Obama is partnering with these sharia slaughterers.
The Death Throes of Pakistan’s Hindus Dr. Richard Benkin
I just returned from a month in India during which time an incredible number of significant events were occurring. My primary mission in going was to document and raise awareness of the ethnic cleansing of Bangladeshi Hindus. I found plenty, including evidence of ongoing attacks on them both in Bangladesh and in West Bengal, India. The border between the two is so porous that terrorists and contraband move freely with and without the help of India’s Border Security Force or West Bengal police. But I also witnessed the tragic beginning of the end for Pakistan’s Hindus. Once one in five Pakistanis, they have been reduced to one percent of the population.
But as the Taliban take over ever larger chunks of that country, that remnant of a people is streaming across the border into Indian Punjab. The stream became a torrent with the Taliban’s seizure of the Swat Valley earlier this year. Hindu refugees report attacks and threats by the Taliban, as well as officials telling them to leave the country “or else.” The February agreement between the Taliban and the Zardari government ceded the area to the former and allowed Sharia law to be imposed on Swat’s 1.2 million inhabitants.
President Obama has used this agreement as a model in his stated quest for “moderate Taliban.” But not only does the agreement countersign ethnic cleansing, it also failed even before Obama’s anticipated speech on US policy in the region. Just hours before the President spoke, one of the Taliban parties to the agreement, Tehrik e Taliban, abrogated it with a terror attack on a mosque in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province, and has engaged in other terrorist attacks subsequently.
One Hindi language channel quoted a Taliban spokesman confirming that his group was pulling out of the agreement not to attack elsewhere in Pakistan because, he said, it would be contrary to Allah’s wishes to limit Sharia to the Swat Valley. Yet, no major media in India, the US, or elsewhere made this connection.
Even more shameful, no media or government has protested the ethnic cleansing of Pakistan’s Hindus, who are being finished off by the Taliban. All governments involved in the region are just allowing it to happen,too. What kind of a world do we live in when India will not defend Hindus attacked for being Hindus; when the US ignores the atrocity; when not a single human rights group or the UN utters a word of protest?
Monday, October 4, 2010
Islamic Honor Killing in Italy
Latest Islamic Honor Killing in Italy: Muslim Husband and Son Stone Mom to Death Who Tried to Protect Their Daughter from Honor Killing
Atlas reader Adam sent this story,
"My Italian isn't good, but this is the gist of it: In Modena, Italy, a father beat up his daughter for refusing an arranged marriage. His son (her brother) helped him with the attack. Her mother tried to intervene to save her, but the two men (her husband and son) turn on the mother and kill her with a stone. The daughter survived, barely"
Atlas reader Adam sent this story,
"My Italian isn't good, but this is the gist of it: In Modena, Italy, a father beat up his daughter for refusing an arranged marriage. His son (her brother) helped him with the attack. Her mother tried to intervene to save her, but the two men (her husband and son) turn on the mother and kill her with a stone. The daughter survived, barely"
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Jeffrey Goldberg Buries J Street
Jeffrey Goldberg, who at one time was at least sympathetic to J Street, if not a supporter, places the tombstone on the pro-Obama lobby masquerading as pro-Israel.
On one level, I understand what is happening here: J Street is made up of liberal Zionists, as well as non-Zionists, and even a few anti-Zionists, and it has been difficult for it to please its differing constituencies. This is why Ben-Ami, its president, might have felt the need to cover-up the involvement of George Soros, because liberal supporters of Israel know that Soros is unfriendly to the Jewish state, and some, presumably, would not want to be part of a group that counted Soros as a prominent supporter. But on another level, what is going on here is inexplicable, and terribly dispiriting to people who thought that J Street was going to make a useful contribution to the debate over the future of Israel.
The question that Goldberg leaves unanswered is why someone who is non-Zionist or anti-Zionist would want to join a truly pro-Israel organization. Of course, the answer is that J Street never was a truly pro-Israel organization.
Finally, this post from Michael Goldfarb is too good not to add:
The pro-Israel community had always been fearful of J Street’s motives and intentions, and now we know the truth – they are the deceitful anti-Israel activists we’d thought them to be. But it also turns out that they are clownishly incompetent. And for this we can be thankful. Asked by General Westmoreland how to win in war, Moshe Dayan was said to have responded: “First of all, you pick the Arabs as your enemy.” As supporters of Israel, we’ve been lucky enough to find ourselves in a fight with J Street.
Karl in Jerusalem
ABC, Diane Sawyer and 20/20 Proselytize for Islam
I just got back. I had TIVO'ed Diane Sawyer and ABC 's crack team's report on Islam. Forgive me for suggesting you watch it. What crap. Dangerous garbage. I hope America sees through this proselytizing for Islam. I am a half hour into this surrender stupidity and I wish to offer my apology for even posting about it. Sawyer spent the first half hour completely whitewashing Islam and advancing a fallacious Islamic supremacist narrative, da'wah. She got nothing right on Islam. Nothing.
This is da'wah -- invitation to Islam. Sawyer and co. have tossed concretes and history out the window to surrender to the Islamic supremacist narrative. Ugh.
ABC taped close to three hours of interviews with me (more with travel, etc.) and they broadcast none of it.A deliberate waste of five hours of my precious time. Yes, Islam is better to women than the West. Yes, there is no jihad, the millions of victims slaughtered are an incidental (but not mentionable) historical footnote. Where was Wafa Sultan, Ibn Warraq, Robert Spencer, Bat Ye'or?
Shut off your TVs. Reject your surrender by proxy.
UPDATE: Write ABC. The only lucid and accurate moments in this piece of propaganda came from the great Americans who video-ed their questions in. They get it.
UPDATE: I think I used the wrong word in the headline. It was more horrible than ridiculous. I am not going to exhaust myself fisking the misrepresentation of Christianity, Judaism, the subjugation of women, and on and on.....
No accident this. It was designed to whitewash Islam as any danger. As in, why are we fighting?
I have been covering the media's incompetence and misinformation on Islam for years, but this was jaw-dropping. It was far worse than anything I could ever imagine; it was a total whitewash, a white-out.
Kids playing football, a drowned girl uniting a community, progressive girls in Egypt who speak American street slang. Well, at least it draws the battle lines clearly. It is beyond hope that the left/liberals will ever look at Islam as a threat -- not up until the knives are at their throats. Ten years, and they are as steadfastly ignorant and married to their multiculturalism as they ever were.
They can neveer change. No, it is hopeless futility to believe that the media/left will examine this, or that they will abandon their dogma, or that they will follow any path except that of "changing course: towards an US Muslim engagement.
Atlas Shrugs
This is da'wah -- invitation to Islam. Sawyer and co. have tossed concretes and history out the window to surrender to the Islamic supremacist narrative. Ugh.
ABC taped close to three hours of interviews with me (more with travel, etc.) and they broadcast none of it.A deliberate waste of five hours of my precious time. Yes, Islam is better to women than the West. Yes, there is no jihad, the millions of victims slaughtered are an incidental (but not mentionable) historical footnote. Where was Wafa Sultan, Ibn Warraq, Robert Spencer, Bat Ye'or?
Shut off your TVs. Reject your surrender by proxy.
UPDATE: Write ABC. The only lucid and accurate moments in this piece of propaganda came from the great Americans who video-ed their questions in. They get it.
UPDATE: I think I used the wrong word in the headline. It was more horrible than ridiculous. I am not going to exhaust myself fisking the misrepresentation of Christianity, Judaism, the subjugation of women, and on and on.....
No accident this. It was designed to whitewash Islam as any danger. As in, why are we fighting?
I have been covering the media's incompetence and misinformation on Islam for years, but this was jaw-dropping. It was far worse than anything I could ever imagine; it was a total whitewash, a white-out.
Kids playing football, a drowned girl uniting a community, progressive girls in Egypt who speak American street slang. Well, at least it draws the battle lines clearly. It is beyond hope that the left/liberals will ever look at Islam as a threat -- not up until the knives are at their throats. Ten years, and they are as steadfastly ignorant and married to their multiculturalism as they ever were.
They can neveer change. No, it is hopeless futility to believe that the media/left will examine this, or that they will abandon their dogma, or that they will follow any path except that of "changing course: towards an US Muslim engagement.
Atlas Shrugs
Saturday, October 2, 2010
Christine O'Donnell's Tutorial at Oxford
The witchhunt continues as the bar, which nary exists, is lowered for the Democrat party of destruction. This week's latest smear campaign is yet another attempt to befoul the clean, fresh breeze blowing through O'Donnell's Delaware; it is debunked here at Atlas.
It won't work. It's funny that the crooked, corrupt and scandal-ridden party of that wretched Rangel, dirty Dodd, Blagojevich, felony Frank, Nazi Pelosi, fast Eddie Johnson, molesting Massa (must I go on), splits hairs on logistics. Destruction, that is their business: of country, of production, of people.
Check out these observations from O'Donnell's tutor at Oxford, college professor, Bruce W. Griffin:
Christine O'Donnell at Oxford: some notes from summer 2001
In the summer of 2001, I was a doctoral student in classics at the University of Oxford, and looking for summer employment. I signed on with a group called the Phoenix Institute to do a tutorial at Oxford on postmodernism and natural law.
This was my second summer with the Phoenix Institute. The Phoenix Institute was a group of Jedi academics; rebels and renegades against the evil empire of politically correct university life. Their summer school at Oxford ran three weeks, and was intended to give intellectual alternatives to the philosophical morass of postmodern moral relativism.
Although we were never an Oxford University course, we drew heavily on the faculties of Oxford and Cambridge for our lectures. The organizers had put together a star-studded cast of lecturers, and partly as a result we drew students from Latin America, the US, and Europe.
My role was to run the tutorials: these were modeled on the Oxford tutorial system, and were designed to give an intense analysis of the lectures, the readings, and the students' papers. The students were broken down into groups of four for a weekly one-hour tutorial with me. The basic text that summer was C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man (1944), his classic case for the importance of natural law in ethics. In addition, the students were assigned 25-50 pages of readings for each of the nearly daily lectures.
I required the papers to be written in disputatio format. This format demands that you furnish the three best reasons against your case before you are allowed to set forth your reasons for your case. So, for example, if you wanted to argue for communism, you needed to give the three best reasons in defense of capitalism before you could make your case for the merits of Marxism. If, on the contrary, you wanted to argue in favor of free markets, you needed to set forth the best three arguments you could find in favor of Marxism before you put forth your case for capitalism.
The purpose of the disputatio format was to enforce intellectual honesty, to enhance critical thinking skills in the writing of papers. The students had to think seriously about the other point of view before setting forth their own. Then and now, I self-identified philosophically as a Thomist and politically as a neoconservative. But as a teacher, I didn't do indoctrination. The point of the tutorials was to help the students learn to think.
The first tutorial was nearly always a something of a shock for the students. Allan Bloom of the University of Chicago put it brilliantly:
There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. If this belief is put to the test, one can count on the students' reaction: they will be uncomprehending. That anyone should regard the proposition as not self-evident astonishes them, as though he were calling into question 2+2=4....The relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate, the condition of a free society, or so they see it. They have all been equipped with this framework early on, and it is the modern replacement for the inalienable natural rights that used to be the traditional American grounds for a free society.(The Closing of the American Mind, 1985)
Exactly. Lewis's The Abolition of Man was a frontal assualt on moral relativism, and the students were not quite sure what to make of it. The opening chapter is a critique of emotivism, a theory of ethics then somewhat in vogue at Oxford under the influence of analytical philosophy. Lewis went after this with some gusto: "It is an outrage that they should be commonly spoken of as Intellectuals...Their heads are no bigger than ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so."
For Lewis it was one of the central problems of relativism that it was normally only directed at other people's values: relativists usually "will be found to hold, with complete uncritical dogmatism, the whole system of values which happened to be in vogue among moderately educated young men of the professional classes during the period between the two wars." After going through some of these values in detail, Lewis wrote: " It will be seen that comfort and security, as known to a suburban street in peace-time, are the ultimate values: those things which can alone produce or spiritualize comfort are mocked. Man lives by bread alone and the ultimate source of bread is the baker's van: peace matters more than honour and can be preserved by jeering at colonels and reading newspapers."
During the summer of 2001, we worked through key aspects of natural law theory from a variety of perspectives. The final exam contained two questions: 1. agree or disagree with the view of natural law expressed in Sophocles' Antigone using a disputatio format; 2. agree or disagree with Thomas Jefferson's quotation from 1782: "Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God?"--again using a disputatio format.
Christine O'Donnell was a joy to have in the tutorials: intelligent, engaged, dynamic, good with questions and interested in ideas. Her paper on cloning was one of the two best papers written for me that summer. She successfully completed a rigorous, intellectually demanding course that was the equivalent of a course in the humanities at any graduate school at any university. As a result, I was happy to write recommendations for her for future graduate study.
The course we did that summer in Oxford is nearly a decade old, but the basic issues we addressed are eternal. Today, too many of the Republic's leaders have abandoned the natural law tradition of the Declaration of Independence for a murky moral relativism--a relativism that is both destructive of democratic values and philosophically bankrupt. Christine O'Donnell would bring to the US Senate a deepened commitment to the philosophical convictions of the Founding Fathers at a time when the philosophical bankruptcy of too many leaders is mirrored in the economic bankruptcy of the federal government. She would surely add intellectual and philosophical depth to a Senate that at this point in its history badly needs both.
It won't work. It's funny that the crooked, corrupt and scandal-ridden party of that wretched Rangel, dirty Dodd, Blagojevich, felony Frank, Nazi Pelosi, fast Eddie Johnson, molesting Massa (must I go on), splits hairs on logistics. Destruction, that is their business: of country, of production, of people.
Check out these observations from O'Donnell's tutor at Oxford, college professor, Bruce W. Griffin:
Christine O'Donnell at Oxford: some notes from summer 2001
In the summer of 2001, I was a doctoral student in classics at the University of Oxford, and looking for summer employment. I signed on with a group called the Phoenix Institute to do a tutorial at Oxford on postmodernism and natural law.
This was my second summer with the Phoenix Institute. The Phoenix Institute was a group of Jedi academics; rebels and renegades against the evil empire of politically correct university life. Their summer school at Oxford ran three weeks, and was intended to give intellectual alternatives to the philosophical morass of postmodern moral relativism.
Although we were never an Oxford University course, we drew heavily on the faculties of Oxford and Cambridge for our lectures. The organizers had put together a star-studded cast of lecturers, and partly as a result we drew students from Latin America, the US, and Europe.
My role was to run the tutorials: these were modeled on the Oxford tutorial system, and were designed to give an intense analysis of the lectures, the readings, and the students' papers. The students were broken down into groups of four for a weekly one-hour tutorial with me. The basic text that summer was C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man (1944), his classic case for the importance of natural law in ethics. In addition, the students were assigned 25-50 pages of readings for each of the nearly daily lectures.
I required the papers to be written in disputatio format. This format demands that you furnish the three best reasons against your case before you are allowed to set forth your reasons for your case. So, for example, if you wanted to argue for communism, you needed to give the three best reasons in defense of capitalism before you could make your case for the merits of Marxism. If, on the contrary, you wanted to argue in favor of free markets, you needed to set forth the best three arguments you could find in favor of Marxism before you put forth your case for capitalism.
The purpose of the disputatio format was to enforce intellectual honesty, to enhance critical thinking skills in the writing of papers. The students had to think seriously about the other point of view before setting forth their own. Then and now, I self-identified philosophically as a Thomist and politically as a neoconservative. But as a teacher, I didn't do indoctrination. The point of the tutorials was to help the students learn to think.
The first tutorial was nearly always a something of a shock for the students. Allan Bloom of the University of Chicago put it brilliantly:
There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. If this belief is put to the test, one can count on the students' reaction: they will be uncomprehending. That anyone should regard the proposition as not self-evident astonishes them, as though he were calling into question 2+2=4....The relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate, the condition of a free society, or so they see it. They have all been equipped with this framework early on, and it is the modern replacement for the inalienable natural rights that used to be the traditional American grounds for a free society.(The Closing of the American Mind, 1985)
Exactly. Lewis's The Abolition of Man was a frontal assualt on moral relativism, and the students were not quite sure what to make of it. The opening chapter is a critique of emotivism, a theory of ethics then somewhat in vogue at Oxford under the influence of analytical philosophy. Lewis went after this with some gusto: "It is an outrage that they should be commonly spoken of as Intellectuals...Their heads are no bigger than ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so."
For Lewis it was one of the central problems of relativism that it was normally only directed at other people's values: relativists usually "will be found to hold, with complete uncritical dogmatism, the whole system of values which happened to be in vogue among moderately educated young men of the professional classes during the period between the two wars." After going through some of these values in detail, Lewis wrote: " It will be seen that comfort and security, as known to a suburban street in peace-time, are the ultimate values: those things which can alone produce or spiritualize comfort are mocked. Man lives by bread alone and the ultimate source of bread is the baker's van: peace matters more than honour and can be preserved by jeering at colonels and reading newspapers."
During the summer of 2001, we worked through key aspects of natural law theory from a variety of perspectives. The final exam contained two questions: 1. agree or disagree with the view of natural law expressed in Sophocles' Antigone using a disputatio format; 2. agree or disagree with Thomas Jefferson's quotation from 1782: "Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God?"--again using a disputatio format.
Christine O'Donnell was a joy to have in the tutorials: intelligent, engaged, dynamic, good with questions and interested in ideas. Her paper on cloning was one of the two best papers written for me that summer. She successfully completed a rigorous, intellectually demanding course that was the equivalent of a course in the humanities at any graduate school at any university. As a result, I was happy to write recommendations for her for future graduate study.
The course we did that summer in Oxford is nearly a decade old, but the basic issues we addressed are eternal. Today, too many of the Republic's leaders have abandoned the natural law tradition of the Declaration of Independence for a murky moral relativism--a relativism that is both destructive of democratic values and philosophically bankrupt. Christine O'Donnell would bring to the US Senate a deepened commitment to the philosophical convictions of the Founding Fathers at a time when the philosophical bankruptcy of too many leaders is mirrored in the economic bankruptcy of the federal government. She would surely add intellectual and philosophical depth to a Senate that at this point in its history badly needs both.
A New Framing of the Argument by Muslim Extremists
So now standing with the 70% of Americans who believe that the Ground Zero mega-mosque is an insult makes you an "opportunist." Standing for freedom and equality for all against Islamic supremacism and Sharia, which denies the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, and equality of rights for all, makes you "anti-Muslim," as well as "infamous" and guilty of spreading "hate." Meanwhile, carrying water for an oppressive ideology that silences dissidents and enslaves women is multicultural and broad-minded. Got it.- Robert Spencer
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