Category: Networks

Victor Davis Hansen explains the jihadis’ motivation:

Autocratic regimes, statist economies, gender apartheid, corruption, the absence of a free press — all that and more retard economic growth from the Gulf to Morocco. In response, theocratic regimes like the Taliban and the Iranian mullocracy blame the West for their own self-inflicted misery and inadequacies. But more often, clever dictators such as a Baathist Saddam, the Saudi Royal family, an Egyptian kleptocracy, or the Pakistani military regime allow Islamicists some rein, if not covert support, to deflect blame from their own failures onto the United States and the “Jews.”

A shamed Islamic street — ill-housed, ill-fed, and ill-informed — is nourished on the mythology that a purer creed and a return to the 8th century alone can reclaim past glories of the caliphate, and stop the decadent intrusion of Western consumerism and popular culture.

So when terrorists strike in London — or Bali, New York or Madrid — they operate on a variety of assumptions. Middle Eastern governments may publicly deplore their methods, but privately sigh relief that al-Qaeda agents are still not yet after their own heads. Islamicist ganglia go deep into the central nervous system of the Pakistani intelligence service, not to mention the House of Saud…

Fourth, and most important, the terrorists and their supporters understand that in a strange way the West is not only split, but also increasingly illiberal as well. It has lost confidence in its old commitment to rationalism, free speech and empiricism, and now embraces the deductive near-religious doctrines of moral equivalence and utopian pacifism. Al Qaeda’s supporters will say that Thursday’s victims were killed because of Afghanistan or Iraq. Westerners will duly repeat the dull refrain that “Bush lied, thousands died” in their guilt-ridden search for something we did to cause this.

And so, rather than focus our attention on the madrassas and the mosques that preach hatred, we will strive to learn more about Islamic culture, as if our own insensitivity were the true culprit. Our grandfathers could despise Bushido — Japan’s warrior cult — without worrying whether they were being unfair to Buddhists; we of less conviction and even less courage, cannot do likewise.

In short, we now know what to expect from the London bombings and the others to follow. There will be no effort to punish the states that subsidize al Qaeda. Critics will cling to the myth that the British got what they had coming. The primary obsession of many Westerners will be to extend sensitivity to Islam, not the victims of those who kill in its name. And all will be consoled that just a few dozen were harvested this time.

Pay attention, this will be on the test.

This is atrocious:

SINGAPORE — Baseball and softball were tossed out of the Olympics for the 2012 London Games on Friday.

The action by the International Olympic Committee marked the first time it had dropped any sports from the Summer Games in 69 years. The committee then rejected the five sports wanting to get in.

Ribbon and ball stay in, of course.

In The Mirror, Mr. Hitchens explains the bombings so clearly even a Maoist can understand:

I remember living in London through the Provisional IRA bombing in the 70s. I saw the very first car-bomb explode against the Old Bailey in 1972. There was no warning that time, but after a while a certain etiquette developed.

And, even as I detested the people who might have just as soon have blown me up as anyone else, I was aware there were ancient disputes involved, and that there was a potential political solution.

Nothing of the sort applies in this case. We know very well what the “grievances” of the jihadists are.

The grievance of seeing unveiled women. The grievance of the existence, not of the State of Israel, but of the Jewish people. The grievance of the heresy of democracy, which impedes the imposition of sharia law. The grievance of a work of fiction written by an Indian living in London. The grievance of the existence of black African Muslim farmers, who won’t abandon lands in Darfur. The grievance of the existence of homosexuals. The grievance of music, and of most representational art. The grievance of the existence of Hinduism. The grievance of East Timor’s liberation from Indonesian rule. All of these have been proclaimed as a licence to kill infidels or apostates, or anyone who just gets in the way.

FOR a few moments yesterday, Londoners received a taste of what life is like for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, whose Muslim faith does not protect them from slaughter at the hands of those who think they are not Muslim enough, or are the wrong Muslim.

It is a big mistake to believe this is an assault on “our” values or “our” way of life. It is, rather, an assault on all civilisation. I know perfectly well there are people thinking, and even saying, that Tony Blair brought this upon us by his alliance with George Bush.

A word of advice to them: try and keep it down, will you? Or wait at least until the funerals are over. And beware of the non-sequitur: you can be as opposed to the Iraq operation as much as you like, but you can’t get from that “grievance” to the detonating of explosives at rush hour on London buses and tubes.

Don’t even try to connect the two. By George Galloway’s logic, British squaddies in Iraq are the root cause of dead bodies at home. How can anyone bear to be so wicked and stupid? How can anyone bear to act as a megaphone for psychotic killers?

There’s nothing much to add to this.

It seems that the lovable peacenik moonbat Justin Raimondo has trotted-out the old Jew-hater’s canard in relation to London. Jeff Goldstein and John Cole put him in his place.

Speaking of the evil Mao and his clueless minions, Marc Cooper reminds us of the stakes:

The savage bombings in the London underground are a stark and bloody reminder that, alas, we live in a complicated world in which civilization is threatened on many fronts. How nice it would be to inhabit a more simplistic bi-polar fantasy, say, of the Maoist bent. It was the Great Helmsman himself who harrumphed that “The primary contradiction is between U.S. imperialism and and all the worlds’ peoples.”

Chairman Mao conveniently forgot all those other “secondary” contradictions. You know, like the one between his totalitarian state and the 17 million people it killed. Or the one between the Russians and the Chinese. The Vietnamese and the Chinese. The Vietnamese and the Cambodians. Rich versus poor. White versus black. Hutus against Tutsis. The sacred against the profane. The religious fanatics versus secular democracy.

Which brings us back full circle to the savagery in London. It was bad enough listening to the reports of the bombings themselves. That pain was aggravated by the politicization of the events. From the Idiot Right were the numbskulls arguing over Shock Radio that the bombings somehow justified the war in Iraq. From the Idiot Left came Janeane Garfolo’s shriekings over Air America that somehow these bombings could be traced back to the Bush administration’s supposed countenance of terrorism.

Pathetic, really. Whatever one thinks of Bush (and I hold him in very low esteem) the London bombers are monsters who are fully responsible for their butchery. Period.

And Marc suggests a look at the Norm Geras inventory of terrorist attacks as well.

And speaking of Maoism, its essence is the creation of a “new man” by means of coercion from the level of politics down to genetics:

When Mao Zedong set forth his designs for China’s Great Leap Forward into communist modernity, he described the Chinese people as “poor and blank.” “On blank sheets of paper,” he declared, “free from any mark, the freshest and most beautiful characters can be written, the freshest and most beautiful pictures can be painted.” Possessed by the totalitarian dream of human nature as his open canvas, Mao thought a new sort of man could be written into being, that Marxist progress was an inevitable fact of China’s destiny, and that brutal means of creating the new society would be justified.

In the quest for the New Man, the end justifies any means, including mass murder. What a sick bastard Mao was.

The one thing that needs to be said about the 7/7 attackers is that they’re simply savage barbarians, operating completely outside any reasonable concept of human civilization. Those of us who live under the umbrella of civilization and the rational approach to life have to stand together in opposition to them, regardless of our politics.

Northeast Intelligence Network reports:

7 July 2005; 12:54 ET: Preliminary reports from a source inside the Pentagon indicate that one of the operatives involved in this morning’s bombings in London was recently released from the prison at Guantanamo. DEVELOPING…

I hope he wasn’t mistreated.

This is worth reading and taking to heart:

It’s through terrorism that the people that have committed this terrible act express their values and it’s right at this moment that we demonstrate ours.

I think we all know what they are trying to do, they are trying to use the slaughter of innocent people to cow us, to frighten us out of doing the things we want to do, of trying to stop us going about our business as normal as we are entitled to do and they should not and must not succeed.

When they try to intimidate us, we will not be intimidated, when they seek to change our country, our way of life by these methods, we will not be changed. When they try to divide our people or weaken our resolve, we will not be divided and our resolve will hold firm.

We will show by our spirit and dignity and by a quiet and true strength that there is in the British people, that our values will long outlast theirs. The purpose of terrorism is just that, it is to terrorise people and we will not be terrorised.

I would like once again to express my sympathy and sorrow for those families that will be grieving so unexpectedly and tragically tonight. This is a very sad day for the British people but we will hold true to the British way of life.

We’re all Britons today.

Every time a terrorist group explodes a bomb, we see the same range of reactions: rational, sane people commiserate with the victims of the attack and their families, cutting through the confusion and getting to the essentials. When the smoke clears, they connect the dots with similar attacks and resolve to fight even harder against the terrorists.

And then you have your moonbats who go “see – this proves the hobby horse I’m riding is going in the right direction!” somewhere toward Appeasementville, Chimpy McBushitlerburton-bashing-ville, or off on some bizarre tangent that intersects with Internet triumphalism or Sinn Fein triumphalism or politically correct triumphalism or whatever.

Moonbats, the next time you have a chance to embarrass yourself, why not wait 24 hours or so for your head to clear before showing the world what a nutter you are? You’ll be glad you did.

UPDATE: For a good case study in what happens to those who violate the 24 hour moonbat rule, see the total destruction of “DarkSyde” by rational people. (Q: Why do these lunatics always go by pseudonyms?)

I wonder if Judith Miller and Li’l Kim are gonna be cellmates. Miller goes to the pokey for not talking:

WASHINGTON, July 6 – A federal judge today ordered Judith Miller of The New York Times to be jailed immediately after she again refused to cooperate with a grand jury investigating the disclosure of the identity of a covert C.I.A. operative.

… and Li’l Kim for the wrong kind of talking:

The hip-hop star, born Kimberly Jones, was sentenced today to one year and one day in prison for perjury and must turn herself in to authorities on September 19th. Kim was convicted in March of lying to a federal grand jury to protect two associates in relation to a 2001 shooting against rival rap outfit Capone-N-Noreaga outside New York City hip-hop radio station Hot 97 in which one man was injured.

But also for sticking to the rappers’ code of silence:

In sentencing Lil’ Kim for perjury, the judge cited the unsolved slaying of Notorious B.I.G as evidence of a troubling code of silence in the hip-hop community.

”It’s because people did what you did, that we still don’t know who killed him,” he said.

What’s the difference between the rappers’ code of silence and the journalists’ code? And if journalists are to be shielded by the law from penalty for sticking to their code, don’t rappers (and Mafiosi) deserve the same kind of protection? It seems that they do.

H/T Notorious Orin Kerr.