Barrel Strength

17 Jul via web

How true. Unfortunately, sincere belief is no indication of sanity. Else David Suzuki, global warmists, Islamic terrorists, Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, PolPot and their followers would all be sane.

Red Tories were the dhimmis of the Liberals.

The term dhimmi comes from the history of Islam’s treatment of christian and  jewish religious inhabitants of Dar el Islam. In exchange for submitting to the superiority of Islam and the superior rights of Muslims, as well as the jizya, the poll tax on non-Muslims, they were granted “protection”.  Some protection.

The comparison of Red Tories to the dhimmis of the Liberals came to mind this morning as I contemplated Prime Minister Harper’s speech this weekend. He said that the Liberal days are over. I recalled my days working under Flora MacDonald, the standard-bearer for that Red  Tory cause. And I recalled all the Red Tories I had known in those days.

The Red Tories’  basic assumption was that the Liberals were the A Team and that they were the B Team. It was explained to me by my then Chief of Staff in the  Minister’s Office that the Tories would be allowed to rule until such time as the electorate wanted the Liberals again, and by implication it would be the job of the Tory government not to upset any of the fundamental assumptions or policies of the Liberals, lest they face electoral wrath sooner. So don’t get too Conservative, I was told. Keep a lid on it.

I also recalled all the savage attacks I have endured in Ottawa society at various times when it became clear that, not only was I a Conservative, but that I did not submit in the least to their pretensions of superiority. I rejected the assumption, implicit or stated, that the Liberals were, by the mere fact of being Liberal, morally superior species of being. This enraged them. Drove them near to apoplexy, in some cases. Dinner parties ruined. I once had acid in the stomach from restraining the desire to punch people in the face, after an hour or so of considered, deliberate abuse by a couple of Liberals, she now sitting on the Federal Court, after having been parachuted into a riding by Chretien. Fortunately for everyone I just left the table.

So I remember all those days, and I remember how utterly useless were the Red Tories in the fight for this country. They had no fundamental disagreement with the Liberals. They delayed the Conservative ascent by blocking the reunion of Reform and Conservative for about ten years. And that is why they, like the Liberal party they secretly worshipped, are toast. Dhimmis.

Earlier in the week, BBC posted an article on declining crime rate in US with the following chart.

It then goes on to list ten reasons why crime peaked in 1991, as per the notation on the chart, and has continued to declined since then. The first reason in this list of ten reasons is this.

The Obama effect could explain the increased pace of the reduction of the last few years, says one of the country’s top criminologists, Alfred Blumstein. “The prior expectation was that the recession would have the opposite effect. The question then is what distinctive event occurred in ‘09?” The election of a black president could have inspired some young black men, who are disproportionately involved in arrests for robbery and homicide, says the professor. It’s very speculative, he adds, and probably only one factor of many, as one of the cities with a huge drop in crime is Phoenix, in Arizona, which does not have a large black population. “In the field of criminology, you don’t get consistent indicators as you would in physics. There are so many factors that could have contributed.” A separate study on school test scores supports the view that some black teenagers were motivated to try harder by the new presidency.

Yes, you read that right. Crime peaked in 1991 and had it largest decline between 1991 and 2000, which encompasses one year of Bush Sr. and eight years of Clinton administration but BBC thinks this might be due to Obama. As Kate of small dead animals blog  is fond of saying, “Is there nothing that Obama can’t do?”

The Barrelstrengthian collective is in occasional communion with the west coast. Our correspondent Grey Goose has been doing his homework. He reports:

OpenMedia is partially funded by another Tides organization called Organize For Change.

 http://organizingforchange.org/

  Organizing For Change is funded in turn by Tides Canada.

 Here’s a link to the National Post story on how it all ties together

 http://www.nationalpost.com/TIDES+HAVE+TURNED/3859570/story.html

 This group had a major hand in determining Christy Clark’s ultimate win in the recent race within the BC Liberal Party as to who was going to be the next Premier replacing Campbell. They signed up as delegates and voted as a block.

Tides and OFC plus their PR firm FD Element were also the backers of Gregor Robertson and his Vision Vancouver council who were heavily funded to bring in social change to the city. This same group also backed Christy Clark’s campaign.

http://fairquestions.typepad.com/rethink_campaigns/2011/03/social-media-and-fd-element-in-the-bc-liberal-campaign-of-christy-clark.html

 While Vision Vancouver volunteers, and paid professionals like Don Millar, from FD Element were working on Christy’s campaign, their other organization, Organizing For Change were working against the Conservative candidate, Kevin Falcon… so offended were most people at their tactics that even the left leaning Georgia Strait came out swinging against their ethical nature of tactics. Remember, these groups are all funded from US backers.

http://www.straight.com/article-377415/vancouver/green-liberals-foiled-falcon

 The whole movement (Tides) was started by two wealthy US transplants, Joel Solomon and Carol Newell,  who moved to BC about a decade ago because they were dissatisfied with the conservative political leanings of that country.

Both are enormously wealthy, Solomon’s money coming from real estate development by his father, and newell being the heiress to the Rubbermaid fortune. They first started funding small projects out of their pocket but soon developed an appetite for bigger things (Alberta Oil Sands, banning oil tanker traffic on the west coast) and went back to the US for more money from like minded individuals who also had personal foundations.

 Their goal is to change to policies and politics of our country saving us from the fate of the United States, their home country which they chose to leave. They are using any and all means to do this including co-opting politicians and political processes to achieve their ends. They have Gregor Roberts, our mayor in their pocket having first financed his personal businesses to the tune of $430,000, paid for his entry into the BC legislature as an NDP MLA. Financed his and his parties campaign to take over Vancouver City Hall and to this day pay for staffers who surround the mayor and council.

 FD Elements was recently contracted to develop the mayors image as a social change advocate and parade his around New York’s liberal establishment as the example of how things should be done.

 They have now succeeded in co-opting Ms. Clark. 

I  put the whole thing together when I discovered that it was a Vision Vancouver counsellor that raised a motion to censure the CRTC for the UBB decision (I mean, why would a local municipal council do this?) and that was the trigger for me to start digging.

Vivian Kruase, who is a blogger, had been following this group for a few years as she had been a general manager of a fish farm company and was always fighting mysterious and well funded forces who were against fish farming and voila,there they were, Solomon and Newell. I strongly suggest you bookmark her blog site and keep checking it every few days.

 http://fairquestions.typepad.com

If you want to get a scope of how big this thing can potentially become, Krause estimates, in her recent National Post stories, that Tides has spent more than $100 million over the past 7 years against oil sands, rain forest initiatives and even recently, through another group, AncientForestAlliance managed to drag Al Jazeera out to BC to do a 1 hour documentary on unsustainable logging practices in this province.

 They have enlisted the paid assistance of a company called FD Element. This is not a small PR firm…

http://www.fd.com/en/

They are waging the battle for Tides in the oil sands, oil tanker traffic on the west coast,usage based billing issue, sustainable logging practices (they assisted Ancient Forest Alliance, another Tides creation, in getting Al Jazeera out here to expose logging practices via a documentary yet to be aired.)

Their local guy Don Millar (see above reference) was a major operative in the Christy Clark camp) and do all the communication for the City of Vancouver (all Vision Vancouver politicians) plus now have their own people on city payroll in positions like Chief of Staff for Mayor Robertson

http://www.straight.com/article-346074/vancouver/former-fd-element-employee-fingers-gregor-robertons-chief-staff-allegations-dirty-tricks
What is also offensive is Tides is a registered tax-receipt granting organization that is able to seek tax relief from the Canadian government while using US-originating funds to interfere with our politics and issues of national importance.

So why are they also targeting telecommunicatins issues, CRTC and the like? Because it is like candy to a baby when it comes to recruiting 20 and 30 something to their cause.

So now, the federal Liberals have weighed in on UBB and have taken both PIAC and OpenMedia under their wing.

http://petition.liberal.ca/crtc-ubb/

And as of a few weeks ago, even Tony Clement chose to meet with OpenMedia reps and tweeted about it…

  @TonyClement_MPTony Clement

My pleasure MT @OpenMedia_ca Thx for taking time 2 chat with us about #ubbyesterday. Hope we can work together 2 solve root cause #crtc

End of Grey Goose’s report

___________________________________

Dalwhinnie’s comment:

The fact that tens of millions of dollars are being spent by US-based foundations to influence Canadian politics is the story not being covered by the mainstream media, with the exception of the National Post. It would be scandalous of it were not business as usual.

All the rest is a quibble, in which I include controversies surrounding usage-based billing.

Canadians’ access to the Internet is a vital issue, because the traditional way we have received programming has been through tied packages whose carriage is often made mandatory and whose underlying prices are set by regulation. Usage based billing is a pricing philosphy that applies to water and elctricity, so in principle there is nothing controversial there. But when large carriers want to increase the price of reception over the Internet to make it as expensive  as cable television, the people smell a rat.

I cannot endure another conversation or argument with the ignorant about the nature of Islam. You can have your choice of pictures; you can take the friendly version or the unfriendly version, but you cannot maintain that:

1. It is a religion in either the modern or Christian sense of the word;

2. it is not a political or social project, similar in scope to communism, fascism or parliamentary democracy as different ways of life, but sharing the dimensions of a complete social project, with laws, economic relations, and culture shaped by that project;

3. and that jihad is not one of it sacraments.

If you disagree with any of these propositions you are merely ignorant and I have the cure for your ignorance. Read these books:

Destiny Distrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansari and Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State,  by Tarek Fatah share many traits. Both are written by assimilated western muslims, one of Afghan and the other of Bangladeshi origin.

Both are compendious reviews of the history of Islam and the Islamic world, what Ansari calls the Middle World between China and the Bosphorus, well-written, and highly informative.

Ansari takes a much more friendly tone to his own religion than does Fatah, but the facts are clearly related.

Try to imagine a religion where the followers of the Apostles fought a war with the followers of St. Paul, and executed the losers, where John the Baptist’s family was murdered by followers  of Jesus, where Mary and Joseph died at the hands of followers of St. Paul, and you can begin to capture the flavour of the political turmoil  that is Islam. It begins when the founder of your religion is also the founder of your social community, when the distinction between religion and political structure has no legitimacy, and when no attention has been paid to the question of succession by the founder, when the founder’s vision is explicitly political and social.

That is the thrust of Fatah’s critique of Islam as a religious project: that the Islamic state is an impossibility. After reading it you will feel justified in your anti-Islamism, as you should be, you western liberal, you.

But then you read Ansari and you cannot help but agree with this description:

“From the other (Islamic) side, however, the moral and military campaigns of recent times look like long-familiar programs to enfeeble Muslims in their own countries. Western customs, legal systems and democracy look like a project to atomize society down to the level of individual economic units making autonomous decisions based on rational self interest. Ultimately, it seems, this would pit every man, woman and child against every other, in a competition of all against all for material goods.

“What looks, from one side, like a campaign to secure greater rights for citizens irrespective of gender, looks from the other side, like powerful strangers inserting themselves into the private affairs of families and undercutting people’s ability to maintain their communal selves and familial and tribal networks. In short, what looks from one side like empowering each individual looks, from the other side, like disempowering whole communities.” 

The legitimacy of this observation does not argue that the western liberal world is wrong in how it governs itself. But, it does raise a concern that east is east and wast is west, and that the import of millions of unassimilated communalist, tribal and patriarchal people into advanced liberal democratic states, where the bonds among people are much looser and more voluntary, is troublesome to the point of policy insanity.

They do not have to live here, do they? And if they do, why does anyone think they should not adapt immediately to our ways of doinf things, by force of law, if necessary?

Andrew McLaughlin was the first employee of ICANN. He went on to be a policy counsel to Google and later served as the Obama White House’s first Chief Technology Officer. He spoke at the same ICANN conference in San Francisco as Ira Magaziner. He reminded us why the Internet became a success.

>>ANDREW McLAUGHLIN: Thank you very much. It’s been eight years
since I was at an ICANN meeting, and it feels really like I was just
here — oops — yesterday. It’s funny, I was thinking to myself that
I’ll always be grateful to ICANN for giving me my first opportunity
to really screw things up on a global scale.

[ Laughter ]

As I keep looking for new opportunities, though, it’s interesting
for me to go back and think about the early days of ICANN.

So what Rod asked me to do was from the perspective of somebody who
was arguably — and I say this arguably because Louie Touton
disagrees with me — arguably the first employee of ICANN. I got the
first paycheck, although Louie thinks that it was actually he who
signed the paycheck, so he counts, but anyway –

[ Laughter ]

– as the first employee of ICANN, to put the organization in
something of a broader context and in some ways to try to make a call
to action to this group today, rooted in the fundamental importance
of the work that you’re undertaking.

So a few remarks — whoa! That did not seem healthy!

[ Laughter ]

Here we go.

So a few remarks about ICANN from 1998 to 2011 and beyond. This is
a photograph taken of me at the Boston board meeting. See if you can
tell the difference between me in 1998 –

[ Laughter ]

That’s right. I’ve changed my glasses.

[ Laughter ]

I remember very fondly — and I dressed — thank you, Larry. Yes,
I dressed better then too.

[ Laughter ]

Of course the Internet in 1998 had much larger tubes, thanks to the
beauty’s of Moore’s law we’ve been able to reduce the size of our
tubes and make the Internet work better. We’ve alluded a little bit
today already to the staggering growth of the Internet and when you
look at a chart like this, it really gives you some sense of
appreciation. You know, really the early years of the Internet were
so marginal, really they were almost like rounding errors compared to
the amounts of traffic that are being carried globally today. It is
impressive to see — well, this really does not want to move. There
we go.

It’s impressive to see the growth. This is one of my favorite ways
of showing data. It’s called gap minder, and what you see here, each
circle represents a country, just to space them out a little bit I’ve
lined them up according to the human index development indicators and
if you play a time sequence starting in 1990 and moving up to the
present, you can start to see the rising tide that is lifting
basically all humans on the planet into a state of global
interconnectedness through the Internet.

As Bruce Sterling or William Gibson — I can’t remember — once
famously said, “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly
distributed yet,” this graph which really goes up only to 2007 shows
you that we are starting but in our adult lifetimes we will achieve
even distribution of the future in the form of Internet connectedness.

So — oops. Wow. There we go.

Looking ahead towards 2015, Cisco has put together its numbers for
the next five or six years, and if you think that the Internet is big
and impressive now, this is just — this is just a graphic. Mobile
data traffic is going to be jumping from about a quarter of an
exabyte up to six exabytes per month. Again, this is absolutely
staggering growth and shows you how fundamentally important the work
of the DNS and IP addressing systems is going to be. This sort of
breaks it down between smartphones and laptops and so forth, and
shows basically there’s going to be 92% consolidated annual growth in
Internet traffic in the next couple of years. That is a further
staggering increase in the amount of data traffic that the
organizations represented here in this room today are going to be
fundamentally important in delivering.

Now, what makes all of this possible, since we’re here in Silicon
Valley, we have to reflect on this — what makes all of this possible
is the prediction that Gordon Moore made in the 1960s that the amount
of computing that you could fit onto a given computer chip would
double every 18 to 24 months. To a quite surprising extent, that has
remained true. In fact, almost all linearly true. If you look at
the chip innovations and their ability to deliver computing power for
a given size and price of chip.

So what Moore’s law means, in a sense, is that computing is getting
ever cheaper, bandwidth is getting ever cheaper, and that means that
ever more people can communicate ever more amounts of data and
information and communications for the same — and indeed falling –
costs.

For example, if you look at the cost of a terabyte of data storage
in 1992, it would have cost you about $5 million and taken a couple
of racks of computers. You can now buy a terabyte of data storage
for $89 down the road at Frye’s and fit it on the corner of your
desk. That’s what Moore’s law means in practice.

If you apply the same principles to a car, a car –

[ Laughter ]

– that cost you $20,000 five years ago would cost you — the same
car — only $2500 today and five years from now it would cost you
about $350.

That’s if we had Moore’s law apply to the auto industry. And maybe
we will.

But for the Internet, what this means is that cheaper and faster
computing brings cheaper and faster Internet. Which means cheaper
and faster information and communications. Which means more
information and communications to and from more people. And there is
a geopolitical consequence to that. After all, what this means in
practice is that the Internet is democratizing and decentralizing
access to communications and information. As we all know,
information is power, and so the democratization of information
equals the democratization of the structures of power in a world
where information is power. So democratization brings disruption and
we’re seeing that unfold before us in so many different ways. In
data, in news, in culture, in politics. We see the democratization
of the tools to create information, to access information, to
distribute information are bringing what I believe to be a colossal
and very welcome shift in the culture of the planet that we live on,
which is to say that we are moving from what I hope will eventually
be seen as a kind of bizarre lacuna in human development in the 20th
century where human beings were essentially treated largely in media
and government and politics and so forth as passive consumers of
product, passive consumers of messages, as passive recipients of mass
broadcasts on TV, on radio, through newspapers, as recipients of
politicians’ messages to be driven home. And instead, we’re seeing
the ability, the cheapness, and the accessibility of low-cost
creation of information and the sending of communications around the
world is, in fact, enabling people to become active creators, active
creators of culture, active creators of parity, active creators of
news, active creators and activists in politics.

This is what’s unfolding around us right now, and in some — in a
large sense, it’s a function of Moore’s law.

If you think about the incredible amount of computing power that
each individual in this room has available to you for free, from
these companies like Amazon and Google and Facebook and Twitter and
so forth, they provide you for free staggering amounts of computing.

And human beings all across the planet are putting it to work.
They are using these so-called Web 2.0 services to change the way
that politics works, to spark revolutions and connect with each
other, to make weak ties strong in countries like Egypt and Tunisia
and across the Middle East today, and no doubt in many countries in
the future.

We see mentos and Diet Coke being turned into a business model. We
see incredibly annoying people get 15 minutes of fame sitting in
their bedrooms. But this is the power of the Internet is to make
this democratization and decentralization mean something and turn
into something.

Of course we have the problem that our borderless Internet
confronts bordered nations. This is not going to strange. The
struggle that Larry alluded to in his speech that we have to figure
out what the role of governments is and how they can enforce and
vindicate their legitimate values and national interests on a
borderless Internet that crosses every frontier that we’ve built and
allows people to connect to each other directly across the planet,
that is still a fundamental tension.

Turning then to ICANN for just a few minutes, let me say that I
share the previous speaker’s, you know, sense that this model which
might have been a debacle and a catastrophe and I did my best to make
it so has, in fact, proven its value. The multistakeholder model
that lies underneath ICANN has proven to be fundamentally important
and resilient in the face of these national bordered nations and the
challenges that they have presented and the interests that they’re
trying to vindicate.

The multistakeholder model requires sitting around the table
sharing ideas and so forth, and I think its importance is fundamental.

I’ve been thinking a lot about over the years many times I’ve been
thinking — found myself thinking about the profound wisdom that was
embodied in Jon Postel and his community’s decision to use the
ISO3166 table for the designate — for the determination of what is
and is not a country or geographically distinct territory, and
therefore, entitled to a two-level domain. If you think about it, in
the early days of the Internet, this was a potentially explosive,
extremely difficult, highly contentious issue. What is and is not a
country is the sort of thing that wars get fought over. And one of
the things that Jon Postel did, some would say quite wisely, others
would say for lack of any better alternative, but was he found a
table created by an authoritative body that allowed him, as the
Internet coordinator, to delegate a highly toxic political question
to another organization that was better equipped and better able to
handle it.

And when I look at some of the issues and the problems that ICANN
is confronting right now, it’s clear to me that there is a profound
kernel of wisdom in that.

There are no easy answers for how to delegate a problem like who
should run dot Muslim or dot Islam or dot Kashmir or dot Tibet, who
should run dot Jesus or pick your religious, ethnic, cultural, or
controversial name. Nevertheless, the idea that the technical
coordinating organization should be as modest as possible and as
deferential as possible to the institutions that have been
constituted and developed to solve these kinds of questions over
hundreds of years, seems profoundly wise to me.

And I think about that because in some sense, a way to think about
the challenge for ICANN today is whether this room of people and all
of the thousands who participate in the ICANN processes on-line can
come up with an answer that’s as good as what this one man figured
out sitting alone in that paper-filled office at the University of
Southern California some years ago.

And so with that, I’m going to close and just say it’s really nice
to be back here. I hope to see as many old friends as I can. Thank
you to Rod and to Peter for the invitation to be here. And as maybe
not a dinosaur but maybe more like a Neanderthal man of ICANN, you
know, kind of unsuccessful evolutionary branch that’s now extinct,
I’d like to say to everybody in this room, congratulations on all the
hard work you’ve done. For all of the reasons that I just said, the
work of this organization, this community, is of fundamental
importance to allow the world to realize the potential, the
democratizing, decentralizing, individual empowering potential of the
Internet and however irritated you may get with one another, however
frustrated you may get, I hope you all will continue to retire for
the lobbies for the beers that will lubricate this process because it
is so fundamentally important that you get it right. Thank you.

See Niall Ferguson on the debt crisis of the American state.

“The United States is on a completely unsustainable fiscal course with no apparent political means of self-correcting”.

Then read Mark Steyn’s paean to the anglosphere, and the decline he anticipates as a result of the debt crisis of the American state. He bases himself on what has happened to Britain. The same welfare dependency generating policies that destroyed the American black family have been tried on the entire British nation, to predictable effect.

“Permanence is the illusion of every age. But you cannot wage a sustained ideological assault on your own civilization without profound consequence. Without serious course correction, we will see the end of the Anglo-American era, and the eclipse of the powers that built the modern world. Even as America’s spendaholic government outspends not only America’s ability to pay for itself but, by some measures, the world’s; even as it follows Britain into the dank pit of transgenerational dependency, a failed education system, and unsustainable entitlements; even as it makes less and less and mortgages its future to its rivals for cheap Chinese trinkets, most Americans assume that simply because they’re American they will be insulated from the consequences.”

More Niall Ferguson:

Here, here and here.

In Paul Johnson’s book Intellectual, the final chapter, titled Flight of Reason, has the following sentence.

There seems to be, in the life of many millenarian intellectuals, a sinister climacteric, a cerebral menopause, which might be termed the Flight of Reason.

After reading this article it is safe to say that Thomas Friedman has taken off.

Hans Rosling, the Swedish demographer is bringing a new understanding to the world of where we are as a species: economically, demographically, socially. Try any one of his speeches and demonstrations on YouTube. You will never use words like “the Third World” or “the developing world” in good conscience again. Our view of the world is obsolete because, unless we have travelled broadly, we still think as we were taught back in the fifties, sixties, or seventies when we went to school, namely that terms like the “Third World” — you know, large families, short lives and poverty — actually represent a reality. Let me say it plainly: the term is a large piece of wallboard which hides reality. Peruse Mr. Rosling’s brilliant work and be changed.

The facts are always worse than how theycan be spoken about.

http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/51628/deadly-fictions/

My perusal of the blogs today and for the past few weeks is enough to generate despair, but the hope persists that people will wake up in time. That is because I am hopeful by nature, not because I know the outcome.

Non-discrimination and Islam

1. The would-be Portland bomber tries to blow up adults and children at a Christmas-tree lighting ceremony. Of thousands of reports, 75% fail to report that the bomber is a Muslim.
2. Elisabeth Sabbaditsch-Wolff is on trial in Austria for expounding the doctrines of Islam. The European Commission is about to pass a law that makes criticism of Islam effectively illegal.
3. Airport pat-downs continue to try to protect against a threat that we dare not name. Israeli airport secuity measures are criticized for “profiling” Muslims.  A counterblast points out that the article might have ignored the fact that Muslims are Israel’s chief security threat. Of course, they are our chief security threat. Robert Spencer makes this point: it is time to profile according to who causes the risk.

Economic collapse

1. You can run an immigrant society or a welfare state, but you cannot have both, as Europe is discovering. You cannot vastly expand state expenditures, collapse the birth rate and attach increasingly dysfunctional immigrants (from Muslim countries largely) to the welfare system, and still remain solvent.
2. Expect one European country to go under every six months until something more dranatic happens (Greece, Portugal, Ireland and so forth).

Given what we have been doing since World War II cannot be sustained, and give that the evidence for this is to be found in ruinous economic and demographic policies, some discussion of these ideas is in order.

What is Islam?

Is Islam:

a) a totalitarian political ideology? or

b) a mass psychosis? or

c) the religion of a raiding party of slave-drivers?

Discuss. See for instance, “The Principle of Abrogation in The Quran“. The difference between moderate and radical Islam is the speed at which world domination is to be achieved.

Every day that passes I increasingly think David Warren is both right and prescient.

Welcome to our weekly donnybrook, in which most Barrelstrengthians take vigorous exception to some moderate, well reasoned view of Oban.  Today’s rumble is on Islam/Palestine/Israel. Rebel Yell started it with a piece in the Jerusalem Post praising Harper at Obama’s expense.

Prime Minister Harper may not get many kudos from our drivelling liberal press,
but his positions are certainly not viewed the same way where it matters in the
world….. (cites Jerusalem Post on Harper versus Obama).

Then Arran Gold chimes in

“I voted for Obama and all I got was a crotch-cupping”.

Oban tries to be reasonable, as is his wont:

My observation is that for a Canadian PM full throated support for Israel is cheap – it starts to shake Jewish support from the Liberal Party, appeals to religous fundamentalists, and is largely a reflection of domestic political interests and calculations.
 
The US has different interests.  An Israeli-Palestinian peace would relieve a major irritant in its relations with the Muslim world, much of Europe and Africa.  No US President has viewed Israeli settlements with any enthusiasm, and all have seen colonisation of the West Bank as a serious impediment to finding a peaceful settlement to the Arab-Israeli conflicts.  Papa Bush, Baby Bush and Clinton all have opposed extension of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and been extremely sensitive to development in Jerusalem.  That is because an Arab-Israeli peace is in the interests of the United States.  The Obama government senses an opportunity for a settlement and wants Israel to back off of provocative development schemes while the parties negotiate.  That seems reasonable to me.  If the area in which development is presently restrained emerges as part of Israel after a peace accord, then settlement can go ahead.

If not, then the development shouldn’t take place – at least for some  reasonable period to permit negotiations to proceed.   

 
It seems to me that the differing Canadian and US positions are ones of nuance.  Canada has no role in overseeing the settlement process.  It has neither the power, credibility or interest to sponsor or guarantee the end result.  For the US, it has huge interests in the outcome of the process, will likely be its primary guarantor as well as a beneficiary
of peace.  If it were Canada that were to sponsor the peace talks, you can bet without a shadow of doubt that it would be very sensitive to Israeli settlements outside the boundaries of 1967 Israel, as it would be of Arab terrorism, militias in Lebanon, etc. etc.
 

At this point, everyone piles on Oban. Arran Gold chides Oban in these  terms:

Oban, your view of this is very western, very white, very christian and totally leftist.

I once met a captain in the Canadian military who had just returned from a peacekeeping mission in the Balkans.  I talked to him about his mission and he shared some insights.  He said that they said to him “Why are you guys getting involved in this?  This fight is centuries old”.  Essentially both sides were waiting for them to leave so that they could at it again.  Similarly, there is no reason to believe that a “peace” agreement will be the end of it as far as muslims are concerned.  It sure isn’t likey to “relieve a major irritant … with the Muslim world”

I get my oar in as follows:

I agree with Arran Gold’s remarks (on Brother Oban), save with regard to “leftist”. I
think many sensible people share Oban’s views. I no longer consider them realistic.

The point I have reached in re the Israeli thing is that it would make little difference to Arab opinion if Israel subjected the Palestinians to a march past under a triumphal arch and then slaughtered every male older than 12, and filmed it, as regards how the Muslims look at israel.

This reflects my increased understanding of Islam, which sees the Jews as a hideous uncleanness that must be extirpated from the face of the earth, and in which Islam is either or any of the following:

a) a totalitarian political ideology (sharia)
b) a psychosis (Arab male dominated family structure, and incessant violence within the family, and a defence against shame)
c) an ideological justification of slavery, both of chattel slavery (Christians in the past, and possibly the future) and sexual slavery (of women).

I have, as it were,”jumped the shark”. But I invite all who think this view to be extreme to read the texts and see the propaganda of Islam itself, and see how they actually treat each other. Then you decide.

Rebel Yell cannot resist  rejoinder.

Folks:

“Relieving an irritant” is a major red-herring in the political discourse.  It
stems from a misunderstanding of the Israeli-Islamic stand-off.  

Islam will never be satisfied until Israel is eliminated and the Jews destroyed.
 ”Occupation” to the Muslims means the very existence of Israel itself.  It was
not “cheap” at all for PM Harper to make that stand–”cheap” would have been
kow-towing to the Islamic bloc in the UN–something the Liberals would do only
too willingly under the slippery guidance of Iggy.  

“The Obama government senses an opportunity for a settlement”.. No it doesn’t.
 It senses a further opportunity to ingratiate itself before Muslim despots and
drag America’s reputation through the mud again.  America has done great works
for freedom, not the least of which is standing up for the small guy threatened
by an army of ignorant thugs, a.k.a. in this case, the Islamic world.  The Arabs
would not have lost the West Bank had they not on several occasions tried to
destroy Israel, so tough luck on losing the property.  Despite that, on several
occasions, Israel has made offers of returning upwards of 95% of the lands, only
to be rebuffed again by the Arabs.  

The different positions of the Obama regime and the Canadian government are
considerably more than “nuance”, a flaccid word for a flabby position on a
crucial topic.  PM Harper was quite right and deserves extra kudos for taking
such a spirited stand.  On the other hand, Hussein took the opportunity of
bashing Israel again in Indonesia, his homeland, a land which doesn’t even allow
Israeli citizens to visit, and which treated his own wife with contempt and with
no objection from him.  If Hussein’s understanding of the Islamic world really
is reflected in the appallingly inaccurate speech he gave at Cairo university,
then Israel would do well to avoid all his suggestions as much as possible.

When Islamic countries allow Christians and Jews and Hindus etc. to live as
citizens with equal rights, then there might be a possibility of a settlement.
 I don’t see it happening any time soon.  And until that time, Israel should
stay alert and not be sucked in to devious arrangements with any state.  The
Muslim nations have to show that they can live up to an agreement, ANY
AGREEMENT, and stick to it.  We all know what their record is on that one.

And when Iran gets the Bomb, all the “nuance-ing” in the world is not going to
produce any settlement.  And the Appeaser-in-Chief will have some ’splainin to
do.

Caol Illa responds to Oban:

While I respect your opinion I think your analysis of the situation is at least 20 years out of date.

Regarding the political situation in Canada it is a fact that for the last 60 years, at least,the Liberal Party sought the support of the Jewish community and received it. As a result the Liberals won a number of ridings they would not otherwise have held. The Liberals rewarded the loyalty of the Jewish community so long as there was not a better deal elsewhere. Then the demographics changed, Muslims became more numerous than Jews and the Liberals abandoned Israel in favour of the Palestiians. The Conservatives have not won a seat in which the Jewish community was a significant factor until 2008, when they won the riding of Thornhill. Ridings like York Centre, Eglington-Lawrence and Mount Royal remain Liberal. Even in the Mulroney sweep of 1984 all these ridings voted Liberal. Even though the Liberals have abandoned the Jews, the Jews, especially the secular Jews have not abandoned the Liberals. Therefore, I think you are wrong to suggest that our PM is supporting Israel for narrow partisan purposes.

As for there being any hope for a “peacful settlement to the Arab-Israeli conflicts” I would say that whereas that might once have been possible, those days are long past and I think your opinion may be based more on wishful thinking than an analysis of what is happening on the ground in Gaza and the West Bank.  Not only did the former Palestinian leadership torpedo the Oslo Accord, more important the new elected government of Gaza, Hamas, have repeatedly stated they are not interested in a peaceful settlement of the Palestinian conflict. Hamas’ chief supporter, Iran claims it wants to annihilate Israel. That replaces the former PLO policy regarding Israel of “driving them into the sea”.  I cannot find the seeds of a peaceful solution in those policies. Just to be clear about its intentions Hamas continues to fire rockets into random targets in Israel even when it knows Israel is bound to retaliate. Not the actions of those desiring peace.

I am glad Stephen Harper has stood up to the illiterate, hate fueled thugs who rule the Arab world. With Obama’s abandonment of Israel somebody needs to stand up and say we will not sit idly by while the only  pluralistic liberal democracy in the Middle East is bullied by it’s much larger neighbours.  At this point it is diplomatic support and not military action that Israel needs.  If Obama is too foolhardy to do it I am glad we have a Stephen Harper around to do so. I wish the world had a few more leaders with the strength of character to stand up for what is right instead of what is politically expedient.

Oban is still talking to us.

read this, from Peter Oborne of the Telegraph: ringing defence of the family and marriage, ending culture of wlefare dependency, and so forth. Also read the letter-writers who disagree strongly with his positive assessment of the Cameron/Clegg coalition.

“The Crisis of Islamic Civilization” was written by Ali A. Allawi, a former Minister of Defence and of Finance in the post-war Iraqi government. I recommend it highly even as I disagree with several of its peripheral arguments.

Allawi is is hugely learned, and not without sympathy for other religions than Islam. Accordingly you will find yourself beguiled by the  tone even if you remain unpersuaded by the arguments. Partly his book arouses sympathy because no Canadian or American politician now in office could ever produce anything so learned and well-written. Partly it arouses sympathy because it is the cri de coeur of a genuinely religious man confronting the all-powerful monster of technological civilization. David Warren, meet Ali Allawi. You have much in common.

“A root principle in the world view of Islam is that no individual or social group, if it seeks harmony and justice, can assume the absolute power to determine its own ethical standards of conduct. The operative phrase here is the qualification regarding harmony and justice. There are any number of ethical models and norms of morality …which do not seek their justification in anything but reason, utility personal desire or natural rights. But Islam would venture that these cannot but be unstable”

“It becomes clear now that the claim for the absolute autonomy for man in the design of the moral universe is in itself an invalid and false claim within the framework of Islamic reasoning.”

1. Substitute the word “Christian” for Islamic in the above paragraphs and see if it makes any difference. I submit that the Pope would agree to them in that case, too.

2. If this is so, wherein lies the difference between the two revealed religions?

The answer, to the extent that one can be stated simply, seems to lie in the fixity with which all social relations and intellectual possibilities were cemented by Shari’a.  Islamic law (Shari’a) is immutable and comprehensive. The people authorized to consider it are limited to a narrow class of learned men and to a narrow range of topics. When everything has been revealed, the role of reason is merely to clean up the inconsistencies and gaps in the revelation, to the extent that such possibilities could be admitted at all. The effect on inquiry at all levels of Islamic behaviour has been devastating. Ayaan Hirsi Ali recounts how her mother would slap her face for asking any question at all, no matter how remote from religion. Is it too much to argue that the hostility to questioning of any kind has its roots in Islam, and not tribal Somali culture?

I do not wish to imply that this book makes ultimately coherent or satisfactory arguments; I only wish to draw to your attention a book that reveals that a highly educated Muslim feels that Islam could well be on its last legs.

“The quest for continuous material improvement, a rising standard of living, and an almost fetishistic belief in the power of science and technology is now a nearly universalcondition….The response in the West has been to accept the process of secularization as an inevitable consequence of the general increase in wealth and power. The same recipe is being offered to Islam. Reformers, both in the Muslim world and outside are, in effect, calling for a ‘Christianization; of Islam, a final break between the sacred and the profane in the world of Islam….

“Radical Islamists, and even the rank and file of ‘rationalist’ Muslims, suffer from a different conceit, namely that, by picking and choosing from the menu of change, a happy compromise between Islam and what is acceptable from modernity can be fashioned. This approach, which has been entertained for over a century, has neither produced satisfactory material progress nor strengthened the foundations  of Islamic civilization in any way. The fundamental conundrum for all such rationalists and radicals is that the change they are facing is a product of a different and ascendant civilizational order”.

“If Muslims want the very things that modern technological civilization promises and in some cases has delivered, they have to acknowledge the roots of this civilization in order to become active  and creative part in it. Otherwise they will simply become a parasitic attachment to it. It is difficult to see how Islam can contribute to this civilization while rejecting or questioning its premises.”(pp.271-272)

Nor does he hold out hope for political Islam.

“The success of political Islam may, paradoxically, prove to be the last crisis of Islamic civilization. For it will remove, once and for all, the possibility that the political route could ever be the basis for rejuvenating or refashioning the elements of a new Islamic civilization.” (p.253)

Allawi’s book is a useful insight into how the crisis of modernity appears to a pious and worldly Muslim. They are at the same stage that Christian society was in 1500, and we had 500 years of religious war and scientific progress, with the accompanying changes of mores and ideals, in which to adapt. They have scarcely had 50.

You will not agree with Allawi on many points. Certainly I do not. The review by the Christian Arab Raymond Ibrahim nails those faults accurately. My point is that it is occasionally useful, in the gloom of apparently  impending dhimmitude,  to realize that Islam is cosmically fucked. Allawi explains why, and even the faults of his argument illustrate the truth of his fundamental assertion.

Guardian headline — Sweden joins Europe-wide backlash against immigration:
 

In a country that elevated social democracy into the natural form of government for decades, Maria has been a loyal stalwart. The 66-year-old retired canteen worker has always voted for Sweden’s Social Democratic party, like the vast majority in her working-class suburb of Malmo. Until last Sunday, that is. That morning Maria broke the habit of a lifetime and in doing so helped redraw the map of Swedish politics. She voted for an extreme-right movement accused of being Islamophobic that broke into parliament in Stockholm for the first time, probably condemning the country to a fragile minority government.

It is a shockingly accurate account of what is going on in Europe today. How can a nation of nine million take in 100,000 largely muslim immigrants a year? 100,000/9,000,000= 11% growth of foreign unemployables a year? Every year? And you womder why it took them so long to start complaining?