Demographics Trump Idealism
Mark Steyn asks one of those unpleasant questions…
If Fatma An-Najar [ a suicide bomber] has 41 grandchildren and a responsible “better educated” Episcopalian has one or two, into whose hands are we delivering “the stewardship of the earth”? If your crowd isn’t around in any numbers, how much influence can they have in shaping the future? more
R.I.P. Oriana Fallaci
One of the most passionate and eloquent defenders of Western civilization has died. She fought against the dhimmitude of her fellow Europeans until the very end. She was a great lady and will be missed.
Oriana Fallaci 1929-2006
There are 1.3 billion Muslims. The fellow holding the sign, we are assured, is not typical. More likely, he illustrates the downside of encouraging cousins to marry for a few dozen generations. Polls suggest that only about 100 million Muslims are medieval fanatics. The remaining 1.2 billion are ordinary folks who want to live and let live— right?
They’ve been so quiet about the atrocities committed by their co-religionists because, well…they’re busy, you know? They’ve got lives. It’s not like they’ve just been standing on the sidelines waiting to see who wins, is it?If Catholic fanatics were blowing up innocent people we wouldn’t expect the average Catholic to protest, would we? It isn’t as if Catholics have reacted to Church leaders’ complicity in protecting pederasts with a significant drop in church attendance. Oh, wait…they have. Must be a cultural thing. Catholics get upset when innocent people are victimized. Muslims don’t, apparently, although groups like CAIR get terribly upset if anyone dares criticize Muslims for shrugging off evil. That’s a kind of empathy, I guess. They do have feelings, after all. God forbid that anyone should publish a cartoon featuring Mohammed. You’ll see some serious umbrage then.
Right-thinking folks are careful to remind us that not all Muslims are terrorists, even if nearly all terrorists are Muslim. But the hard reality is that the global jihad will end only when moderate Muslims become sufficiently inconvenienced. Pogroms. Mosque burnings. Daily Muslim-only flights — that sort of thing. Then they might be motivated to rein in their more impetuous brethren. Such a sea change would require a truly hideous provocation and an even more horrific response. Nobody (except perhaps the 100 million nutjobs) wants that.
After five years, it’s hard to find cause for optimism. The crazies still bomb and behead. The Islamic majority shrug. The few remaining defenders of Western civilization half-heartedly prosecute the Warn Terr without ever quite daring to name the real enemy (although President Bush has of late used the remarkably un-PC term “Islamic fascists”). The press barely mentions a terrorist attack in Seattle but spends days analyzing Mel Gibson’s drunken rantings, and utterly ignores the discovery of two improperly-assembled suitcase bombs on trains in Germany — a country one would think an unlikely object of Islamic ire. We’re maybe one more exploding shampoo scare away from having to fly everywhere in our skivvies.
And the Left sits up nights worrying about the weather and George Bush.
God help us. Or Allah. These days, one can’t be picky.
The missing WMD…news stories
Fox News reports that recently-declassified documents state that more than 500 WMD’s, most containing degraded mustard gas or sarin, have been found in Iraq since 2003. Their existence supposedly has been kept under wraps to reduce the possibility that yet-undiscovered caches might fall into the hands of terrorists. Let’s check the headlines of other news outlets to confirm this startling story:
CBS — “Is Insurgency Thriving Since Zarqawi?” No WMD’s here…
ABC — “Saddam Lawyer Killed; Iraq Workers Seized” Nope…
CNN — “Attacks Kill 5 U.S. Servicemembers in Iraq” Very sad…
MSNBC — “Hastert, other lawmakers defend big profits” No Iraq news here…but we can find out “Why U.S. has bad reputation in Europe”
NY Times — “Hussein Lawyer Seized and Slain in Baghdad Raid” This story keeps popping up. If the lawyer turned out to be Ramsey Clark, I’d be interested…
LA Times — “Deal Puts Mayor on Verge of Major School Control” Actually, not true at all; he came back from Sacramento with his tail between his legs, but we should not expect headlines to reflect story content. Perhaps the WMD story will appear on page A-17 of the print edition, where news that might generate cognitive dissonance is usually sequestered.
Can you hear the tumbleweeds rustling in the wind… the crickets chirping? The inconvenient fact will be ignored to death.
more on the documents
more on the media silence
Dennis Prager explains why liberals fear global warming more than conservatives do…
…After all, if the science is as conclusive as Al Gore, Time, Newsweek, The New York Times and virtually every other spokesman of the Left says it is, conservatives are just as likely to be scorched and drowned and otherwise done in by global warming as liberals will. So why aren’t non-leftists nearly as exercised as leftists are? Do conservatives handle heat better? Are libertarians better swimmers? Do religious people love their children less? (more)
The "Migration Phenomenon"
Every so often, the universe contrives a juxtaposition of disconnected events that seems designed to teach a hard lesson — as if God were saying, “Look, you idiots. Isn’t it painfully obvious that you are doing something seriously wrong? How dumb can you be, anyway?”
Today, my son was mugged on the way home from school. He’s fine. Just a bit shaken up, but pissed off. Five Latino gang members stole his iPod. A witness noticed the first three numbers of their license plate. It’s quite likely that the police will be able to visit one of their mothers and annoy her for five minutes before she has to leave to do a job that an American won’t do. The iPod won’t be recovered. The kids won’t be prosecuted. They will probably commit more petty crimes, and maybe graduate to grand larceny and even murder. With luck, these anchor babies will spend a significant part of their youth in prison.
Almost simultaneous with the assault on my son, the United States Senate mugged the rest of us by passing a bill that would guarantee a geometric increase in such criminality: the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act. A few hours later, Mexican President Vicente Fox addressed the California Legislature, reciting obvious lies that were met with enthusiastic applause — from the stewards of a state that spends $10 billion a year to cover costs incurred by illegal immigrants.
Inmates. Asylum. Write your own cliche. If the entire population of Ireland decided to relocate to Scotland, the infrastructure of the land of lochs would utterly collapse, but the Senate bill encourages a similar influx from Mexico.
It also authorizes the use of up to 6,000 National Guard troops along the border, which sounds impressive until you do the math. If they work 8-hour shifts, with weekends off, actual coverage at any moment is fewer than one soldier per mile of border. It’s probable that many guest workers will be able to sneak through such a barricade— but perhaps the Guard is really there to catch Minutemen.
In his speech, President Fox repeatedly spoke of “the migration phenomenon” — as if describing wildebeests in a National Geographic special — wildebeests who happened to have sent home $60 billion during his presidency. It would be amusing, and perhaps even useful, if critics of “the migration phenomenon” henceforth described the Mexican migrants with a more accurate word: refugees. Perhaps that might shame the Mexican government into pursuing real reform.
If You Scare Them, They Will Pay
Readers who have managed to survive Bird Flu, West Nile virus, Sars, flesh-eating bacteria, Y2K, the Attack of the Killer Bees, cell phone tumors, the heterosexual AIDS epidemic, the global economic collapse of 1990, and the ice age that was predicted in the mid-1970′s, may enjoy Michael Crichton’s lecture about the hazards of trying to predict the behavior of complex systems:
Once I looked at Chernobyl, I began to recall other fears in my life that had never come true. The population bomb, for one. Paul Ehrlich predicted mass starvation in the 1960s. Sixty million Americans starving to death. Didn’t happen. Other scientists warned of mass species extinctions by the year 2000. Ehrlich himself predicted that half of all species would become extinct by 2000. Didn’t happen. The Club of Rome told us we would run out of raw materials ranging from oil to copper by the 1990s. That didn’t happen, either.(more)
Letter from a Soldier in Iraq
Written by Ltc. John M. Kanaley…
The American soldiers are not concerned about arguments that Saddam Hussein’s payments to terrorists did not contribute to September 11th. They do not want to hear that Hussein’s acquiescence to the presence of the barbarian Zarqawi in Iraq in 2001 was not a threat to our country. They are not going to analyze whether Hussein’s “secular government” would ever conspire with religious fanatics to attack the U.S. More importantly, they do not consider the war in Iraq as a “distraction” from the efforts in Afghanistan. Yet, this is the anti-war mantra heard ever since the Islamo-fascists had the temerity to attack American troops. These are the same people who crashed jetliners into innocent Americans and you want to withdraw because they shoot back. What did you expect? This is war. Unfortunately, we were going to experience losses. Each loss is tragic, but each loss represents the yearning not to allow another innocent American to be attacked on U.S. soil ever again. Their lives were not lost in vain. (more)
