The archbishop [of Canterbury, Rowan Williams,] omitted a cardinal fact from his address [suggesting the UK adopt certain aspects of Muslim law], because he was either not honest or not perceptive enough to notice it: namely, that in all the talk of transformative accommodation, it was not necessary to mention the Sikhs, the Hindus, the Buddhists, the Confucians, the Bahais, the Jains, and the Orthodox Christians, to say nothing of the Jews, of whom altogether there are many hundreds of thousands, if not millions, in Britain. This fact alone, if he were a man of the slightest understanding, should have given him pause.
-- Anthony Daniels
Labels: appeasement, dhimmitude
Victor Davis Hanson gives Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams a just deserved history lesson.I suggest that the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams read a little history about the British experience in India before he offers politically-correct but historically laughable sermons like the one he gave to a Muslim "lifestyle" magazine:
[Bishop Williams:] It is one thing to take over a territory and then pour energy and resources into administering it and normalising it. Rightly or wrongly, that's what the British Empire did - in India, for example. It is another thing to go in on the assumption that a quick burst of violent action will somehow clear the decks and that you can move on and other people will put it back together - Iraq, for example.
ONE, who is clearing the decks and moving on? And who are the "other people" putting Iraq back together? Iran? Saudi Arabia? China? The British in Basra? First, we read from the anti-war Left that the US is wasting a trillion dollars and thousands of its lives in Iraq, and yet now that we are clearing the decks and not putting it back together? Which is it?
TWO, Williams should read a little about British military campaigns in India, and then count the corpses.
THREE, he should also tally up the amount of money the U.S. has spent for civic and economic development in Iraq over four years, and then compare that to what Britain invested in any four-year period in their centuries-long occupation of India.
FOUR, I don't recall the British, after their second year in India, fostering nation-wide elections.
FIVE, if he is worried about the soul of civilization in general, and the U.S. in particular, he might equally ask his Muslim interviewers about the status of women in the Muslim world, polygamy, female circumcision, the existence of slavery in the Sudan, the status of free expression and dissent, and religious tolerance ( i.e., he should try to visit Mecca on his next goodwill, interfaith tour) .
SIX, all Williams will accomplish is to convince Episcopalians in the U.S. not to follow the Anglican Church, and most Americans in general that, if they need any reminders, many of the loud left-wing British elite, nursed on envy of the US, still petulant over lost power and influence, and scared stiff of the demographic and immigration trends in its own country, are well, unhinged.
Labels: antiwar loonies, appeasement, capitulation, defending liberty, Iraq, white flag
Apparently, there's going to be some grotesque historical revision of DC Snipers John Allen Muhammad and Lee Malvo, courtesy of CNN. Some early reviews indicate that a CNN special, "The Minds of the D.C. Snipers," downplays or avoids all reference to Muhammad's conversion to Islam and his and Malvo's proud and publicly repeated promotion of Islamic extremism.
For example, in precursor story aimed to advertise their upcoming special, CNN highlights three "self-portraits" by Lee Malvo, under which a caption explains, "Many of his drawings show him with a tear running down his cheek." Woe is Malvo, eh? Poor, choiceless victim.
Well, here's some information that CNN chose to left out, as reviewed in an advance screening by editors at Investors Business Daily:Nowhere in its one-hour special — promoted as "The Minds of the D.C. Snipers" — is Islamist brainwashing even hinted as a motivating factor behind their serial assassinations. Yet the evidence is overwhelming that they were on a jihad.
...The jailhouse drawings of the younger sniper, Malvo, tell it all:
• One sketch of Osama bin Laden exalts him as a "Servant of Allah."
• A self-portrait of him and Muhammad is captioned: "We will kill them all. Jihad . . . Allah Akbar!"
• A sketch of the burning Twin Towers has as its caption: "America did this. You were warned."
• A poem scribbled alongside an American flag and star of David drawn in cross hairs reads: "Our minarets are our bayonets, Our mosques are our baracks, Our believers are our soldiers."
• The Quran (Surah 2:190) is quoted as follows: "Fight in the cause of Allah those who fight you and slay them wherever ye catch them." Also: "Islam the only true guidance."
• The White House is drawn in cross hairs, surrounded by missiles, with the warning: "Sep. 11 we will ensure will look like a picnic to you," and "you will bleed to death little by little."
• Another warning reads: "Islam. We will Resist. We will conquer. We will win."
Somehow CNN's "special investigations unit" managed to overlook this pile of courtroom evidence. It showed only one drawing — a self portrait of Malvo shedding tears.
CNN maintains that Malvo, an alleged victim of negligent parents, now has remorse for his victims — even though he wrote in one notebook: "They all died and they all deserved it. We will not stop. This war will not end until you are all destroyed utterly."
CNN also omitted the fact that while Muhammad and Malvo were in county jail awaiting trial, their lawyers insisted they be fed Islamic "halal" meals, such as veggie burgers, instead of ham sandwiches. They also got copies of the Quran.
According to Knight Ridder and others reporting at the time, the director of a shelter where the two men stayed for a spell in Washington state tipped off the FBI that Muhammad "might be a terrorist."
That incident mysteriously disappeared from an interview that CNN host Soledad O'Brien conducted with the same source for the special.
The revisionism and sanitization of Islam continued with O'Brien's interview with Muhammad's ex-wife, who insisted that jihad and hatred of America had nothing to do with her husband's cold-blooded killings.
...
By leaving out all these facts — never even mentioning that the subjects of its investigation had converted to Islam — CNN committed professional malpractice.
Its "special investigation" is nothing more than a politically correct whitewashing of the truth aimed at pleasing Muslim groups like CAIR, which has argued that "there is no indication that this case is related to Islam or Muslims."
No indication, except that is, for the piles of evidence of Islamic militancy.
Indeed, CNN's latest special even contradicts their own earlier reporting, such as this one from 2004, telling of his 1990s relationship in a security role with Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, headlined: "Mohammad a Gulf War Vet, Islamic Convert."
CNN's revisionism isn't new, but rather a trend by Western apologists who think they can quench the conflict through appeasement or understanding.
Likewise, Here's former PLO terrorist, Christian convert and author of Why We Want To Kill You, Walid Shoebat: "The Misperception of the enemy and a coddling and supposed liberal Muslim agenda just gives the jihadists more time and opportunity to further penetrate and infiltrate the West... Westerners view Middle East issues through their Western mindset."
Labels: appeasement, capitulation, dc snipers, Islamic extremism, media bias
Just an awesome editorial by Michael Graham...Deval's naivete endangers us all
How do you explain to someone who just doesn't get it, that the problem is that he just doesn't get it?
This is the Deval Patrick Dilemma.
He is our governor, and he's unlikely to leave office before serving two full terms. (Patrick may be a lot of things, but he's no Republican.)
He is our chief magistrate. Due to his involvement with the courts and police, he is essentially Massachusetts' top cop.
And yet he seems completely and utterly incapable of telling the good guys from the bad guys.
Ben LeGuer, rapist of grandmothers - bad. Police officers and prosecutors who locked LeGuer up - good.
Sex offenders looking for jobs at Massachusetts day care centers - bad. Employers who want to see complete CORI reports before hiring day-care providers - good.
Islamist hijackers who board planes at Logan and fly them into the World Trade Center - bad. The Americans they killed, and the nation they terrorized. . .
See the pattern here, Gov?
In his 9/11 commemoration speech, Patrick observed that while the attack on the World Trade Center was "mean and nasty," (that's telling 'em, Deval!) the real tragedy of six years ago was the "failure of human understanding."
Yes, 9/11 was, Patrick said "a failure of human beings to understand each other, to learn to love each other." [Emphasis added.]
To find out what the victims of 9/11 didn't understand about the terrorists that might have prevented the attack, I turned to Debra Burlingame. Her brother, Chic, was the pilot of American Airlines [AMR] Flight 77 - the plane that hit the Pentagon.
When I first read Debra the governor's remarks over the phone, her reaction was astonished silence. "Can you read that again please?"
I did. More silence.
"Did he have the audacity to say that in front of grieving 9/11 family members?" she asked, somewhat astonished.
Yes.
"Well, I'm glad I didn't have to listen to that on 9/11," she said in a measured tone, trying unsuccessfully to conceal her anger. "I would have found it extremely insulting to the memory of my brother."
"Did he really say 'mean and nasty?' " she wanted to know. "At Ground Zero, they've recovered 21,000 body parts and still counting. That's not mean and nasty, that's an atrocity."
Debra wasn't happy with the governor's suggestion that 9/11 was born of the failure of mutual understanding between the victims and their killers, but she understood it. She called is a form of moral vanity.
"It appeals to one's sense of vanity to think we're better than these people because we're nicer than they are. Liberals like this think 'I'm not judgmental, so that makes me superior,' " Debra said.
This self-gratifying "we're all responsible for 9/11" preening isn't just dumb, however. It's also dangerous. "If your governor thinks we can love-bomb al-Qaeda into submission, he's living in a dream world."
Perhaps that's Patrick's problem. Maybe he's living in another world, an imaginary liberal land were every Muslim radical is just one hug away from Methodism, and every criminal can be rehabilitated by a proper diet and midnight basketball.
The rest of us, alas, are trapped in the real world. And in this world, "9/11 is the price we paid for not truly understanding the enemy," Debra told me. "It was the moral vanity of our politicians that told them the Islamists could be dealt with through diplomacy, or negotiated with.
"The only negotiating they do is with a Kalashnikov rifle."
I'm still unclear what it is Patrick wants us to understand about the radical Muslims who want to kill us. But thanks to liberals like Patrick and MoveOn.org, the terrorists understand America.
All too well.
Labels: 9-11, appeasement, capitulation, Delusional Democrats, why they hate us
"We pulled out of the Gaza Strip two years ago, we took down all of the settlements, we pulled out all our military personnel, we ended the military occupation and these extremists who are shooting rockets really have no positive agenda. It's just nihilism."
-- Mark Regev, spokesman for the Israeli foreign ministry, commenting on a Gaza-based Palestinian rocket attack into Israel, wounding 70.
Labels: appeasement, capitulation, Islamic extremism, Israel, palestinians
