I. Lacrimosa
“We know that Islam is the religion of peace and mercy.”
The Philippines will withdraw its forces from Iraq “as soon as possible,” Philippine deputy foreign minister Rafael Seguis said on Monday in a statement he read out on al Jazeera television.
“In response to your request, the Philippines … will withdraw its humanitarian forces as soon as possible,” Seguis said according to al Jazeera's Arabic translation of his remarks.
His statement was addressed to a group calling itself the Islamic Army in Iraq, which is holding a Filipino driver hostage and has threatened to kill him unless Manila agrees to withdraw its troops by July 20.
“I hope the statement that I read will touch the heart of this group,” Seguis told the satellite television from Baghdad.
He declined to give an exact date for the 50 humanitarian troops' withdrawal, which Manila had insisted would take place by August 20 as earlier scheduled.
Seguis appealed to the group to release their hostage, truck driver Angelo de la Cruz, and added: “We know that Islam is the religion of peace and mercy.”
The Filipino pullout has already begun.
Meanwhile, no doubt encouraged by this display of staggering cowardice, several representatives of The Religion of Peace and Mercy have killed a Bulgarian hostage in a manner too gruesome even for the refined tastes of al-Jazeera.
As noted by The Belmont Club notes, at least eleven US servicement have died while aiding the Filipino military in its fight against homegrown Muslim murderers. Now their government joins the ranks of the appeasers, along with the Spanish socialists. The Iberians are, for the moment, safe from al Qaeda and its affiliates, who have bigger quarry to catch.
But in the Phillipines, the Abu Sayyaf are sharpening their long knives.
II. Confutatis maledictis
Children as young as 10 are being recruited to fight for the Palestinian cause.
The recruits, some of whom are dwarfed by their AK-47 assault rifles, are taught how to carry out ambushes.
They are also made to do an obstacle course, crawling under barbed wire and leaping through hoops of fire while their instructors fire live bullets overhead.
[Sky News correspondent Emma] Hurd witnessed one training session in which a militant, dressed as a Jewish settler complete with yarmulke skull cap, was ambushed in his car. Gunmen pulled the “settler” from his vehicle and Hurd was told if this had been real he would have been killed.
She spoke to two 10-year-old recruits.
One of them, Mustafa, said he wanted to shoot down Israeli aircraft and blow up tanks.
The use of children as combatants is a war crime.
Look in vain for condemnation from the UN, the EU, or any of a multitude of NGOs whose secret purpose remains to humble the hegemon and its upstart client.
III. Kyrie
Melanie Phillips explains how “incitement” is being redefined in the United Kingdom.
It is little short of astounding that, on the very day that Home Secretary David Blunkett refuses to do anything other than ‘monitor’ the visit to Britain of the Muslim extremist Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, who has expressed violent Jew-hatred and support for human bombs, Blunkett brings forward proposals for a second time to foist upon us a new law that will almost certainly criminalise any criticism of Islam, Muslims or any other religion. […]
Specifically, [Blunkett's proposal] is designed as a sop to those in the Muslim community who have been conducting a relentless campaign against anyone who even so much as mentions the word ‘Islamic’ in connection with extremism or terror by vilifying them as ‘Islamophobic’. And I should know, since I am regularly targeted — along with getting on for just about every journalist who has ever written about the jihad against the west or about the troubled business of Muslim integration — for precisely this kind of crude attempt at intimidation. […]
The fact is that the British prosecuting authorities are too terrified to use the law that already exists criminalising incitement to hatred. Five men who were arrested a few years ago for allegedly distributing anti-Jewish literature in the ultra-orthodox area of London’s Stamford Hill were freed after the Director of Public Prosecutions decided not to proceed with charges of racial hatred. The police were reported as saying the charges were dropped because the material was targeted ‘only’ at a localised Jewish community, with no likelihood of civil unrest. So much for the desire to stop incitement to hatred against Jews.
Yet now look at Blunkett’s attitude towards Christians. In the Commons today, he said:
read the rest »
‘We need to be able to take on those extremists and say, I’m afraid in our society, pluralism and openness, the ability to accept differences without being subsumed, is crucial to our survival, it’s what distinguishes all of us, from every faith, from those who would take our lives because they reject our faith, and it applies equally from far right evangelical Christians, to extremists in the Islamic faith.’
Astonishingly, he appeared to be equating Islamist extremism with evangelical Christianity! Where are the evangelical Christians who would ‘take our lives because they reject our faith’, for heaven’s sake? The new law would trap Christians and those of other faiths and none for saying things which others may find insulting, while the government continues to turn a blind eye to the actual incitement and links to terrorism that have turned London into ‘Londonistan’. Just what kind of inverted thinking is going on here? Whose side is David Blunkett on?
Mark Steyn takes the baton.
Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the Western world, but Blunkett wants us to pretend that it's a wee delicate bloom which has to be sheltered from anything unpleasant. The other week, the governor of one of those Nigerian states that now lives under sharia called for the burning of all Christian churches within his jurisdiction. Every Friday, on state TV and radio throughout the Arab world and in mosques somewhat closer to home, the A-list imams call for the killing of Jews and infidels. Well, good luck to them. But, if they can dish it out so enthusiastically, couldn't they learn to take it just an eensy-teensy-weensy bit?
One of the reasons Arab nations are in the state they're in is because of the inability to discuss Islam honestly. I was in Amman for the Jordanian election last year and one of the things you notice is that, although the city does a reasonable impression of a modern dynamic capital and its press is, by the standards of the region, free-ish, its stunted political culture is subordinate to its religious culture. That's why, for example, Article 340 of the Jordanian Penal Code - which effectively licenses “honour killings” - always gets renewed when it comes up in parliament.
That's another reason the British Government should not be in the business of helping coercive lobby groups further stifle debate. Islam raises political questions that Judaism or Buddhism don't - the suggestion, for example, that Muslim women should be exempt from the requirement to be photographed on national identity cards. Without Blunkett's law, there'll be the odd crusty type from the shires huffing on BBC phone-ins that if Muslim women think it's insulting to be made to remove their hejab for ID cards, they should bloody well have thought about that before moving to Britain.
Victor Davis Hanson surveys the home front.
Nearly three years after 9/11 we are in the strangest of all paradoxes: a war against fascists that we can easily win but are clearly not ready to fully wage. We have the best 500,000 soldiers in the history of civilization, a resolute president, and an informed citizenry that has already received a terrible preemptive blow that killed thousands.
Yet what a human comedy it has now all become. […]
Recently in the New York Times I read two articles about the supposedly new irrational insensitivity toward Muslims and saw an ad for a book detailing how the West “constructed” and exaggerated the Islamic menace — even as the same paper ran a quieter story about a state-sponsored cleric in Saudi Arabia's carefully expounding on the conditions under which Muslims can desecrate the bodies of murdered infidels.
Aristocratic and very wealthy Democrats — Al Gore, Ted Kennedy, Howard Dean, and John Kerry — employ the language of conspiracy to assure us that we had no reason to fight Saddam Hussein. “Lies,” “worst,” and ” betrayed” are the vocabulary of their daily attacks. A jester in stripes like Michael Moore, who cannot tell the truth, is now an artistic icon — precisely and only because of his own hatred of the president and the inconvenient idea that we are really at war. Our diplomats court the Arab League, which snores when Russians and Sudanese kill hundreds of thousands of Muslims but shrieks when we remove those who kill even more of their own. And a depopulating, entitlement-expanding Europe believes an American president, not bin Laden, is the greatest threat to world peace. Russia, the slayer of tens of thousands of Muslim Chechans and a big-time profiteer from Baathist loot, lectures the United States on its insensitivity to the new democracy in Baghdad.
IV. Dies irae
This is a war of civilizations, though one not of our choosing. But if we do not finish what our enemies have started then the toll in blood and fire will be beyond the stuff of nightmares.
Gerard Van der Leun:
What might wake us — when we have finally dreamed too long and drifted too far to stop or to turn aside — is a flash as bright as the sun on earth, a sound louder and deeper than any thunder ever heard upon the land, and the screams of many thousands of our countrymen dying. And this time not just our men and our women at work or unlucky in the air, but many of our children as well. What might wake us is coming down, by the day, to the worst thing; an act of human sacrifice performed upon us by our enemies — the murder of one of our cities.
That our enemies are preparing such a sacrifice has long been known. That they will, if left intact and undisturbed, murder one of our cities is a fact; a fact many of us prefer to obscure from the rest of us for reasons that cannot be comprehended. […]
Our enemies' instruments of war that will be used to kill our city are either already hidden on our shores, or stored within one of the surviving nations hostile to our existence awaiting transshipment to the target. The specific nation that creates these instruments of our destruction may not be known, but the group of nations is.
Our enemies' programs to purchase or manufacture other weapons of mass destruction continue around the globe at an ever faster pace, hidden behind a screen of the usual international commissions, and a bodyguard of fresh denials heaped on the mountain of yesterday's lies. The authors of these denials and lies are also known.
Our enemies' dispersed cells of suicidal agents continue to thrive within our cities, protected and sheltered by their relatives, neighbors and fellow travelers that we have graciously assumed to be “moderate” and “loyal.” They move among us, clad in their false histories, secure in the knowledge that our own institutionalized rules of decency decree that having the appearance of a suspect group is the surest protection against being suspect. But this is a but a temporary quirk of our society and subject to rapid revision.
Our enemies' efforts to recruit from within our criminal and pyschotic classes increase as his chief organizing tool, his “religion,” is welcomed into our prisons, and allowed to flourish as a means of keeping those prisons quiet. And it does, as any place in which men undertake the serious study and planning of wholesale death becomes quiet.
All these things we know. All these things we see. That one of our cities will die we accept. None of these things awaken us. In this deepening night we have made a dark bargain with ourselves to let a city die. All we are doing now is waiting on the day.
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