COLLECTIVE MADNESS


“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."

Monday, June 28, 2010

Militant Islamists Smell Israeli Blood in the Water


Let's be honest in a way that our President, Barack Hussein Obama cannot be. Islam is inherently incompatible with Western Democratic values. No matter how badly the radical Left wishes it otherwise, Islam is as antithetical to The West as the BP oil spill is to the Gulf and like that oil spill, Islam is spreading farther and wider.

Secularism in the Islamic world is receding and militancy is increasing and ironically in most of the places where the US has involved itself militarily starting with Afghanistan under the Russians, Kosovo, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan again, Turkey and now starting to gain momentum in Malasia.

Israel is not the cause of radical Islam. Israel is the rallying point. If Israel did not exist, the Islamists would have to invent her. There is a lot of disagreement on this blog about Israel. American alliances should be continuously related to America's interests. American interests have not been served with the military interventions in the Islamic world. They are not served by blindly agreeing with every Israeli action, but the reality that we face is an Islam hostile to western values. Israel is but one small fortress in the path and crosshairs of the Islamists. We need to remember that.
__________________________



Flirting with zealotry in Malaysia


By Jackson Diehl
Monday, June 28, 2010
Washington Post

Anwar Ibrahim, the leader of Malaysia's political opposition, has become known over the past decade as one of the foremost advocates of liberal democracy in Muslim countries. His many friends in Washington include prominent members of the neoconservative movement -- such as Paul Wolfowitz, the former World Bank president and U.S. ambassador to Indonesia -- as well as such Democratic grandees as Al Gore.

Lately, Anwar has been getting attention for something else: strident rhetoric about Israel and alleged "Zionist influence" in Malaysia. He recently joined a demonstration outside the U.S. embassy in Kuala Lumpur where an Israeli flag was burned. He's made dark insinuations about the "Jewish-controlled" Washington public relations firm Apco Worldwide, which is working for Malaysia's quasi-authoritarian government.

Therein lies a story of the Obama era -- about a beleaguered democrat fighting for political and personal survival with little help from Washington; about the growing global climate of hostility toward Israel; and about the increasing willingness of U.S. friends in places such as Turkey and Malaysia to exploit it.

First, a little about Anwar: While serving as deputy prime minister under Malaysian strongman Mahathir Mohamad in the 1990s, he began pushing for reforms -- only to be arrested, tried and imprisoned on trumped-up charges of homosexual sodomy. Freed after six years, he built a multiethnic democratic opposition movement that shocked the ruling party with its gains in recent elections. It now appears to have a chance at winning the next parliamentary campaign, which would allow Malaysia to join Indonesia and Turkey as full-fledged majority-Muslim democracies.

Not surprisingly, Anwar is being prosecuted again. Once again the charge is consensual sodomy, which to Malaysia's discredit remains a crime punishable by whipping and a prison sentence of up to 20 years. Anwar, who is 63 and married with children, denies the charge, and the evidence once again is highly suspect. His 25-year-old accuser has confessed to meeting Prime Minister Najib Razak and talking by phone with the national police chief in the days before the alleged sexual encounter.

Nevertheless the trial is not going well. If it ends in another conviction, Anwar's political career and his opposition coalition could be destroyed, and his life could be at risk: His health is not great. Yet the opposition leader is not getting the kind of support from the United States as during his first prosecution, when then-Vice President Gore spoke up for him. Obama said nothing in public about Anwar when he granted Najib a prized bilateral meeting in Washington in April.

After a "senior officials dialogue" between the two governments this month, the State Department conceded that the ongoing trial again had not been raised, "because this issue was recently discussed at length." When it comes to human rights, the Obama administration apparently does not wish to be repetitive.

Anwar meanwhile found his own way to fight back. Hammered for years by government propaganda describing him as an Israeli agent and a Wolfowitz-loving American lackey, he tried to turn the tables, alleging that Apco was manipulating the government to support Israeli and U.S. interests. He also said that Israeli agents had infiltrated Malaysia's security forces and were "directly involved in the running of the government."

Najib describes Israel as "world gangsters." But he quickly turned Anwar's words against him; Apco has been peddling the anti-Israel statements around Washington.

Anwar is like Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whom he regards as a friend and fellow traveler. Both know better than to indulge in such stuff. Both have recently begun to do it anyway -- after a year in which the Obama administration has frequently displayed irritation with Israel. "If you say we are growing impatient with Israel, that is true," Anwar told me. "If you say I am not too guarded or careful in what I say sometimes, that is also true."

Anwar, who was in Washington for a couple of days last week, spent a lot of time offering explanations to old friends, not to mention House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman and a Jewish leader or two. He said he regretted using terms such as "Zionist aggression," which are common coin for demagogues like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. "Why do I need to use it if it causes so much misunderstanding?" he said. "I need to be more careful."

Many of the Malaysian's friends are inclined to give him a break. "What Anwar did was wrong, but considering that he's literally fighting for his life -- physically as well as politically -- against a government that attacks him as being 'a puppet of the Jews,' one should cut him some slack," Wolfowitz told me.

But Anwar's story can also be read as a warning. His transition from pro-American democrat to anti-Israeli zealot is sobering -- and it is on the verge of becoming a trend.



41 comments:

  1. Oh, this thread ought to be a real joy.

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  2. After killing 800 civilians, women and children, in Gaza, it is impossible for the Israeli to even pretend that they hold the moral high ground.

    They are just another authoritarian regime, that gains political power from the barrel of a gun.

    An apt target of derision by the democratically inclined, everywhere.

    As our friends, political and military allies in Turkey and Malaysia make quite clear.

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  3. It's not about Israel. It's about a militant Islam aided and abetted by antisemites.

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  4. Combined from the BBC and AP wire, for the interests of those that have an interest

    Reports first surfaced in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot that an Israeli military cargo plane, carrying more than 100 officers on their way to Auschwitz, was barred from Turkish airspace.

    At the G20 summit in Toronto, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was asked by a reporter if the ban was related to the flotilla raid.

    Mr Erdogan confirmed that "we started the ban after these events", according to a report by Turkish news agency Anatolia.


    Closing Turkish airspace to the Israeli military ...

    The Israeli military "refrained from responding officially to the event so not to exacerbate the rift in relations," the newspaper added.

    The Israeli prime minister's office had no comment on Erdogan's statements.

    ...

    Turkey, which had a close alliance with Israel until the three-week Gaza war, which ended in early 2009, withdrew its ambassador and canceled joint military drills in response to the raid. It has said it will not return its ambassador and will reduce military and trade ties unless Israel apologizes for the raid. It also wants Israel to return the seized aid ships, agree to an international investigation and offer compensation for the victims.


    All that seems quite reasonable.

    "Up to now, we have done whatever is necessary within the rules of law — whether national or international — and we will continue to do so," Anatolia quoted Erdogan as saying, adding that ties with Israel could return to normal if the Jewish state meets Turkey's demands.

    The Pirates of the Mediterranean take their normal position...

    Israel has objected to an international inquiry into the operation ...

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  5. The US allies and friendly politicians are speaking to Israel, and their actions. While you claim it is about our friends in the Muslim whirled, abandoning "Western Ways".

    You're way off base, from their perspective. It is the Israeli that have abandon the norms of civilized behavior, becoming a lightning rod for political dissent across the Islamic Arc.

    Democratic politicos, just getting out in front of public opinion, in their own countries.

    The Israeli have made themselves the issue, by violating the Geneva Accords for the past 43 years. The Israeli have a history of obstruction that has developed some "push back" amongst those with sympathy for the victims of Jim Crow style discrimination, based upon religious creed.

    Opposition to Israel that is quite democratically driven.

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  6. While it is the "Friends of Israel", at least the ones that post here, that tell US we are at "War with Islam", when the US is not.

    Israel may well be, if the mind set seen here is really that of the Israeli. But the US, we are closely allied with the Wahhabi, politically, militarily and economically.

    Islam is our ally.
    Or we'd not be spilling $350 Billion USD each year into the Persian Gulf.

    Actions speak louder than words.

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  7. If it is not "about Israel" why was it mentioned ten times in that WP article, while no other country rated being named, twice.

    The entire piece is about how the different Islamic politicos relate to Israel and how that is is some how now the litmus test of "Western".

    The Israeli are being demonized, true enough.

    They provide their opponents plenty of cause for the effect.

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  8. As these Islamic countries become more democratic and less authoritarian, the politicos have to go, where the people are.

    In the past, using Turkey as the example, the Army held a lot of political power.

    They were the authority.

    As Turkey has been Westernized, it has become more democratic. Public opinion is beginning to drive government policy. Just as it does, here.

    That public opinion, across the Islamic Arc, is polarized against Israel, well, that is going to be reflected in their politicians and their policies.

    As it should be, democratically.

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  9. The US has supported Islam in Kosovo, Bosnia, Afghanistan twice, and Iraq. Tito enforced a secular Yugoslavia. Clinton bombed our WWII allies, the Christian Serbs, in support of Albanian Muslims in Kosovo and today Bosnia is becoming the third Muslim country in Europe.

    Saddam brutally enforced a secular state and Bush handed the reins of power to the Shiites in Iraq.

    The Russians backed a secular Afghanistan and Reagan and Bush made the Mujahideen.

    When the Shah faltered, Carter stopped the Iranian military from a coup d'état, that let in the Ayatollah Khomeini.

    The record of US military involvement in Islamic lands is a spectacular and catastrophic failure.

    Our delusional obsession goes back to when we tolerated the Saudis taking over American oil fields and thinking Saudi Arabia would become a bulwark of sanity in the Muslim World with the help of American arms.

    The delusion continued while the Shah was in power. They were to be the military hegemon in
    Central Asia.

    Turkey has benefitted from the US believing that Turkish tolerance would spread. The opposite has happened as Islam reasserts its power.

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  10. Israel is really irrelevant. It is unsustainable. The population will become majority Muslim.

    Egypt will sink back into the Islamic cesspool.

    Israel as a nation state is sixty years old with five million people. It is up against a resurgent Islam of over a billion that has no hope of internal reform.

    Militant Islam is on a roll. Israel is an irritant. Islam has far bigger fish to fry than Israel.

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  11. Triangulate, Trish!
    Fly above (or beneath) the Fray:

    Athiests Don't Have No Songs

    Steve Martin

    Christians have their hymns and pages, (hymns and pages)
    Havah Nagilah is for the Jews, (for the Jews)
    Baptists have their rock of ages, (rock of ages)
    Atheists just sing the blues...

    ReplyDelete
  12. I'm wearing my robe at half-mast in respectful memory of Bobbie Byrde.

    ReplyDelete
  13. WiO and Anon,

    I was sorely tempted to take the plunge. Note: I did not.

    Let the goy have their meaningless, free anti-Jew rants. They know nothing, as will be evident by day's end.

    "Silence is golden".

    Shalom...out...

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  14. Palletloads of cash being (legally) shipped out of Afghanistan to Dubai.

    A gift from US Taxpayers to the Taliban.

    - WSJ

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  15. "Triangulate, Trish!"

    Tall order before 9 AM.

    ReplyDelete
  16. For the record, a "goy" is someone, a gentile, hired by a religious Jew to do the dirty work that they are prohibited from doing.

    ReplyDelete
  17. Deuce said...
    For the record, a "goy" is someone, a gentile, hired by a religious Jew to do the dirty work that they are prohibited from doing.

    Mon Jun 28, 08:27:00 AM EDT



    Ahh...mmmmmnnnnnnnoooo!


    One does hope your Israeli prognostications are equally flawed.

    ReplyDelete
  18. Dye-job Jackasses become Zebras, wow Gaza children

    Gaza children play with the 'zebra' donkeys

    A zoo in Gaza has found a novel way to get around Israeli restrictions on the importation of animals by partly dyeing two donkeys so they resemble zebras.

    The owner of the Marah Land zoo in Gaza City said he had used masking tape and black hair dye, applied with a paint-brush, to disguise the white females.

    Mohammed Bargouthi said it would have cost him more than $40,000 to bring in a real zebra via smuggling tunnels.

    Children seemed delighted by the new additions and happily played with them.

    The children don't know, so they call them zebras and they are happy to see something new.

    Mohammed Bargouthi, Owner, Marah Land zoo:

    "The first time we used paint but it didn't look good," Mr Bargouthi told the Reuters news agency.

    "The children don't know, so they call them zebras and they are happy to see something new."

    ReplyDelete
  19. Deuce,

    For the record, where did you come by your "definition" of goy?

    ReplyDelete
  20. "One does hope your Israeli prognostications are equally flawed."

    Careful there, Allen:

    Deuce authored Revelations.

    ReplyDelete
  21. Could our rodent be a Joo in drag?

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  22. I think we're supposed to be moving right along to Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, about whom rufus once said, "Who'd ever listen to a guy with a name like Ambrose?"

    ReplyDelete
  23. Obama bows to Stalin and The Great Patriotic War

    President Obama’s equalizing the World War II with the ‘the Great Patriotic War’ was the latest in the string of weird moments where the US place in the history was downgraded to be equal to the Soviet’s:

    "Those were the same hopes of another generation of Americans and Russians — the generation that stood together as allies in the Second World War —- the Great Patriotic War in which the Russian people suffered and sacrificed so much. We recently marked the 65th anniversary of our shared victory in that war, including that historic moment when American and Soviet troops came together in friendship at the Elbe River in Germany."

    A reporter who was there at that time, all those years ago, said:

    “If there is a fine, splendid world in the future, it will largely be because the United States and Russia get on well together. If it is in trouble, it will be because they don’t get on well. It’s as simple as that.
    "

    Instead of using the chance to remind the world of the critical role the USA played in the Second World War, Obama just ripped a page off the Russian textbook on history and put it in the middle of his prepared remarks at the joint press-conference with President Medvedev.

    It was almost the equivalent of going to the D-Day Memorial and bowing to the newly carved Stalin bust.

    ReplyDelete
  24. Ambrose Rufus the Rose Colored.

    ...my sister's Guinea Pig was named "Rufus."

    I killed it by playing with it with a little white plastic cane that you got for donating for the blind.

    Rufus consumed the cane and passed away.

    ReplyDelete
  25. goy: Definition from Answers.com
    goy n. Offensive , pl. , goyim , or goys . Used as a disparaging term for one who is not a Jew. [Yiddish, from Hebrew gôy , Jew ignorant of the.


    goy - definition of goy by the Free Online Dictionary, Thesaurus ...
    n. pl. goy·im (goi m) or goys Offensive. Used as a disparaging term for one who is not a Jew. [Yiddish, from Hebrew gôy, Jew ignorant of the Jewish religion ...
    www.thefreedictionary.com/goy

    goy - Definition of goy at YourDictionary.com
    noun pl. goys or goyim goy′·im (go̵i′im). a non-Jew; gentile: often used contemptuously. Origin: Yiddish < Heb, tribe, nation. Related Forms: ...
    www.yourdictionary.com/goy - Cached - Similar

    ReplyDelete
  26. "I killed it..."

    Don't feel bad.

    Colombians eat them.

    ReplyDelete
  27. One nation's odd pet is another's occasional dinner.

    ReplyDelete
  28. Doug said...
    Goy = Kaffir



    Spoken like someone without a shred of knowledge.

    ReplyDelete
  29. Allen,

    I asked and was told it came from Yiddish for gentiles to do work that was forbidden to orthodox Jews.

    Sorry if I have it wrong. I thought it was unlike you. I share your hope that my prognostications about Israel and radical Islam are wrong.

    My believe is that the objective of Islam goes far beyond Israel.

    ReplyDelete
  30. From what Ash posted, it looks to be about right.

    ReplyDelete
  31. She who must be obeyed seems to have made an accurate prognostication.

    ReplyDelete
  32. Rather than mud slinging why not address the post. Has American military intervention in the Muslim World been beneficial?

    ReplyDelete
  33. Just for the record redux:

    Can someone tell we who is the Goyest of them all, someone wreaking of Goyety, all to clarify.

    ReplyDelete
  34. I vote for me, mee'mi as the goyish of them all. 99.5 percent of mine are geniles, and Saturday is a busy day, just the way it is.

    ReplyDelete
  35. Deuce said...
    Rather than mud slinging why not address the post. Has American military intervention in the Muslim World been beneficial?


    Start with the corrected premise..

    The Muslim involvement in the Americas since 1783.

    ReplyDelete
  36. Oxford Advanced Learner Dictionary:

    goy:

    a word used by Jewish people for a person who is not Jewish

    Jews are permitted to work at almost every occupation, trade or profession. The limits to what Jews have been permitted to do have been set by the goyim (Yiddish & Hebrew for "nations")

    Practicing Jews do not work on Shabbat or Holidays. The sole exception to this prohibition is the saving of life.

    ReplyDelete
  37. O, and my apologies is advance to Ash for having introduced the sine qua non of the English language, the Oxford Dictionary.

    ReplyDelete
  38. Great thread...

    Once again those that disagree with Israel's being and her policies raise the reality of their hatred.

    IT EXISTS..

    The "Rats" are real..

    It's a simple truth...

    The Israelis and Jews are the canary in the mine...

    We will never enlighten the rodents of the world to actually change their points of view....

    So let's embrace the Rodent's pov...

    To all the rodents...

    I will raise a glass of Maker's Mark on the day of your destruction, as it will be of your own sword that you shall be destroyed. Through out the centuries we have know your type... And through out the centuries your types have done malice and mayhem to the world...

    We know you exist and we are not the victims you wish us to be, luck for you we are not the cold blooded murderers that you in fact are....

    So have your discussions of how horrible Israel is and how murderous it is, and how it has no right to be...

    You are sealing your own history.....

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  39. "Spoken like someone without a shred of knowledge."

    How so?

    ReplyDelete
  40. What is "Occupation" said...
    Doug said...
    Goy = Kaffir



    Spoken like someone without a shred of knowledge.


    Dear Doug..

    Might I suggest you get off your lazy ass and go and LEARN what a "kaffir" is and then present to us all the meaning of the term goy.

    Do your own homework retard....

    Otherwise you sound like the inbred illiterate jackass you are pretending to be...

    ReplyDelete