside in Illinois.

• That awesome European model for what America could do and be? Not so awesome. Hey Krugman, are you paying attention?

• A little push-back on financial reform.

• The fundamental problem of government bureaucracy.

• What happens when you prioritize "fairness" over freedom.

• What's going on in North Korea? Obama doesn't really know.

• Another great school-choice column. Love this stuff.

• North vs. South--not the Civil War but Europe.

• Another of my favorite hobby-horses--shale-based energy--and how it's going to bring on an energy revolution. But not the kind my friend Sameer keeps rapping (literally) about.

Enjoy!

If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

Radical Islamism & American Intelligence

One of the British critiques of American intelligence--specifically the FBI--is that because it focuses on crime--gathering evidence to be used in court--it misses things like, for example, guys who are learning to fly planes, but not land them.

So that's one blind spot. The other is the knee jerk political correctness that hamstrung everyone who should have seen Major Hasan for what he was and is--an Islamic jihadist.

On Monday for the WSJ, Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA officer, wrote the best analysis of American anti-terror efforts--specifically w/re: to Islamist terror--that I have ever read.

For the FBI, religion remains a much too sensitive subject, much more so than the threatening ideologies of yesteryear. Imagine if Maj. Hasan had been an officer during the Cold War, regularly expressing his sympathy for the Soviet Union and American criminality against the working man. Imagine him writing to a KGB front organization espousing socialist solidarity. The major would have been surrounded by counterintelligence officers.

A law-enforcement agency par excellence, the FBI reflects American legal ethics. Because the FBI is always thinking about criminal prosecutions and admissible evidence, its intelligence-collecting inevitably gets defined by its judicial procedures. Good counterintelligence curiosity—that must come into play before any crime is committed—is at odds with a G-man's raison d'être. And much more so than local police departments—which are grounded to the unpleasantness of daily life—it is highly susceptible to politically correct behavior.

Powerfully intertwined in all of this is liberal America's reluctance to discuss Islam, Islamic militancy, jihadism, or anything that might be construed as invidious to Muslims. The Obama administration obviously doesn't want to get tagged with an Islamist terrorist strike in the U.S.—the first since 9/11. The Muslim-sensitive 9/11 Commission Report, which unambiguously named the enemy as "Islamist terrorism," now seems distinctly passé.

Thoughtful men should certainly not want to see a U.S. president propel a "clash of civilizations" with devout Muslims. However, clash-avoidance shouldn't lead us into a philosophical cul-de-sac. The stakes are so enormous—jihadists would if they could let loose a weapon of mass destruction in a Western city—that we should not prevaricate out of politeness, or deceive ourselves into believing that a debate between Muslims and non-Muslims can only be counterproductive.

Political correctness is not a principle--like liberty & freedom--for which guilty liberals should be willing sacrifice the lives of others.

If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

Soldiers Of Ft. Hood, RIP

Casualties in the War on Terror.

Whether here or in Iraq or Afghanistan, these soldiers gave their lives for the same country.

I thank them for their service and their sacrifice.

If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

Politically Correct Excuse-Making = BS

My patience for this sort of thing evaporated the moment I read Michael Moore write, the day after 9/11, that we deserved what we got.

It didn’t take long before the apologist industry was cranked up to explain the latest terrorist outrage in Bombay. Joshua Kurlantzick at the New Republic suggested that “After years of moderation, India’s Muslims—including even some middle-class Muslims—finally may be striking back at the discrimination stacked against them.” A piece in Time chimed in by noting that “the roots of Muslim rage run deep in India, nourished by a long-held sense of injustice....” So falls into place the usual response of Western liberals to any acts of intolerant savagery committed by Muslim “militants” —that it is somehow in some way caused by those they attacked, that “Muslim rage” over their mistreatment leads Muslims to slaughter Hindus, Jews, Christians, Orthodox Russians and even thoroughly secular Europeans.

...

Some intrepid, politically incorrect soul might even have the temerity to draw attention to the fact the Islamic terrorists seemed to have grievances against just about everybody, every ethnic or religious group that isn’t Muslim along with all those Muslims who refuse to fall in line with the Islamist project. Muslim terrorists have, after all, killed far more Muslims than non-Muslims in the past decade.

The sheer diversity of it all is part of the problem. There are so many rag-tag Muslim terrorist groups launching so many attacks based on such a bewildering array of grievances—infidels in the land of Mecca and Medina, the existence of Israel, disputes over Kashmir, Russian colonialism in Chechnya, etc. —that we bend ourselves into pretzels trying to define them all as understandable responses to mistreatment.

We are left to wonder why Muslims here, there and everywhere seem to be so badly mistreated and respond to such mistreatment in such drearily predictable fashion, which is to blow other people (and sometimes themselves ) up.

(h/t Ace)


If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

'It's The Ideology (And The Demographics), Stupid'

(with apologies to James Carville)

Mark Steyn's take on the Mumbai attacks and how they fit in to the broader picture is a must read. Sure, he pounds the demographics drum, again, but it's an important part of the advance of jihadism as an ideology:

[...] we’re in danger of missing the forest for the trees. The forest is the ideology. It’s the ideology that determines whether you can find enough young hotshot guys in the neighborhood willing to strap on a suicide belt or (rather more promising as a long-term career) at least grab an AK and shoot up a hotel lobby. Or, if active terrorists are a bit thin on the ground, whether you can count at least on some degree of broader support on the ground. You’re sitting in some distant foreign capital but you’re minded to pull off a Bombay-style operation in, say, Amsterdam or Manchester or Toronto. Where would you start? Easy. You know the radical mosques, and the other ideological-front organizations. You’ve already made landfall.

It’s missing the point to get into debates about whether this is the “Deccan Mujahideen” or the ISI or al-Qaeda or Lashkar-e-Taiba. That’s a reductive argument. It could be all or none of them. The ideology has been so successfully seeded around the world that nobody needs a memo from corporate HQ to act: There are so many of these subgroups and individuals that they intersect across the planet in a million different ways. It’s not the Cold War, with a small network of deep sleepers being directly controlled by Moscow. There are no membership cards, only an ideology. That’s what has radicalized hitherto moderate Muslim communities from Indonesia to the Central Asian stans to Yorkshire, and co-opted what started out as more or less conventional nationalist struggles in the Caucasus and the Balkans into mere tentacles of the global jihad.

[...]

This isn’t law enforcement but an ideological assault — and we’re fighting the symptoms not the cause. Islamic imperialists want an Islamic society, not just in Palestine and Kashmir but in the Netherlands and Britain, too. Their chances of getting it will be determined by the ideology’s advance among the general Muslim population, and the general Muslim population’s demographic advance among everybody else.

So Bush is history, and we have a new president who promises to heal the planet, and yet the jihadists don’t seem to have got the Obama message that there are no enemies, just friends we haven’t yet held talks without preconditions with. This isn’t about repudiating the Bush years, or withdrawing from Iraq, or even liquidating Israel. It’s bigger than that. And if you don’t have a strategy for beating back the ideology, you’ll lose.

(emphasis added)

This is the ideological challenge: Making "moderate" Islam (broadly speaking, the ones who don't use violent means to achieve a worldwide caliphate) more appealing than radical (is there any other kind) jihadism (aka, Islamofascism or whatever other word you like to use).

Look, whatever you may have originally thunk about Iraq, it is quickly shaping into exactly the type of pluralist, muslim, moderate state President Bush always hoped it would be. Sure, Obama will take credit when that happens, but still, Iraq will be there as an example to the rest of the Middle East (and world, for that matter).

Democracy allows for Sunnis and Shiites and Kurds and Christians to all get along.


If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

And They Say Conservatives Are International Narcissists

In Bill Kristol's latest column about the Mumbai attacks, he takes University of Chicago professor Martha Nussbaum to task

Consider first an op-ed article in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times by Martha Nussbaum, a well-known professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago. The article was headlined “Terrorism in India has many faces.” But one face that Nussbaum fails to mention specifically is that of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Islamic terror group originating in Pakistan that seems to have been centrally involved in the attack on Mumbai.

This is because Nussbaum’s main concern is not explaining or curbing Islamic terror. Rather, she writes that “if, as now seems likely, last week’s terrible events in Mumbai were the work of Islamic terrorists, that’s more bad news for India’s minority Muslim population.” She deplores past acts of Hindu terror against India’s Muslims. She worries about Muslim youths being rounded up on suspicion of terrorism with little or no evidence. And she notes that this is “an analogue to the current ugly phenomenon of racial profiling in the United States.”

So jihadists kill innocents in Mumbai — and Nussbaum ends up decrying racial profiling here. Is it just that liberal academics are required to include some alleged ugly American phenomenon in everything they write?

(emphasis added)

Lots of pundits want to paint last week's attacks as something other than what they really were: Terrorist attacks by "a jihadi group of Wahhabi persuasion, 'backed by Saudi money and protected by Pakistani intelligence services.'"

They have essentially the same "maximalist" aims as their friends in al-Qaeda--elimination of Islam's "existential" enemies (the United States, UK, India, Israel) and establishment of a global caliphate.

The motivation for these attacks was no more complicated than that.

It's as nose as the Anne on plain's face.

(h/t Scott L.)


If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

Are We Fighting A Holy War?

The anti-religious want to see some sort of historical connection between the Crusades and the War on Terror. This is something they have in common with the Islamofascists.

Charlie Gibson's misquotation and misinterpretation of Sarah Palin is an example of that.

I think that most religious conservatives--including Gov. Palin, as evidenced by her citation of Abraham Lincoln--believe that we must fight where we believe the fight is just and for just causes and pray that we are on God's side rather than praying that He is on our side.

This, I think, is an important distinction.

From Instapundit

If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

Dangerous & Strange Bedfellows

In the most recent issue of "Natty Review" appears an article by Daniel Pipes--director of the Middle East Forum and Taube/Diller distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. In it, Pipes discusses the pragmatic alliance between "Islamists, Marxists, and the radical Left."

It is both persuasive and alarming.

For the hurried, an outline will be provided below, for those with a few minutes on their hands, click here.

Allied Menace
By Daniel Pipes

Overview: Despite their obvious ideological differences, Islamists and Leftists have begun to make common cause in their efforts against Western Civilization including the U.S., Great Britain & Israel.

Examples: Hugo Chavez's alliance with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; Ken Livingstone the Trotskyite former mayor of London; Noam Chomsky, friend of Hezbollah; Ella Vogelaar, Dutch minister for housing; the Workers World's (an American Communist newspaper) laudatory obituary of Hezbollah terrorist Imad Mughniyeh; Carlos the Jackal & others actually converted to Islam; Norman Mailer called the 9/11 perpetrators "brilliant"; Michel Foucault supported the Iranian Revolution and called Ayatollah Khomeini a "saint"; during the Cold War, Islamists favored the Soviet Union and "the U.S.S.R. receive[d] but a small fraction of the hatred and venom directed at the United States;" the Cairo Anti-War Conference. The list goes on

Why the "unholy alliance?"

1. Similar enemy--Western Civilization, the U.S., Great Britain, Israel, Jews, believing Christians, and international capitalists.

2. Shared political goals: they want coalition forces to lose in Iraq, an end to the War on Terror, the spread of anti-Americanism, and the destruction of Israel.

3. Marxism-Leninism and Islamism have historical and philosophical ties: a stages view of history; crossover of Leftist thinkers like Franz Fanon, Che Guevara, Jean-Paul Sartre, Lenin, & Stalin. Additionally, Marxists have replaced the failed rise of the worker with the rise of the Islamists (ie. the Iranian Revolution, 9/11. et al.)

4. A pragmatic path to power. Both groups are able to subordinate conflicting pillars of their respective ideologies in order to combat their common enemy--here again, Western Civilization. Add to the examples listed above the Stop the War Coalition whose committee members are drawn from the British Communist party and the Muslim Association of Britain.

Conclusion: Where communists, Trotskyites, Maoists, Castroists and others "had been clinging to the dregs of a clapped-out cause," Islamists bring a new proletariat. This dangerous and strange partnership is a threat to Western Civilization which "must be exposed, rejected, resisted, and defeated."


If you have tips, questions, comments, suggestions, or requests for subscription only articles, email us at lybberty@gmail.com.