The Iconoclast

Last night John Ware did a first rate investigation for BBC's Panorama programme of the link between Interpal (George Galloway's favourite charity) and Hamas. The programme, "Faith, Hate and Charity", can be seen here for the next few days, and is highly recommended.

The word "da'wa", variously translated as "proselytising" and "missionary work" came up repeatedly. A recurring theme was the fact that in Islam, religion, charity, politics and jihad are all fused. Particularly chilling were the scenes of children singing songs about dying as martyrs and "making of our skulls a ladder to your glory". John Ware also shows clearly how Muslims present one side for Western consumption and one side when talking among themselves (taqiyya). Towards the end, Qaradawi is shown, first being welcomed by Ken Livingstone, then stating explicitly on Al Jazeera that Europe is to be re-conquered for Islam. On charity, Qaradawi says: "I don't like the word 'donations'. I like to call it 'jihad with money'.  Because God ordered us to fight enemies with our lives and with money." He also talks about the "population bomb", hinting at the demographic conquest, which is a major part of jihad today.

The programme should have gone on to demonstrate that the principles of taqiyya, da'wa and jihad are part and parcel of mainstream Islam, and are mandated by the Koran, Hadith and Sira. John Ware has also exposed the Muslim Council of Britain, but what he has not yet done is join the dots, and show that the problem is not just Hamas, or the Muslim Brotherhood, or the Muslim Council of Britain but Islam itself. However, this criticism aside, and it is not a small one, this was an excellent programme, and it is hard to imagine that it came from the same BBC whose news coverage of matters Islamic, particularly as they involve Israel, is so abysmally one-sided.

Do watch it - it will be 45 minutes well spent.

From the BBC - the latest on the protests about the filming of the book by Monica Ali.

Some 120 members of the Bangladeshi community from London and beyond marched in protest against the forthcoming film adaptation of Monica Ali's novel, Brick Lane. The book is about a Bangladeshi woman sent to London for an arranged marriage.  But some local Bangladeshis claim the novel insults them specifically, by being named after the street in which they live and work. They say Ms Ali portrays Bangladeshis as uneducated and unsophisticated, and repeatedly mention a passage which they say has Bangladeshis coming over to England in the hold of a ship and with lice in their hair.

This community first complained vehemently when the novel was first released in 2003 to much critical acclaim. But the attempts of Ruby Films, makers of the forthcoming movie adaptation, to film exterior scenes in the street itself have re-opened wounds that have never really healed. The film-makers have since abandoned their plans and will now shoot the footage elsewhere. (Whenever crime films were filmed locally we never complained about how indigenous East Enders were portrayed - it was a good chance to earn a few bob as an extra and get an autograph or two)

A small group of mostly middle-aged Bangladeshis, all men save for two women, gathered in Brick Lane in the warm afternoon, holding a banner and hand-written posters. Assurances were given by local businessman and protest organiser Abdus Salique that the widely-reported plans to burn copies of the book were incorrect . . . Numbers began to swell, and everything seemed orderly enough until a young Asian man stepped forward to ask if anyone had actually read the book. . .He was swiftly stopped in his tracks by a hug from Dr Hasanat Husain, one of the organisers of the protest, and the incident quickly cooled down.  Dr Husain delivered a short speech.

"This hard-working community has been offended by lies, slander and cynicism. There should be a limit to what you can write or say.  "You can write fiction, but you cannot use names that are reality. The reality is Brick Lane."

It's upsetting our elders and giving us a bad name" Shochall admits to not having read the book, but says he has read "bits and pieces" of it while having other sections explained to him by others.

. . . Dan Simon, 28, of south-east London, who admitted he was shouting and remonstrating with the marchers. He was pulled to one side and given a bit of a talking-to by the policeman. Dan later said he was annoyed the film-makers were "thwarted" by the Bangladeshi community. "The film should be made . . .

It was quite noticeable that there were almost no women directly involved in the march. One of the two who did march was Salina Akhtar, 41, who lives not far from Brick Lane. She said she didn't know why women were not at the protest, but said the female members of the Bangladeshi community were upset by Ms Ali's novel. Muhammad Shahabuddin, 56, from Plaistow, London, said the lack of female representation was because "Muslim women are very conservative and they don't feel comfortable coming here. "If there was a protest just for the women then they would come."

However, when this suggestion was made to Dr Husain, he spoke of his "frustration" at "stereotyping" of the community. The reasons there are few women protesting about a book and a film which is centred around a woman's life, he said, is more mundane. "This event was organised at short notice and obviously our families have children. So who looks after them? My wife wanted to come and face this, but at the moment I have guests."

Passer-by Andrew Insley, 26, who lives in Tower Hamlets, watched the protest with interest. "All this is making me want to do is read the book and watch the film," he said.

I don't know Brick Lane anymore. My Great Aunt lived there and  I used to go there with my father.  In those days most of the shops were Jewish, I took no interest in Katz the famous string shop, but I loved the delis with the rollmop herrings and gherkins where Klezmer music was playing from a record player in the back room. We would buy some to take to my nan's for tea. And there is still a bagel bakery left.

The Sylhetis have actually lived there a long time.  The first were seamen landed from the docks who took jobs, tailoring was a favourite, so that they had money to send home.  I once noticed a thin man buying at least a dozen hideous pullovers from one of the secondhand clothes stalls.  I asked my Dad why he needed so many pullovers and why such hideous ones.  Dad explained that he would be sending them home to his family in East Pakistan (as it was then), that the family would be as poor, or probably poorer, than our family when he was a child, and like him they would  not care if the pullover was an ugly colour so long as it was warm, sound and clean.

I can understand a family wanting a better life for their children in another country.  The Hugenenots came,  then the Irish, then the Jews.  My heritage is mixed in with all those groups. There was Chinese, Indian, Italian and more. But there is one difference.

They all adapted to their adopted home. Unlike some.

A press release from the Iran Policy Committee:

On 25 July 2006, during a visit to the White House by Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki, the Iran Policy Committee (IPC) held a press conference to discuss the Iranian regime’s brazen efforts to fuel the insurgency and exacerbate sectarian violence in Iraq. The IPC revealed newly-acquired intelligence identifying the exact location of a roadside bomb factory in Tehran that manufactures improvised explosive devices (IEDs) for shipment to Iraq. 

Georgetown professor and former senior member of the National Security Council staff Raymond Tanter stated: “The Ordnance Factories Complex is located in the Lavizan neighborhood in northern Tehran and consists of three separate and independent industrial sections called Sattari, Sayad Shirazi, and Shiroodi, each with its own products. The Sattari Industry specializes in making various types of anti-tank mines and bombs. The industry works on turning mines and bombs into improvised explosive devices.”
 
Professor Tanter went on to say: “Intelligence reports received from reliable sources inside Iran indicate that powerful explosively formed projectiles (EFPs), or shaped charges, used against the multinational force in Iraq are built under a confidential order by the Qods (Jerusalem) Force, in Iran. Explosively formed projectiles are advanced improvised explosive devices that are harder to detect, can penetrate thicker armor, and are more lethal than traditional IEDs. The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Qods Force has active relations with the Ordnance Factories Complex and places its orders with the group.” Struan Stevenson, a Scottish Member of the European Parliament added, “I am alarmed at the intelligence reports of Iranian improvised explosive devices that are being shipped to Iraq and are leading to British and American deaths.”

Stevenson said, “In 2006, improvised explosive device casualties accounted for half of coalition deaths in Iraq. Not only are IEDs becoming more lethal, they are becoming much more plentiful, with the number of roadside bombings almost doubling between 2004 and 2005 in Iraq.” Commenting on Iran’s links to al Qaeda, Clare Lopez, a former undercover operations officer with the Central Intelligence Agency, added, “We know that Iran has set up a network of terrorist training camps on Iranian soil, which employ al Qaeda experts to train Iraqi insurgents in the latest explosives techniques.” 

To counter the threat posed by Iran supplying Iraqi insurgents with explosively formed projectiles, Lt. Col. Bill Cowan (U.S. Marine Corps, Ret.) said, “The United States should put Iran on notice that we are going to threaten its regime in the worst way possible—from within: Tell Tehran that we will be providing money, assistance, and advice to empower Iranian resistance movements. Washington’s pressure on Tehran constrains Iran’s options and forms an anvil against which Israel can hammer Iran’s proxy in Lebanon—Hezbollah.”

Neither the Christians nor the Druze, who were on opposite sides of the civil war (and in the 19th century there were Druze massacres of Christians), support either Hezbollah or Syria. Whatever silences are maintained (would you, hating Hezbollah, if you lived in Lebnanon right now, dare to say it aloud? Some will, but very few), or whatever pretend-support is offered in the phony, transient, whipped-up hysteria of the moment, a hysteria no different from, say, the hysteria that led to attacks in Pakistan on the American Embassy back in 1979 when one group of Muslims opposed to the Saudis seized the Mosque in Mecca, or the hysteria that led to the burning down (again in Pakistan) of the British Council building because someone somewhere had somehow insulted Muhammad. Oh, it is here today, and was here yesterday, and will be here tomorrow -- Muslim mobs, Muslim outrage, Muslim this and Muslim that. It is the job of Infidel leaders not to be influenced, not to be swayed in the slightest, not to think that anything they do to meet those demands in order to "quell Muslim outrage" will have any effect at all except to be taken as a sign of weakness, weakness that will then whet Muslim appetites to demand still more and more. Islam is Islam; any yielding at all, at this point, either by Israel or by the United States deciding to pressure Israel in the slightest (it should be supplying weapons, satellite intelligence, whatever it can to make sure that Hezbollah is permanently not merely dimidiated but reduced to dimensions that will allow the Lebanese whose loyalty is to Lebanon -- those Christians, those Druze, those Sunni merchant classes of the coast -- can deal, as they then will, taking quite a different tone from that which melodramatic and nearly-hysterical Siniora has taken (there was not a wet eye in this house at any of his speeches), and then facing up, or facing down, the Shi'a. Jumblatt, like his father, has one virtue: he says what he believes to be true. Very few people in Lebanon allow themselves that luxury.

Just came from listening to the hideously shrill voice of Judy Swallow, as she presented her al-Jazeerish version of events in Lebanon, including how those mad-dog Israelis deliberately killing civilians (how dare they hide behind the fact that Hezbollah hides behind civilians! how dare they point to the ten days of constant warning, by computerized telephone calls and leafletting all over southern Lebanon, urging civilians -- the real civilians and not the "civilians" who consist of family members of Hezbollah, determined to remain and aid the fight, not least by assuming they can permanently prevent Israeli attacks on missile-launchers placed in their midst), and then as she proceeded to attempt to brow-beat the Israeli government spokesman, Mark Regev, when he said, quietly but firmly, that Israel would be "prepared to support" a "cease-fire" under which Hezbollah would no longer be allowed to possess and use those 12,000 missiles (minus 1,700 already fired -- all 1,700 of them at civilian targets -- and whatever number the Israelis have managed to destroy. That calm statement infuriated the always-nearly-hysterical Judy Swallow, who was at her shrillest wondering why Regev said Israel "would support" a cease-fire, why it could not, surely, "call for a cease-fire" itself. A moment's thought would tell her, even if she fails to realize why a cease-fire is not in Israel's, or America's, or the West's, or the Infidel world's best interest (that is beyond Judy Swallow, that is beyond Ian Lustig, that is beyond the BBC, its loaded list of "experts"), and why were Israel itself to call for it, that would be taken as a sign of victory by Hezbollah. Her foolish cruelty was followed by an interview with one Charles Tripp, of the School of Oriental and African Studies, which everyone knows is no longer what it once was, and is now a hotbed for anti-Israel sentiments and "scholarship" (ask J. B. Kelly about how "dreadful" -- his adjective -- the SOAS has become, ask Kenneth Minogue, ask Donald Watt, ask the shade of Elie Kedourie). Tripp, of course, being sure to refer back to the killing of Lebanese civilians at Qana several years ago, had nothing to say about those 12,000 -- perhaps now a mere 6,000? -- missiles still all over Lebanon, nor was there the slightest hint of any willingness to sympathetically imagine, by imagining 1,700 missiles being fired into, say, London (metropolitan London being vaster than Israel), and what his reaction, or that of the British government would be, even if most of those missiles somehow landed harmlessly on cricket pitches or in the Thames.

That was the BBC. Par for the course. Who in Great Britain will join Vladimir Bukovksy in others in trying to take control of a runaway and vicious organization, an organization that is not part of the defense against Jihad, but a promoter of the world-wide Jihad, and not only, as some may delude themselves into thinking, against tiny, maximally imperiled Israel.

Coming fast on the revelations about the Foreign Office (a very strange establishment, whose recruitment policy is an enigma and a conundrum even by the standards of the Home Civil Service) chief advisor on Islamic affairs is this article from The Times about possible "terror sleeper cells" within the Metropolitan Police.

SCOTLAND YARD has placed one of its Muslim officers on restricted duties while it investigates intelligence that he may have attended a terror camp linked to Al-Qaeda in Pakistan.

The policeman — who firmly denies the allegations — is said by police sources to be one of three Muslim officers questioned in a Yard search for terror “sleeper cells” in its ranks.  The move follows disclosures earlier this month that Islamic terrorist sympathisers had attempted to infiltrate the intelligence services by applying for jobs in MI5.

It raises the risk of terrorist “fifth columnists” passing on information about secret operations and compromising the identities of undercover agents. During an interview with the Yard’s secret vetting unit, which works closely with MI5, it was suggested he may have attended or associated with people at an Al-Qaeda training camp. The British-born officer, whose parents are from Pakistan, denies knowingly meeting terrorists.

During an interview with the Yard’s secret vetting unit, which works closely with MI5, it was suggested he may have attended or associated with people at an Al-Qaeda training camp. The British-born officer, whose parents are from Pakistan, denies knowingly meeting terrorists.

It won't just be the Met at risk;  I anticipate that South Yorkshire Police,  West Yorkshire Police and the Lancashire Constabulary will be taking an interest.

Hacked to death in the night.

Would you be at ease putting up, in your own house, as an overnight guest, a Believer in Islam, perhaps an affable co-worker or former college roommate, who assured you that all this business of Muslim hostility toward Infidels was "nonsense and lies"? Would you be at ease watching the evening news with him, seeing him take in the same stories, but perceive them in quite a different way? Would you wish to go to bed, and have your children go to bed, while down the hall your affable colleague had his own room. Any tiny hint of some worry, of some lapsus or raptus or anything else, directed possibly at you or one of the children?

If, in thinking this over, you are forced to admit to yourself that, despite your wish to believe that there is no cause for any suspicion or alarm, your wish to believe, perhaps even your insistence, that there is nothing wrong or worrisome about Islam, only about those who misinterpret or pervert it, you would be alarmed, then ask yourself a final question.

If you would worry about such a person staying in your house, in your home, overnight, for fear of what he might do, whether set off by something on the news, or something in his own life (suppose he asked to stay with you because he had lost his job, or lost his wife, or suffered some other setback), why should you not worry about such a person, about millions of such persons, staying not for one night, but for tens of thousands of nights, forever, and becoming ever more numerous, ever more demanding, ever more threatening, in your land. For what is this land, if not our national home, our country's estate?

Islamists, in this case the Hezbos, have always targeted civilians--just as they are this minute firing rockets specifically at Israeli civilian targets.  The Islamists also use Muslim civilians as human shields, who die as per Islamist strategy to produce the requisite false tears in the eyes of Kofi Annan and his ilk.  They die, these civilians of Qana and those like them, to provide fodder for the cynical, disingenuous and just plain blind to write speeches, to write articles, to produce TV news stories, that exist for the sole purpose of trumpeting the moral "seriousness" of their authors--and to condemn Israel for defending itself.  Such moral squalor, such human sacrifice.

From Varifrank:

From the Herald Sun.

UPDATE: An alternate headline for this would be " Hezbollah Human Shield Air Defense System fails to stop Israeli Air Raids"

Short notice, I'm afraid. On BBC 1 tonight at 10.15pm there is a Panorama documentary presented by John Ware called "Faith, Hate and Charity", which will investigate how a British Islamic charity was giving financial support to Hamas.

John Ware, some readers may recall, did a very good Panorama documentary exposing the Muslim Council of Britain. This type of hard-hitting investigative journalism is what the BBC should be doing, instead of what they often do, which is to pander to the Muslims.

I hope that this documentary will be similarly thorough.

This is one more example of pretending, in order to what? To protect Muslims from scrutiny? To prevent scrutiny of what Qur'an and Hadith contain? To not worry anyone? To keep the "dialogue" going? With each such act, the local, state, and federal governments lose the support of citizens, alienate them, make them more worried, as so many are in Europe, that their own governments will not adequately inform or instruct them, and are determined to hide or distort reality because those in charge lack the wit and imagination to deal with the matter at hand -- the matter of the belief-system of Islam, and those who presently, or in the future, may take that belief-system, its teachings, its attitudes, its atmospherics, a little too much to heart.

Yesterday we were told the Seattle shooting was not terrorism and now today we learn it wasn't even a hate crime.

Move along folks, no jihad here.

DISTURBING details have emerged about the radical background of the chief adviser on Islamic affairs at the Foreign Office.

Mockbul Ali, a 26-year-old civil servant, was involved in a Muslim student group that has published material supporting Palestinian female suicide bombers.

The Union of Muslim Students (UMS), which has been repeatedly praised by ministers as a paragon of moderate Islam, also carried articles in its newspaper by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a Qatar-based preacher banned from entering America.

Leaked documents show that since joining the Foreign Office Ali has argued for Qaradawi to be allowed into Britain and played a part in sending Sharif Hasan al-Banna, president of the UMS, to Islamic conferences in Indonesia and Nigeria at taxpayers’ expense.

MPs have voiced concern about Ali’s role at the heart of government. They accuse him of using his position as a senior member of the Foreign Office’s Engaging with the Islamic World Group (EIWG) to promote dialogue with Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, which is outlawed in many Arab countries.

Ali also had a key role in co-ordinating seven Muslim taskforces set up by Tony Blair to tackle extremism in the wake of the July 7 bombings last year...

["Leaked documents"? Does that imply that so fierce is the debate within the British government, that those alarmed by the presence, and influence, of this clear agent of Jihad within the British government, did not get their way and had to resort to the desperate act of "leaking documents" about him to arouse the press and through it, the public? Has it come to that in Great Britain? Where an agent of Islam cannot easily be dislodged? - HF]

"we disassociate this act from our Islamic teachings and beliefs."
-- from this article quoting a local Muslim leader (echoed, no doubt, by Muslim spokesmen across the country) about the Seattle shootings.

Really? From Qur'an 9.29? 9.5? From all the Jihad-verses, more than a hundred, that clearly tell Believers to kill Infidels? What about the hundreds and hundreds of Hadith, with the same message? What of the history of Muhammad, and the list of what he did to the Jewish tribes of Medina, the Jewish farmers of Khaybar (Khaybar being the name of Iran's new missile)? How long will it be before official Jewish organizations stop the nonsense with "Muslim-Jewish Dialogues" and "reaching out" for some "interfaith" harmony that does not and can not exist, though of course Muslims will, still unsure of their position, still needing to shore up that position with this "three abrahamic faiths" stuff. Who in his right mind, having read the Qur'an with comprehension (in English, as in French, its ferocity is less obvious -- but still apparent), or the more comprehensible Hadith, or -- still more comprehensible and less subject to deliberate distortion by Muslim apologists -- the Sira, the biography of Muhammad, that Perfect Man, uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil, could conceivably believe that Islam can be "dissociated" from the murder and attempted murder of one disgruntled Haq, no doubt expressing, as Taheri-reza, as that Egyptian co-pilot whose personal and professional life was a mess, or all those others, supposedly "crazy," who in the United States, in Egypt, in Jordan, or for that matter in the southern Sudan, in Nigeria, in India and Bangladesh and Kashmir, are eager to kill, and have killed, with great enthusiasm, Christians and Hindus.

Let's see if we can find a guide to Infidel-hatred, or more specifically, to the inculcated hatred of Jews which is a subset of that general Infidel-hatred. Some 30 years ago, the Sheik al-Azhar, Tantawi (not yet having reached that eminence) as shown by Andrew Bostom below, compiled a 700-page book, essentially a compilation of all the Qur'anic passages, and Hadith, and incidents in Muhammad's life, that showed the fierce hatred of Jews that Islam teaches, that Islam -- if the adherent is paying attention and trying to keep being a Muslim without really knowing what Islam is all about --naturally inculcates. It may be some consolation, for Jews, that Islam teaches hatred of all Infidels. But were all these Jewish organizations whistling in the dark for so long and "reaching out" to their "Muslim brothers" to have even a small amount of those 700 pages translated and distributed, they would forever lose their suicidal innocence. And the same goes for those still in Israel who, no matter what happens, will still go back to the idea of giving up more territory as the way to somehow reach an accommodation with what cannot be accommodated, what must only be constrained, held in check, by the demonstration, so clear as to never be doubted, of overwhelmingly greater force. Darura -- necessity -- is the only doctrine that Muslim rulers, who may be more aware of how they, and their regimes, will suffer if they go to war -- can invoke to explain their failure to join in a collective gang-up. The more powerful Israel appears -- and it will not appear powerful if it further shrinks in size by giving up one dunam more of territory -- the less likely an all-out war will occur. Already the supposed ferocity (it's nonsense, of course - the Israelis have been scrupulous in trying to minimize civilian casualties, as all intelligent people know) of Israel's attacks on Hezbollah have had a good effect, not a bad one, on the calculations of many in Jordan and Egypt and even Saudi Arabia and the sheiklets. Who wants to see all those palaces, all those skyscrapers in Dubai and elsewhere, paid for with OPEC revenues that, out of environmental if not geopolitical common sense, may sooner rather than later have to be diminished, destroyed by a "ferocious" Israel?

But let's go back to the remark that prompted these remarks: "we dissociate this act from our Islamic teachings and beliefs."

Oh, do you?

We don't. We find them completely consonant with those "Islamic teachings and beliefs." We find them in the same spirit as so much of the Qur'an, so many of the Hadith (in the best, most authoritatie, collections of Bukhari and Muslim), so many of the acts of Muhammad as recorded in the Muslim versions, the accepted versions, of his biography. We find that the history of Islamic Jihad-conquest, and the subsequent subjugation of all non-Muslims, to provide further evidence, if such were needed, of the attitudes and atmpospherics of Islam, of its "teachings and beliefs," that support rather than contradict the behavior of such Muslims as Mr. Haq. We find his behavior, whether he was "crazy" or not, in locating the source of all his woes, the source of the world's villainy, in Infidels, or in his case in Jews, to be "completely consonant" with that 1350-year history of "Islamic teachings and beliefs."

And there is one other thing that we find "completely consonant with Islamic teachings and beliefs." And that is the exercise in taqiyya of all those Muslim spokesmen who would have us, Americans, or other Infidels in other countries, believe their nonsense, as they engage in the religiously-sanctioned dissimulation -- lying about the faith in order to protect it -- which is exactly what they do when they, in Washington State or in Texas or Pennsylvania or Massachusetts -- attempt to make us believe that such-and-such an act is to be "dissociated" from "Islamic teachings and beliefs." Dissociate away. Practice taqiyya and kitman all you want. It isn't working in quite the same way as it did just after 9/11/2001, with all those imams taking part in those touching "candlelight vigils" and "interfaith ceremonies" -- not when so many of those imams and others involved were discovered to have said before, and to say later, to Muslim audiences, quite different things, and some even to have gone further than mere words in the expression of their hatred of Infidels.

Infidels everywhere are now keenly interested in how Muslims in other Infidel countries are behaving. We are watching. What do Muslims in this country think will be the reaction here, if the islamization of Western Europe continues apace, and Europeans flee here, to tell us, to warn us not to repeat their errors? What do they think will happen to their position in this country?

while we announce plans to arm them.

Here's part of the statement put out by the official website of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (h/t, the Belmont Club):

[THE KINGDOM OF SAUDI ARABIA] WARNS ALL THAT IF THE PEACE OPTION IS REJECTED DUE TO THE ISRAELI ARROGANCE THEN ONLY THE WAR OPTION REMAINS AND NO ONE KNOWS THE REPERCUSSIONS BEFALLING THE REGION, INCLUDING WARS AND CONFLICT THAT WILL SPARE NO ONE INCLUDING THOSE WHOSE MILITARY POWER IS NOW TEMPTING THEM TO PLAY WITH FIRE.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon indicated yesterday that it has new plans to sell billions in weaponry to the Saudis, among others in the region:

The Defense Department reported that they have a plan to sell military hardware and worth up to $5 billion to certain Arab countries. ... The plan calls for a nearly $3 billion deal with Saudi Arabia, involving sales of 58 Abrams tanks and a [sic] upgrade of Saudi-owned Abrams tanks, as well as Apache helicopters worth $400 million, according to a statement released by the Pentagon's Defense Security Cooperation Agency.

Congress has 30 days to approve the sale once it is officially notified.

In a posting yesterday I quoted Karl Kraus: "Psychoanalysis is the disease for which it is supposed to be the cure"

That particular quote, by the way, was mentioned by Auden twice -- once in his Commonplace Book, and again in the collection of aphorisms he did with Kronenberger. So I suspect that was his favorite Krausism.

Canetti, on the other hand, begins his lecture on Karl Kraus, in whom he had such a great interest, with a different memorable quote, which I give a-peu-pres, not having the book within reach:

"The population of Vienna consists of 2,030,864 people. That is, 2,030,863 people, and me."

It's hard to choose between those two quotes. One tries to imagine certain people who died in 1939, just before the war, as not having died, but having made it to America and lived long enough to see the end of the war and all the details of the death camps, and then tries to imagine what they might have said, or written. What would James Joyce have written about Paul Leon (husband of Lucie Leon), who was caught by the Germans, then murdered, only because he delayed his departure by one day in order to permit his son to sit for the bac. What would Karl Kraus, who in the early 1930s about Adolf Hitler had written "About Mr. Hitler I have nothing to say" have written in 1946? There was a long silence by most of the stunned world, and for many things went on as before -- and certainly, in Europe today, the signs of what went on between 1933 and 1945 never having occurred, never having made an adequate impression or never having been adequately conveyed to the mindless young and the vicious old, are all about.

Well, Kraus, who was maddened by the cheapness of newspapers (newspapers which, by comparison with newspapers today, seem to have been written by a staff consisting of James Bryce, Max Muller, Elie Halevy, and Wilamowitz-Moellendorf) would probably be living in a state of permanent fury at idiocy after idiocy.

I'm sure you know that feeling.

Thanks, John, for the opportunity to plug my book, The UFOs of October, a collection of five poem cycles, the last of which, "River Edge, 1959," deals specifically with the loss of latitude in the lives of boys.  Boys these days are either feral or "projects" of their parents, at least in the major population centers and their suburbs.  This has been going on for decades, now, a function of the explosive post-war growth of the 'burbs as much as anything else, and though it's very late on the scene, I'm glad Psychology Today has "discovered" the problem.

Another example of how the West has failed to fight the war to win, in this case by permitting Muslims to work in Hanford.  From LGF:

Atlas Shrugs has this from Andy Bostom:

Jew Hatred from the “Muslim Pope”

Andrew G. Bostom, MD, MS

Imagine the following (thankfully unimaginable) scenario: Some twenty years prior to being elected Pope Benedict, then Cardinal Ratzinger wrote a 700 page treatise detailing and rationalizing for present (and all) times the most virulent anti-Jewish motifs extant in Christian theology. Sadly, what is unimaginable in Christendom, has not only occurred, but passes virtually without recognition in the Islamic world of today.

Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi wrote these words in his 700 page dissertation rationalizing Muslim Jew hatred, Banu Isra’il fi al-Qur’an wa al-Sunna [Jews in the Koran and the Traditions], originally published in the 1970s, and then re-issued in 1986:

[The] Koran describes the Jews with their own particular degenerate characteristics, i.e. killing the prophets of Allah, corrupting His words by putting them in the wrong places, consuming the people’s wealth frivolously, refusal to distance themselves from the evil they do, and other ugly characteristics caused by their deep-rooted lasciviousness…only a minority of the Jews keep their word….[A]ll Jews are not the same. The good ones become Muslims, the bad ones do not.

Tantawi was apparently rewarded for this scholarly effort by being named Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University in 1996, a position he still holds. These are the expressed, “carefully researched” views on Jews held by the nearest Muslim equivalent to a Pope—the head of the most prestigious center of Muslim learning in Sunni Islam, which represents 90% of the world’s Muslims. And Sheikh Tantawi has not mollified such hatemongering beliefs since becoming the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar as his statements on the Jews as “enemies of Allah, descendants of apes and pigs”, the legitimacy of homicide bombings of Jews, or “dialogue” with Jews (excerpted just below), make clear.

…anyone who avoids meeting with the enemies in order to counter their dubious claims and stick fingers into their eyes, is a coward.  My stance stems from Allah’s book [the Koran], more than one-third of which deals with the Jews…[I] wrote a dissertation dealing with them [the Jews], all their false claims and their punishment by Allah. I still believe in everything written in that dissertation.

Unfortunately, the orthodox Islamic archetypes of Jew hatred promulgated by Hizbollah and Hamas, are also being disseminated by the most respected, mainstream Islamic institutions. Tantawi’s case illustrates the prevalence and depth of sacralized, “normative” Jew hatred in the contemporary Muslim world which can no longer be ignored.

Dr. Bostom, www.andrewbostom.org is the author of “The Legacy of Jihad”, from Prometheus Books

UPDATE: Andrew Bostom will be on History TV today:

History on Book TV
A look at non-fiction history books. On Sunday, July 30 at 1:30 pm EST.

Report: Kuwait’s Al Seyassah newspaper reported that Hassan Nasrollah, the capo of Lebanon's Hezbollah traveled to Damascus to meet with Syrian leader Bashar al-Asad and the secretary of the supreme national security council of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ali Larijani. On Thursday, the Islamic regime’s news media announced Larijani’s trip to Syria. However, later they denied it.

Al Seyassah however wrote that Nasrollah was able to reach Syria with the assistance of Syrian security agents stationed in Lebanon. The topic of discussion between the 3 men will be about the ways Syria and the Islamic Republic of Iran can deliver weapons and ammunition to Hezbollah; Nasrollah intends to be consulting with his “big brothers”.

This newspaper reported that the Hezbollah capo appeared in plain clothes in Damascus without his usual clerical attire and rode in a bullet proof, Syrian Baathist security vehicle. Since the beginning of the war against Lebanese Hizbullah, this is the first time it is reported that Nasrolah has in fact traveled out of Lebanon.

The paper also reported that while Larijani has traveled to Damascus in order to deliver to Nasrollah his new set of orders from Tehran, the Islamic Republic of Iran’s radio and television had claimed that the true nature of his trip was "to achieve the humanitarian objectives".

(Thanks to Jonah Goldberg at the Corner)

This Psychology Today report is the most horrible, horrible thing I have read for a long time. I sort of knew it all, of course, as we all do, piecemeal; but to see it spelled out in one place, at such length, induced something close to clinical shock. Our poor kids, our poor poor kids.

I've been aware for some time, and reading that made me freshly aware, of my own great good fortune in having been in the last (actually, I think, about last but one, or last but a half) generation of Western children to have a real childhood: roaming over fields and through woods, falling out of trees and into ponds, experienced with firecrackers, roller-skates, airguns, and slingshots, being bullied and occasionally beaten up by older boys, playing "British Bulldog" in the schoolyard**, sailing model boats and flying model planes, playing complicated street games handed down intact from ancient Rome—-and all with never an adult in sight! How lucky we were! How miserable our children must be!

And someone please tell me how we are going to preserve liberty, when we are raising generations who have never experienced it?

Now you've gone and done it. Now I'm in that mood again: I ***hate*** the modern world.

—

**Rules of British Bulldog: About a dozen boys stand in a line with their backs against a wall. Another dozen stand likewise, facing them, with their backs against an opposing wall 50 feet or so away. At a signal, both groups charge headlong for the opposite wall, the two groups meeting in the middle. First group to get all its men to the opposite wall wins. Contact rules: there aren't any.

Victor Davis Hanson has the right dislikes. His attacks on the American -- or at least the California -- university system are a pleasure to read. His hatred for those who are unfair to Israel, his general take on the universe endear him to all sensible people. But what is not endearing, what has been so disturbing and even maddening for the past 2 1/2 years, is his refusal, even though in his writing he has made much of the influence of "culture" in explaining the success of Western man as warrior (those free Greeks, those serried ranks of Persian myrmidons), to contemplate what the belief-system of Islam is all about, and how Islam so completely molds both its adherents, and the societies in which even those who are not full believers grow up, and drink in the atmospherics of Islam.

Had he done so, he would long ago have realized that in March or April, 2004, when I began setting out exactly what would happen and why it was inevitable (those sectarian and ethnic divisions that cannot be healed, that neither Sunni Arabs nor Shi'a Arabs will permit to be healed though both will play for Amercian protection, American military equipment and training, American fighting against their enemies under the guise of "protecting democracy") and furthermore, why it was in American and Infidel interests for these sectarian and ethnic divisions to be encouraged -- the first being a kind of Iran-Iraq War (which should have gone on forever), with repercussions in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Pakistan, Lebanon, and the second with repercussions in Algeria and elsewhere in the Berber-haunted Maghreb, and everywhree that non-Arab Muslims have been persecuted, or treated with contumely, or resented the linguistic and cultural imperialism of the Arabs, of which Islam is the obvious vehicle.

His refusal to see this, his ignoring of what his associate Bruce Thornton was writing in those "Private Papers," and his failure to see that the war in Iraq had been won, as far as Infidel interests were concerned, just as soon as Saddam Hussein was captured, his sons killed, the game of Fifty-Two Pickup successfully completed, and -- this is the main point -- the country scoured for weapons of mass destruction and for projects intended to produce such weapons, in the first case an effort of search and destroy, in the second case an effort of search and disrupt for a very long time.

All that was accomplished within the first year, and everything was then set inevitably in motion. It was time then to leave.

This is still somethiing Hanson has trouble with. But he's much more intelligent than the smug Kristols and all those others who will keep prating about what "needs to be done" in Iraq, and has no need to obstinately defend the Administration for its folly, its lack of low or high cunning, its miscomprehension that this "war on terror" stuff will not do, and the "war of self-defense against the Jihad" (Jihad standing in, synecdochically, for "Islam").

Incidentally, I realize now that setting all this out, declaring victory, as has been done here repeatedly since late March or early April, 2004, should entitle the author of that victory-declaraation, trying to halt the squandering of taxpayers' money (and the lives of soldiers), should be worth something, some kind of whistle--blower's award. A third of the avoidable hundreds of billions would seem like a lot. A million would do just fine.

Meanwhile, let's hope that Hanson, given his many admirers, begins to see the plans for Iraq as the hopeless -- and self-defeating from the Infidel point of view -- nonsense it is. It would help push the Pentagon and Bush and Rice into recognizing reality.

We've seen the problem before of the government not wanting to refer to a "war," or "terrorism," or, of course, "Islam."  Last year, when the administration tried to rebrand the, er, um, w-thingy as the "Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism," I suggested that we just call it "Mabel."  I still think this has promise.  You know, "The FBI immediately announced that the shooting had nothing to do with Mabel, none of the victims was a Mabel, and the shooter himself was not a Mabel, although he was a M—" ... Nope, don't wanna go there.

My exhortation, at the end of this week's Radio Derb, to "keep your pecker up" has been widely misunderstood.  I apologize.  This is a Britishism.  It means:  Keep an optimistic attitude and mien—shoulders back, head up, nose (that's the pecker) in the air.  I hope that is clear.

Steve Sailer on the Seattle shooting:  "Anti-Semitic terrorism ... another job Americans just won't do!"