The Iconoclast

And neither is dumping Rumsfeld and replacing him with someone just as clueless, like James Baker. The big picture continues to elude our leadership in both parties and there is no Churchill in the wilderness willing to articulate the necessity to contain and constrain Islam. Here is the latest analysis from the New Duranty. A change of course in Iraq is necessary, but the changes being proposed by Baker et all won't change anything. A strategy for dealing with Islam as a political force is the only strategy that will work. But for now, the politically correct blinders are on and no one, not a single politician in America, Britain, or anywhere in Europe, wants to admit the scope, breadth and depth of the real problem.

The Times Crossword has been nominated as “an icon of England”. It is the latest weird and wonderful thing to have been chosen as quintessentially English for a project that celebrates England’s cultural heritage.

From the everyday delicacy of fish and chips to the beauty of the entire Lake District, from the now-obscure bowler hat to the universal pint, they have all been voted official symbols representing life in England in the 21st century.

Now fish and chips and pints (half) - them I can do.

This is W F Deedes in The Telegraph.  I agree with him up to his suggestion of a “supreme council of principle religions”.  In everything else he is spot on.

Ministers appear whimsically to be shifting from the multi-cultural society towards an integrated one. They are whistling in the dark if they think that will play well with the followers of Islam in our midst. Muslims are rooted in their faith and it governs the way they live. It is the only faith on Earth that persuades its followers to seek political power and impose a law — sharia — which shapes everyone's style of life.

For some years now, I have been close to events in Sudan, north and south, on behalf of this newspaper. I find the power of Khartoum awesome. It defies the world over Darfur and will continue to do so. It has reduced Sudan to ruin in an interminable civil war, the mainspring of which was Khartoum's insistence on sharia for the Christian or animist south.

That harsh aspect of Islam is no help at all to relationships here. . . I say all this not in hostility to Muslims, but because, unless we get a clearer understanding of their religion, we shall find peaceful co-existence with the moderate majority (which is crucial) ever harder to attain.

In a little noticed passage of his controversial interview with another newspaper, the Chief of the General Staff, Gen Sir Richard Dannatt spoke of the Islamist threat. "I hope it doesn't make undue progress," he said, "because there is a moral and spiritual vacuum in this country."

We have come to regard blasphemy as a symbol of free speech; Islam treats offensive words about the Prophet or the Koran as a serious offence.

It is vain to say: "Well, if they come here, they must conform with British society and its easy ways." Muslims will not do that. Their religion forbids it.

Why do we suppose India had to be partitioned? There was no other way of keeping the peace in that great sub-continent. We cannot do that here, but perhaps we should be thinking in terms of a supreme council on which our principal religions, including Islam, would sit and try to resolve misunderstandings.

What is never going to work is telling followers of Islam here: "You must conform to our ways!" 

WASHINGTON, Oct. 18 -- A prominent national Islamic civil rights and advocacy group today called on the government of Tunisia to respect the religious rights of women in that nation who choose to wear an Islamic headscarf, or "hijab."

Media reports indicate that Tunisian police are stopping women on the streets and asking them to take off their headscarves and to sign a pledge that they will not wear a scarf again. A 1981 Tunisian law prohibits Islamic attire in schools or government offices. - from this CAIR press release

Tunisia is a police-state, but a police-state largely dedicated to constraining Islam. It was Bourguiba and his Destour Party who ruled Tunisia at and since independence, and Bourguiba was, when it came to treatment of Infidels, far superior than were other Muslim leaders outside of Turkey. But it remains a state where Islam can only be constrained, and it cannot be constrained in all ways. Of course Tunisia's foreign policy reflects the general unappeasable hostility toward Israel (indeed, even Abdelwahhab Meddeb, the Tunisian-born student of Islam who has been so keenly critical of Islam, continues to hold violently anti-Israel views -- those views continue to linger among many who no longer remain loyal Muslims, those attitudes are among the last thing to go), and it was in Tunisia that the PLO found its refuge after Beirut.

But the Tunisian government knows, in a way that Western governments do not, that it has to use force -- hence that "Police-state" characterization -- if it wishes to keep the outward and visible signs of Islam on the March (as the Return of the Hijab, a statement that is clearly and aggressively political in nature) from scaring the secular, and demoralizing them. The Tunisian police are doing what in Turkey is, or used to be done, by the army: preserving the regime of constraints on Islam. Call it Kemalism in one country, or Bourguibism in another, or call it merely common sense -- in any case, it requires the kinds of measures that soft-hearted and soft-minded Infidels no doubt deplore, not understanding how powerful and menacing and all-encompassing a belief-system Islam is, and how the West has much to learn from the willingness of those in the Islamic world who, in order to keep this Rasputin under the ice, have to keep knocking it down, tying it up, keeping it from emerging yet again.

And those who mention tourism are also not wrong. The Tunisians are not fools. They do not possess oil and gas. They have all sorts and conditions of tourists. Some can safely be escorted to resorts, where gentils-organisateurs will keep them occupied. But should other Western tourists wander around outside those gated-and-guarded resorts, and see those herds of hijabs, and the unsmiling faces under them, then Tunisia becomes less attractive to tourists. And of course the sunbathing hedonistic Infidels are likely targets if Islam has its way, and without the strongest of measures, as is understood in Tunisia as in Turkey, but not yet in London or Paris, unless the strongest of measures, of all kinds, are relentlessly undertaken, then Islam usually has its way.

The [US Department of Homeland Security's] Customs and Border Protection section would not elaborate on why Kamal Helbawy, 67, a founding member of the Muslim Association of Britain, was told by airline staff to get off his flight shortly before it was due to leave London.

Helbawy was due to speak on a panel on the Muslim Brotherhood, organized by the Center on Law and Security, an independent think tank based at New York University. - from this news item

The whole thing was, in the topics and guests, scarcely a step up, in its import, than any of those Interfaith Gatherings with which we are familiar, where the Muslims present their own views, heavily laced with taqiyya, turn aside questioning with another dose of the same, fortified with tu-quoque, and a good time is had by all. And nothing whatsoever of real substance comes out, or is learned by the innocent Infidels.

This grand affair is being conducted by Peter Bergen, famous for having interviewed Al Qaeda, and therefore for being a "terrorism" expert, which does not make him an expert on all the other, much more important things one needs to know about -- the tenets of Islam and the attitudes to which those tenets naturally give rise, Jihad and the dhimmi system, the varied instruments of Jihad and, finally, the internal weaknesses within the Camp of Islam that might usefully be exploited in order to defend the non-Muslim world. Peter Bergen knows nothing of any of this. But he will continue to dine out, for quite some time, at universities and as a "consultant" on terrorism (the days of these consultants on "terrorism" and their so-called expertise, both trivial and often irrelevant to larger matters, should be numbered).

Another party involved in this degringolade is Alexis Debat, a believer in the wonders of "Muslim economic theory" which is short on economics, but long on Islam. He thinks, apparently, that we have much to learn from this part of Islam, and when he senses Islam under attack, is quick to invoke the Islam-is-not-monolithic mantra, constructing something, and then demolishing that same something, which only a fool would have argued in the first place. It is precisely because "Islam is not a monolith" but at its core divides the world between Believer and Infidel, that one has argued here for the idiocy of the goals established by Bush for Iraq, and the further idiocy of ignoring those sectarian and ethnic and other divisions within Islam --- you see, "Islam is not a monolith" -- when he should be attempting to exploit them to the fullest.

If one of the invited participants to this conference was kept out even by our State Department, that tells you something about this Conference. I suggest that the ghost of Harold Acton insist on receiving back his villa of La Pietra, near Florence, in order to turn it into a cultural center dedicated to preventing the spread of Islam in Europe, and the threat that such a development would pose to the art, literature, free and skeptical inquiry, that is much of the legacy that Harold Acton, thought he was protecting and promoting when he turned over that fabulous place to NYU.

Too bad Acton did not leave heirs who might have insisted that the intention of Acton himself was not being met by the university (but what can one expect when the twisted-mouthed, man-in-dramatic-black Tony Judt is put in charge of the "Remarque Institute" -- can you just imagine what Erich Maria Remarque, and at least one of his wives (Paulette Levy Goddard) would have made of Tony Judt, and his comprehension of Europe and the need to defend it from Islam?

Stop giving things to universities. They don't deserve it. Stick to those who are in fact acting as protectors, defenders, and true transmitters of true culture. They are not to be found, at least not the way they might once have been expected to be found, in universities. They are elsewhere.

I meant to post this last week, but it’s not too late.  From The Times.

If Russia is allowed to continue bullying its neighbour, its neo-imperialist appetite will spread to our front door.

A FARAWAY COUNTRY of which we know nothing.” Neville Chamberlain may have been unfair to Czechoslovakia when he dismissed it so casually in 1938. But it is all too true of the countries on the fringe of Europe that now find themselves the front lines in the new cold war: Georgia and Moldova.

Not for them the stag parties that now infest the old centres of Prague and Riga; not for them the eager amateur property speculators who are buying up derelict cottages in Bulgaria and Bohemia. These countries really are off the beaten track; they are not waving but drowning — and if they go down, the security of the rest of Europe will be affected hugely.

All that may be a nuisance for small countries on Russia’s fringe, but why should we worry in Britain? The first reason is that small defeats now mean bigger ones later. Russia’s petrocrats are determined to stem and reverse their country’s geopolitical retreat. If they can derail Mr Saakashvili, it sends a powerful signal elsewhere. If Georgia falls, then others will be next. Russia’s hold over Ukraine will strengthen. Moldova, the weakest country in Europe, will buckle too. Then the shadow will stretch over the poorly governed and demoralised ex-communists of Central Europe and the Baltics. That will bring Russian neo-imperialism to our front door.

Secondly, Georgia is the only way of bringing the oil and gas riches of Central Asia to world markets that does not go through Russia. A pioneering oil pipeline from Baku in Azerbaijan to Ceyhan on the southern Turkish coast goes through Georgia. There is — literally — no other way to break the stranglehold that Russia has on our energy supplies.

I was very proud to see over 200 staff turn up on a cold morning to take part in the world record making stand up against poverty www.millenniumcampaign.org. This campaign is calling on world leaders not to forget the commitments they made when they signed up to the UN Millennium Development goals to be achieved by 2015, www.un.org/millenniumgoals.

There was a wonderful Freudian slip on the same post:

Edinburgh is a creator of great wealth. We have amoral responsibility to share that wealth.

"I have a friend who's a security contractor for the DOD and he said we're going to be there[in Iraq] for the next 15 - 20 years, that the Arabs won't stop until the last drop of blood is spilled and they perceive kindness as weakness. However, note, he feels we're doing the right thing."
-- from a reader

Sheer craziness. What does he think staying for "the next 15-20 years" would cost us? How many lives, how many trillions of dollars, at what great cost to the military, with recruitment for the Reserves and National Guard down to nothing, and young officers leaving the service as soon as they can. They are not fools. They can see that the policy is silly, even if they do not yet understand Islam enough to see that never could have worked, and that the stated goals -- to bring "democracy" and "freedom" and "prosperity" to Iraq, by holding its ethnic and sectarian conflicts to a minimum, is not only impossible, but in fact the very opposite of what we should wish to be the outcome. We are run by fools. And the "wise men" such as James Baker and his Committee are yesterday's men who never understood Islam and still do not, and so their attempts to extricate the President (and to make the world safer for those so many of them, such as Baker, think should be in charge -- the Sunni Arabs), may provide cover for some kind of withdrawal, but offer only a hollow, unrealistic "realism" that will fail to come to grips with the islamization of Europe, the need at once (and for other reasons as well) to diminish OPEC oil revenues (not the same thing as the pointless goal of "energy independence"), and to support Infidels, including the Infidel state of Israel which neither James Baker, nor his co-chairman Lee Hamilton, have ever felt warmly about, or understood why the survival of the West depends partly on the survival of the nation-state of Israel, for moral and historic and civilizational reasons that escape them.

I have had a couple of sprees on Amazon lately.  As well as ordering The Truth about Mohammed (£13.53 estimated date of delivery early November) I bought Kinks the Ultimate Collection on CD.  We have most of their catalogue on vinyl but I thought this would be nice to play in the kitchen.

One blast of the opening riff of You Really Got Me and suddenly it is a Saturday evening in 1964, Leyton Orient have lost, the Arsenal have won, Dr Who and Susan are about to do battle with the Daleks or some other alien, my mum is in the kitchen poaching haddock and all is right with my world.  Apart from Leyton Orient losing but that was normal and character building.

The sleeve notes describe You Really Got Me as “a savage proto-heavy metal riff . . . possibly the key moment in pop’s gradual metamorphosis into rock.”  In which case it will be partly responsible for my musical taste these last 42 years.  I was aged 10 when it hit the charts.  Are there 10 year olds out there now hearing for the first time something that will still be alive, and they will still listen to, in 2048?

I hope so.

I doubt if Lil Chris will last, but the Scissor Sisters might.

...The participation of people all over the world in annual Qods [Jerusalem] day rallies demonstrates very clearly that the occupation of Palestine is not only the concern of the Palestinian nation but the whole Islamic World, Dr Nurani said.

In 1979, the founder of the Islamic Republic, the late Imam Khomeini, designated the last Friday of the holy fasting month of Ramadan as World Qods Day and called on Muslims worldwide to stage rallies to voice support for the liberation of holy Qods from Israeli occupation forces. - from this news item

The wrong lesson to draw from this is that there is nothing important dividing Sunni and Shi'a. There is, and there has been, for 1350 years, and because of Sunni persecution and murder of Shi'a, Shi'a resentment has grown. Through assorted accidents, the Shi'a in Iran and Iraq, while hardly sharing the same views on everything, do share an interest on protecting themselves from being attacked by, or subjugated within, Sunni Arab states.

What the story above illustrates is what we already knew: that the Shi'a of Iran are not, pace Gerecht and other admirers of Sistani and "the Shi'a" at My Weekly Standard, less fervent in their opposition to the sliver of a state controlled by Infidels -- Israel -- and anti-Infidel fervor, the Islamic Republic of Iran feels, can be used to win the allegiance not of the Sunni Arab rulers, who are suspicious of their attentions, but of the Sunni Arabs ruled.

And not only that. Like Muslims generally among non-Muslims in Europe, the Shi'a have been outbreeding the Sunni Arabs in both Iraq (where they were a few decades ago less than half the population, but now constitute 60-65%) and in Lebanon (where the Shi'a now constitute the largest of Lebanon's many groups, with 40% of the population). It is hardly unknown for Sunnis to convert to Shi'a Islam, and recently, apparently out of admiration for the determination and seeming effectiveness of the Islamic Republic of Iran both in its nuclear project, and in its championing of the "Palestinian" cause (the Lesser Jihad against Israel), there have been cases of such conversion. This must worry the Ruler of Bahrain; it must worry the Sunnis in Lebanon; it must worry the Saudi government and especially those in charge of the Province of Al-Hasa.

But of course even if the Shi'a of Iran are supporting the largely Sunni "Palestinians" that does not mean that they have made up with, or ever could, with the Sunnis whose theology is different, and whose history is full of anti-Shi'a wars and persecutions.

When it is a matter directly involving Infidels, then Sunni-Shi'a differences do not matter. But when the Infidels can choose to remove themselves, as they could in Iraq, the split between Sunni and Shi'a could be allowed to flourish. Now Israel cannot "remove" itself and should not be forced to, but rather, supported to the hilt in the moral, intellectual, and civilizational interests, its very sense of itself and of its own coherence, by every member of the Western world, and by every Christian in the non-Western world. But in Iraq those Infidel soldiers can and should remove themselves, not out of any desire to placate or appease, or to "cut and run" as the teasing first-graders like to say, but in order to allow the natural divisions within Islam to become still stronger, and to create a permanent fault line between Shi'a and Sunni that will cause tensions, hostilities, expenditures of men, money, matériel by, and also require constant attention from, both the Islamic Republic of Iran and such malevolent Sunni states as Saudi Arabia.

There is at least one event that demonstrates clearly that Muslims, being Muslims, will always assume that in the end it is better to trust fellow Muslims than any kind of Infidel. That event took place during the Gulf War. Saddam Hussein was afraid of the Americans bombing his airforce. What did he do? The leader of a country that had attacked, unprovoked, a neighboring Muslim country, Iran, and who hod conducted an eight-year war against that same country, Iran, that had just ended three years before, nonetheless chose to move as many of his planes as he safely could, to Iran. He chose, that is, to trust the Iranians, even after that eight-year-war, with 80 or more of his planes. He calculated that the Islamic Republic of Iran, much as it might hate him and Iraq, would see the need to help out fellow Muslims.

It turned out he was wrong to have such faith. The Iranians never returned the planes. In this act of touching and misplaced faith, Saddam Hussein showed how deep, even for someone as suspicious as he was, is pan-Muslim loyalty or the sense that in a pinch, a fellow Muslim state not temporarily co-opted by the Infidels (Saudi Arabia, with its rented lackeys Egypt, and Jordan all supported the American effort against Iraq in 1990-91 because they feared that if he successfully digested Kuwait, he might then move on Saudi Arabia -- this "alliance" was misinterpreted in Washington as one of "staunch Arab allies standing with America in fighting aggression against brave little Kuwait").

And Saddam Hussein's trust in fellow-Muslim Iran was akin to the trust shown by his great model, the man he admired most, Joseph Stalin, when Stalin had Molotov sign the pact with Ribbentrop. And though a master of malevolent deceit himself, Stalin was genuinely surprised, genuinely chagrined, when Hitler, ignoring the Molotov-Ribbentropp Pact, invaded Russia in June 1941. Why, he had counted on a fellow mass-murderer and totalitarian to have some loyalties to at least another mass-murderer and totalitarian. Something of the same seemed to have passed through Saddam Hussein's perfervid and agitated brain before and during the Gulf War.

And in both cases, the dictators in question were wrong.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki speaks yesterday during a joint press conference with Shiite firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr upon their meeting in the holy city of Najaf, central Iraq.  (AFP/Getty Images)

From the Washington Times with hat tip to K-Lo.

The government of Pakistan does something, a little something, but with a great show for its American benefactors, in this or that part of Pakistan. At the same time, it makes deals and then misrepresents those deals, with supporters of the Taliban in Waziristan. Meanwhile, in the cities of Pakistan, including Quetta, the Taliban and its Pakistani supporters (the Taliban owes its existence to Pakistan; it was in the madrasas in Pakistan that each little Talib once studied, and then, properly enthused, moved back in small groups to Afghanistan in the early 1990s, after the Soviet army had been defeated, in order to established Peace on Earth and Good Will Toward All Those Willing to Abide by the Strictest Shari'a, and for the rest -- death.

Pakistan is not an "ally" much less a "staunch ally." It cannot be. It cannot be because of the tenets of Islam and because the population is overwhelmingly deeply and truly and disturbingly Muslim. It cannot be no matter what the smoothest and most plausible of generals (Musharraf, for a while) or the zamindars (Pinky Bhutto and the anglophone children of the elite, who in private schools and colleges in the West are good at winning over first their innocent roommates, then the rest of the students, and then of course the faculty and administrators eager to be fooled about Pakistan, and about Islam).

Meanwhile, the Pakistanis who happen to have acquired, through birth or naturalization procedures, English citizenship (this is not the same thing as being "English"), but who possess not a "dual loyalty" (that might be manageable) but rather a "single loyalty" and that loyalty is only to Islam, continue to move freely about the cabin of the world, and especially in the First-Class Compartment of the West to which, unaccountably, they have been allowed to make themselves at home.

Billions of dollars in debt relief, billions in further economic aid, and even billions in military aid (Pakistan was always a favorite of American generals -- those rectitudinous terry-thomas-moustached generals, that business of "Islam is a bulwark against Communism" that was all ye knew on earth, and all ye needed to know). Taliban upraised in Islam and in terror live freely in Pakistan -- from all kinds of places -- live untouched in Pakistan and return, at will, to Afghanistan. Other terrorists raised in Pakistan have over a much longer period persecuted non-Muslims in Jammu-Kashmir, forcing the mass exodus, for example, of 400,000 Kashmiri pandits, and murdering Hindu villagers. And still other Pakistani terrorists raised and trained and supported within Pakistan, sometimes by the intelligence service of the Pakistani military, or I.S.I., an entirely sinister group that also helped support and now protects A. Q. Khan, have over the years attacked deep within India, in Mumbai twice with hundreds of casualties, and in Delhi (the Parliament building) and elsewhere -- so many of the attacks until recently going unreported outside India, and seldom paid attention to.

That is Pakistan. How long will Pakistan receive American aid -- again, a disguised Jizyah whenever Infidels give payments to Muslims, payments that the Muslims take as by right and that the Infidels give as by fearful duty? Bush and Co. can swagger all they want, but their timidity, their lack of imagination, their obstinacy in a clumsy course that does not recognize the need and possibliliy of dividing and demoralizing the Camp of Islam, infuriates more and more, as more and more innocent and well-meaning American soldiers pay with their lives for that obstinacy, that lack of imagination, that timidity, that stupidity, that Baby-Huey approach based on unrectified ignorance of Islam.

They will be made to sit in the corner, wearing their dunce-caps, soon. But not soon enough.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush has signed a newly revised space policy that sets defense as a priority and rejects future negotiations that might limit U.S. flexibility in space, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday...

Bush's top goals, as stated in the document, are to "strengthen the nation's space leadership and ensure that space capabilities are available in time to further U.S. national security, homeland security, and foreign policy objectives" and to "enable unhindered U.S. operation in and through space to defend our interest there," the newspaper reported...

A senior administration official, who asked not to be identified, told the paper: "This policy is not about developing or deploying weapons in space. Period."

Now, why would a senior official undercut what seems a perfectly reasonable policy?  I remember reading about the weaponization of space years ago and I've never understood the objections some people have on moral grounds.  Satelites are becoming ever more critical to our defense and way of life. They are very vulnerable to attack so we must develop ways and means to defend them. And if we can develop more ways to "fight from afar" to quote Hugh, what's wrong with that? We must protect our country, our citizens and our troops by every available means. Weapons in space are fine by me.