by Samuel Z. Anvil
With the liberal media falling all over themselves pushing the "hate America first" message, it’s time to confront the possibility that John Forbes Kerry will be the next president. What can we expect?
Let’s try to imagine what things will be like on November 4, 2005, a year after the election. President Kerry is having his hair blow dried, anxiously preparing for his 37th news conference, which he wants to devote to clarifying some of the things those damned Republicans claim he said at his 36th news conference last week, while he was trying to clarify his answers to questions at the 35th conference the week before that … you get the idea.
What’s troubling President Kerry? Well, things didn’t work out exactly as he had hoped, and he can’t understand why. He did everything he said he would – the first politician in US history who kept his campaign promises, but the polls are full of bad news.
President Kerry appointed a Michael Moore clone as Secretary of State and a Howard Dean clone as Secretary of Defense. He withdrew US troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, and apologized to the poor oppressed people of these countries for the crimes of George Bush. He sought dialogue with France and Germany and the United Nations, and the UN appointed European-approved governments for those “victim” countries. He carefully avoided fueling Islamic rage and held back judgmental criticism of Iran’s nuclear program.
President Kerry rolled back the Bush tax cuts, forced American companies to keep jobs in the United States, and abolished NAFTA. He packed the Supreme Court wall-to-wall with activist judges who see their role as legislating what Congress is too scared of those fundamentalist religious fruitcakes to do. He did everything the New York Times said he should do.
But after the election, people are still not happy. But why do they blame him? Sure, not everything that happened was 100 percent wonderful, but all those bad things were legacies of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. It was so obvious that things like this were going to happen after that cowboy in the White House, who spent four years dividing America from its friends in Europe. There’s a limit even to the miracles the second president with the initials “JFK” can manage, even if he did serve in Vietnam, to undo the damage Halliburton did in its mad race for profits at any cost.
Now even the New York Times is unhappy. Go figure.
It’s just not fair that the polls show people are blaming President John Kerry. Don’t people understand that foreign policy is like ketchup? The good stuff moves very slowly, but eventually everything comes out OK. No use banging on the bottle.
As for Iran, those Bible-thumping evangelists are still whipping up emotions against that poor country, whose people suffered so much under the Shah. Nobody ever proved to anybody’s satisfaction, well to anybody that mattered anyway, that the missile had a nuclear warhead. Was there a UN resolution specifically forbidding Iran from firing missiles at Israel? Those poor Iranians went through a very painful war once, started by a Republican President. And for God’s sake, the missile landed in the ocean, missed Tel Aviv by miles, maybe killed a few fish – let Greenpeace worry about the damned fish. It’s not like any whales were killed.
So what if the International Atomic Agency whatever that certified that Iran is nuclear free -except for a few peaceful reactors - is headed by a guy named Mohammed? Does that mean you can’t take his word for it? We stopped doing profiling when we got rid of John Ashcroft.
And why did those trigger-happy Israelis have to react like that? Guess who they learned that from? Now President John Kerry has to clean up the mess.
The worst is that thanks to George Bush, the Islamic “terrorists” haven’t given up. They haven’t said “OK, we got what we asked for and now we’ll leave you alone.” They’re keeping up this jihad talk and bombing all over the place, burning schools and blowing up buses everywhere from Chechnya to Manila. They used to torch only Jewish schools but now they’re going after the Buddhists too. George Bush fueled so much Islamic rage it will take those poor people years to get over it.
Why doesn’t anybody give President John Kerry the credit he deserves? Who got rid of that stupid cretin in the White House? Could John Dean have done that?
Hell, the way people are complaining non-stop, you’d think that Osama bin Laden was President of the United States.
Tuesday, May 18, 2004
Monday, May 17, 2004
Tyranny of the Minorities
by Samuel Z. Anvil
Question: What do the Shiite extremist leader Moktada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army have in common with the liberal columnist Thomas Friedman? Answer: More than you think.
Both self-appointed prophets of the Truth combine fanatical devotion to dubious, unproven ideas (actually to ideas repeatedly proven wrong) with a total disdain for anybody that disagrees with them, and enjoy the sympathy of the liberal media, which provides a ready platform for disseminating their bankrupt ideologies.
I won’t go into detail about Moktada al-Sadr’s shortcomings. Suffice it to say that he is the latest bearded specimen of a family that has spent generations sitting on their rear ends in the mosques of Islam’s innumerable “Holy Cities,” telling the true believers how to live their lives and arranging the murders of those who fail to take the family’s holy advice to heart, and that chubby little Muqtada is considered, even by his most loyal fans, to be the least distinguished scion of that know-it-all family.
Thomas’s intellectual shortcomings can be summed up in fewer words: “it’s all America’s fault.” He had a tough moment there on September 11, 2001, when Moslem "terrorists" handed him a real hot potato – how do you blame America for this? To give Thomas credit, it took him only a few days to recover from the shock of seeing the New York Times display sympathy for Americans, but he quickly wrenched his brain back into the politically correct way of thinking and figured out why “they” hate us, and what we can do to make “them” love us, and helpfully explained how we can fix our image problems in the Islamic world.
According to Thomas and his friends in the liberal and terrorist establishments, it’s all Israel’s fault. It’s those settlers. If only they hadn’t settled. They are the devil incarnate, those settlers. After all, the Middle East is not America where people of different races and religions can live on the same block without killing each other. The Middle East is full of “them,” the downtrodden, the desperate, the hopeless, the poor (with rich relatives in Saudi Arabia, some of whom are even real princes) and when a Jew (not a good Jew like Thomas but one of those religious fanatics) moves into the neighborhood they become … well, they can’t help themselves, can they? They’re enraged. Those settlers just go around “fueling Islamic anger” all day.
Thomas knows that the Arabs started the Six Day War (their third attempt to destroy Israel) when the “occupied territories” were occupied by Jordan and Egypt, and there were no settlers in them. He knows that his friend, poor misguided Yasser Arafat, founded the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1965, two years before Israel drove the occupying Arab armies from the West Bank and Gaza, and that the “Palestine” Arafat meant to “liberate” was what the rest of the world called “the State of Israel.” And he knows that to Arafat there’s no difference between the “illegal settlements” and Tel Aviv. Arafat wants it all, and he wants to drive all the Jews into the sea (Thomas of course excepted; he will be allowed to live in America until Islam conquers that too).
Thomas knows all that, but he’s decided that none of it matters. Arafat had him over for tea one day, you see, and Thomas can feel that Noble laureate’s pain. Thomas is studying how a Nobel laureate feels, just in case he should one day need to know.
But the worst thing is, that even though Thomas writes for the New York Times (a newspaper of record no less), and even though some of those real princes in Saudi Arabia have invited Thomas into their luxuriously appointed homes, there are still people who have the nerve to disagree with him. Why, there are whole newspapers and even a TV news network that disagree with him, that show no respect for the liberal ideology and even ridicule it. What kind of a country is this that allows such a thing?
So you see, Shiite extremist leader Moktada al-Sadr and New York Times extremist columnist Thomas Friedman have quite a lot in common. They both represent minorities terrified that their bankrupt ideologies will be exposed, who are prepared to use all the means at their disposal to impose their will on the silent majorities around them.
The big question in both Iraq and the United States (and Israel) today is the same: will the silent majorities in both countries finally turn against these extremist minorities to save their future?
Question: What do the Shiite extremist leader Moktada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army have in common with the liberal columnist Thomas Friedman? Answer: More than you think.
Both self-appointed prophets of the Truth combine fanatical devotion to dubious, unproven ideas (actually to ideas repeatedly proven wrong) with a total disdain for anybody that disagrees with them, and enjoy the sympathy of the liberal media, which provides a ready platform for disseminating their bankrupt ideologies.
I won’t go into detail about Moktada al-Sadr’s shortcomings. Suffice it to say that he is the latest bearded specimen of a family that has spent generations sitting on their rear ends in the mosques of Islam’s innumerable “Holy Cities,” telling the true believers how to live their lives and arranging the murders of those who fail to take the family’s holy advice to heart, and that chubby little Muqtada is considered, even by his most loyal fans, to be the least distinguished scion of that know-it-all family.
Thomas’s intellectual shortcomings can be summed up in fewer words: “it’s all America’s fault.” He had a tough moment there on September 11, 2001, when Moslem "terrorists" handed him a real hot potato – how do you blame America for this? To give Thomas credit, it took him only a few days to recover from the shock of seeing the New York Times display sympathy for Americans, but he quickly wrenched his brain back into the politically correct way of thinking and figured out why “they” hate us, and what we can do to make “them” love us, and helpfully explained how we can fix our image problems in the Islamic world.
According to Thomas and his friends in the liberal and terrorist establishments, it’s all Israel’s fault. It’s those settlers. If only they hadn’t settled. They are the devil incarnate, those settlers. After all, the Middle East is not America where people of different races and religions can live on the same block without killing each other. The Middle East is full of “them,” the downtrodden, the desperate, the hopeless, the poor (with rich relatives in Saudi Arabia, some of whom are even real princes) and when a Jew (not a good Jew like Thomas but one of those religious fanatics) moves into the neighborhood they become … well, they can’t help themselves, can they? They’re enraged. Those settlers just go around “fueling Islamic anger” all day.
Thomas knows that the Arabs started the Six Day War (their third attempt to destroy Israel) when the “occupied territories” were occupied by Jordan and Egypt, and there were no settlers in them. He knows that his friend, poor misguided Yasser Arafat, founded the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1965, two years before Israel drove the occupying Arab armies from the West Bank and Gaza, and that the “Palestine” Arafat meant to “liberate” was what the rest of the world called “the State of Israel.” And he knows that to Arafat there’s no difference between the “illegal settlements” and Tel Aviv. Arafat wants it all, and he wants to drive all the Jews into the sea (Thomas of course excepted; he will be allowed to live in America until Islam conquers that too).
Thomas knows all that, but he’s decided that none of it matters. Arafat had him over for tea one day, you see, and Thomas can feel that Noble laureate’s pain. Thomas is studying how a Nobel laureate feels, just in case he should one day need to know.
But the worst thing is, that even though Thomas writes for the New York Times (a newspaper of record no less), and even though some of those real princes in Saudi Arabia have invited Thomas into their luxuriously appointed homes, there are still people who have the nerve to disagree with him. Why, there are whole newspapers and even a TV news network that disagree with him, that show no respect for the liberal ideology and even ridicule it. What kind of a country is this that allows such a thing?
So you see, Shiite extremist leader Moktada al-Sadr and New York Times extremist columnist Thomas Friedman have quite a lot in common. They both represent minorities terrified that their bankrupt ideologies will be exposed, who are prepared to use all the means at their disposal to impose their will on the silent majorities around them.
The big question in both Iraq and the United States (and Israel) today is the same: will the silent majorities in both countries finally turn against these extremist minorities to save their future?
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
Thomas Friedman and the Sin of Humiliation
by Samuel Z. Anvil
Thomas Friedman, one of the resident always-politically-correct pundits at the New York Times, has been chanting the mantra of “terrorism is a result of our humiliation of the Islamic world” for so long that it’s become yet another of those liberal “truths” that are so convincing only until you actually think about them.
The gist of Friedman’s chant is this: we Westerners have been beating the Moslems at everything for these last centuries, and now we’ve left them to wallow in their utterly failed backward poverty-stricken dictatorships, seething in humiliation – is it any wonder they’re crashing airliners into skyscrapers and blowing themselves (and us!) up in buses and trains? Wouldn’t you do the same? Poor fellows. It’s all our fault, you see, according to the sage from 42nd Street. We’ve embarrassed them by not being losers like they are, and now we’re getting what we deserve.
Well, there are two subtle points about humiliation that Thomas has missed.
First, failure doesn’t have to lead to humiliation. Take Thomas himself as an example. For years he’s been analyzing the Middle East and the world situation, as respected liberal columnists tend to do, and he hasn’t gotten anything right, ever. Remember that Saudi peace plan he more or less invented and waved around the world in 2001, assuring everybody that here, finally, his good friend Prince whatever-his-name-is had finally come to terms with the Jews’ right to breathe the same air as everybody else? Do you remember too what happened next, on the very day of the Arab summit that was supposed to adopt that wonderful made-in-Manhattan peace plan? The Passover Seder Massacre, that’s what happened.
Some peace plan.
And all of Tom’s deep incisive commentary and analysis about the quagmire of Iraq, and the fighting spirit of the Taliban? And all of his reasoned, learned advice about how to wean North Korea and Iran from their nuclear toys? All nonsense, every column, every word. Events proved him wrong about everything, every time.
And yet, despite being a total failure as an analyst, Thomas isn’t feeling the least bit humiliated. No, he’s still pounding away at his word processor, still going to cocktail parties and proudly pontificating to the wide-eyed cute little wannabe journalists and the oh-so sophisticated “cycle of violence” groupies.
And second, did Thomas ever notice that the word “humiliation” is closely related to the world “humility?” That’s what humiliation really means, the humiliated party humbly figures out that maybe he’s not God’s gift to humanity after all. Maybe he’s just a pathetic little screw-up who should get his act together and start behaving like a human being.
By that meaning, Moslems aren’t humiliated at all.
What they are is mad. Mad that their societies are still spinning their wheels in the third world mud. Mad that young men have nothing to look forward to except emigration. Mad that young women have nothing to look forward to but a life somewhere between a camel’s and a donkey’s. Mad that everybody else knows the truth.
If there was any shred of humiliation among them, they would have the humility to admit that their societies’ problems are of their own making and that they alone, Moslems, had better get cracking to fix what they themselves have screwed up.
But they’re not being at all humble. Instead, they’re waving their swords over their heads, straight out of an Indiana Jones movie, pounding their chests like King Kong, making all sorts of awful noises and wild threats, demanding martyrdom for us all. And their cheerleaders, Thomas Friedman and his friends at CNN and BBC and Reuters, are dancing on the sidelines and waving the “Noble Savage” flag, urging them on and finding excuses for every atrocity they commit.
Well, I for one have faith that one day they’re going to run out of oil, and then there will be no more money to buy expensive cars and cheap journalists.
Thomas Friedman, one of the resident always-politically-correct pundits at the New York Times, has been chanting the mantra of “terrorism is a result of our humiliation of the Islamic world” for so long that it’s become yet another of those liberal “truths” that are so convincing only until you actually think about them.
The gist of Friedman’s chant is this: we Westerners have been beating the Moslems at everything for these last centuries, and now we’ve left them to wallow in their utterly failed backward poverty-stricken dictatorships, seething in humiliation – is it any wonder they’re crashing airliners into skyscrapers and blowing themselves (and us!) up in buses and trains? Wouldn’t you do the same? Poor fellows. It’s all our fault, you see, according to the sage from 42nd Street. We’ve embarrassed them by not being losers like they are, and now we’re getting what we deserve.
Well, there are two subtle points about humiliation that Thomas has missed.
First, failure doesn’t have to lead to humiliation. Take Thomas himself as an example. For years he’s been analyzing the Middle East and the world situation, as respected liberal columnists tend to do, and he hasn’t gotten anything right, ever. Remember that Saudi peace plan he more or less invented and waved around the world in 2001, assuring everybody that here, finally, his good friend Prince whatever-his-name-is had finally come to terms with the Jews’ right to breathe the same air as everybody else? Do you remember too what happened next, on the very day of the Arab summit that was supposed to adopt that wonderful made-in-Manhattan peace plan? The Passover Seder Massacre, that’s what happened.
Some peace plan.
And all of Tom’s deep incisive commentary and analysis about the quagmire of Iraq, and the fighting spirit of the Taliban? And all of his reasoned, learned advice about how to wean North Korea and Iran from their nuclear toys? All nonsense, every column, every word. Events proved him wrong about everything, every time.
And yet, despite being a total failure as an analyst, Thomas isn’t feeling the least bit humiliated. No, he’s still pounding away at his word processor, still going to cocktail parties and proudly pontificating to the wide-eyed cute little wannabe journalists and the oh-so sophisticated “cycle of violence” groupies.
And second, did Thomas ever notice that the word “humiliation” is closely related to the world “humility?” That’s what humiliation really means, the humiliated party humbly figures out that maybe he’s not God’s gift to humanity after all. Maybe he’s just a pathetic little screw-up who should get his act together and start behaving like a human being.
By that meaning, Moslems aren’t humiliated at all.
What they are is mad. Mad that their societies are still spinning their wheels in the third world mud. Mad that young men have nothing to look forward to except emigration. Mad that young women have nothing to look forward to but a life somewhere between a camel’s and a donkey’s. Mad that everybody else knows the truth.
If there was any shred of humiliation among them, they would have the humility to admit that their societies’ problems are of their own making and that they alone, Moslems, had better get cracking to fix what they themselves have screwed up.
But they’re not being at all humble. Instead, they’re waving their swords over their heads, straight out of an Indiana Jones movie, pounding their chests like King Kong, making all sorts of awful noises and wild threats, demanding martyrdom for us all. And their cheerleaders, Thomas Friedman and his friends at CNN and BBC and Reuters, are dancing on the sidelines and waving the “Noble Savage” flag, urging them on and finding excuses for every atrocity they commit.
Well, I for one have faith that one day they’re going to run out of oil, and then there will be no more money to buy expensive cars and cheap journalists.
What’s Behind the Double Standard
by Samuel Z. Anvil
Oh, the humiliation! The horror! No wonder the press cries out! Worldwide revulsion, disgust and Moslem rage! Shame on you!
Of course they’re not speaking about what Sadam did to his own people: the gassings, the rapes, the strangulations, the mass graves, etc. Or any of the atrocities countless Moslem leaders inflicted on their fellow Moslems over the years. But why not? Weren’t those things disgusting too? Is there something going on here that ordinary people like you and me don’t understand?
Well, actually there is. But it’s all very simple really, and it makes perfect sense to Moslems. It’s only we infidels who have difficulty understanding it.
You see, in the Islamic view of things, the lives of infidel kafirs like us (Christians, Jews and everybody else), are “worth” something between a Moslem woman and a camel. I’ll bet you didn’t think there was room between those two lowly categories to wedge a fingernail in, let alone the vast majority of human beings on this planet, but there is. There’s room for each and every one of us. It’s another of Allah’s miracles.
At the top of the heap are Moslem men, Masters of the Universe, the purpose of all creation, the exclusive custodians of the eternal Truth, and the people whose feet we kafirs should all be kissing. Below them are Moslem women, whose job it is to wash those feet. Below them, us, then camels and other useful creatures like sheep that don’t make too much of a fuss when a Moslem man whips out his knife.
So when a Moslem man tears out another Moslem’s fingernails and rapes his daughters and slits all their throats, well that’s just the way things are in Allah’s dysfunctional little family. And when a Moslem man shoots dead a pregnant dhimmi woman and her four daughters as they drive through a part of the world he thinks belongs to him (and of course every square inch of this planet rightfully belongs to Moslems and to nobody else), well, that’s his natural-born right as Master of the Universe. Even the kafirs of Europe don’t dare deny him that right.
But if a kafir, a dhimmi, one of those so-called people whose role in this life is to be properly submissive to and respectful of his Moslem betters, should turn around and strike back, well that’s completely unthinkable. It’s against Allah’s holy law. It’s as though a wife should, perish the thought, hit back when her husband beats her. It’s a shameful humiliation, a travesty of Allah’s creation, it can’t be allowed to stand, and it “fuels Islamic rage.”
It’s shameful and humiliating because what the dhimmi is saying when he strikes back is that maybe, just maybe, Moslem men are not the pinnacle of all creation, the reason why the whole universe exists. And when the dhimmi creates a free society in which people have real hope of better lives, while Moslem men use their oil billions to create one hellhole country after another, the dhimmi is saying: “Don’t give me this crap about how wonderful you are, and how Allah himself has chosen you to rule the world.”
And that is a message no Master of the Universe wants to hear. Not from his wives, not from his slaves (and yes, they do have slaves in this twenty-first Christian century), and certainly not from the dhimmis, the sons of pigs and monkeys. So he runs for refuge to his holy books, which tell him to – guess what? – kill the infidel! And if it’s not possible to kill the infidel right now, to do what Prophet did: lie to the infidel, make a false peace while you prepare for war, and plan for the long term. Send him your masses to overwhelm his country with the fruits of your wombs, take advantage of the kafir’s unsuspecting nature, use his democratic laws and rights to undermine his society, enlist the help of the dull-witted, remind him of his wars against you and when he mentions your wars against him, call him a racist, and in the end – maybe a hundred years from now, maybe a thousand – you will finally rule the world as Allah intended. Patience. The infidel is too stupid to understand what you are doing.
And that is how the dhimmi world came to recoil in revulsion at photos of Moslem prisoners being abused, while the Islamic world danced for joy at the photos of the charred bodies of murdered dhimmi hanging from a bridge.
Do you understand now?
Oh, the humiliation! The horror! No wonder the press cries out! Worldwide revulsion, disgust and Moslem rage! Shame on you!
Of course they’re not speaking about what Sadam did to his own people: the gassings, the rapes, the strangulations, the mass graves, etc. Or any of the atrocities countless Moslem leaders inflicted on their fellow Moslems over the years. But why not? Weren’t those things disgusting too? Is there something going on here that ordinary people like you and me don’t understand?
Well, actually there is. But it’s all very simple really, and it makes perfect sense to Moslems. It’s only we infidels who have difficulty understanding it.
You see, in the Islamic view of things, the lives of infidel kafirs like us (Christians, Jews and everybody else), are “worth” something between a Moslem woman and a camel. I’ll bet you didn’t think there was room between those two lowly categories to wedge a fingernail in, let alone the vast majority of human beings on this planet, but there is. There’s room for each and every one of us. It’s another of Allah’s miracles.
At the top of the heap are Moslem men, Masters of the Universe, the purpose of all creation, the exclusive custodians of the eternal Truth, and the people whose feet we kafirs should all be kissing. Below them are Moslem women, whose job it is to wash those feet. Below them, us, then camels and other useful creatures like sheep that don’t make too much of a fuss when a Moslem man whips out his knife.
So when a Moslem man tears out another Moslem’s fingernails and rapes his daughters and slits all their throats, well that’s just the way things are in Allah’s dysfunctional little family. And when a Moslem man shoots dead a pregnant dhimmi woman and her four daughters as they drive through a part of the world he thinks belongs to him (and of course every square inch of this planet rightfully belongs to Moslems and to nobody else), well, that’s his natural-born right as Master of the Universe. Even the kafirs of Europe don’t dare deny him that right.
But if a kafir, a dhimmi, one of those so-called people whose role in this life is to be properly submissive to and respectful of his Moslem betters, should turn around and strike back, well that’s completely unthinkable. It’s against Allah’s holy law. It’s as though a wife should, perish the thought, hit back when her husband beats her. It’s a shameful humiliation, a travesty of Allah’s creation, it can’t be allowed to stand, and it “fuels Islamic rage.”
It’s shameful and humiliating because what the dhimmi is saying when he strikes back is that maybe, just maybe, Moslem men are not the pinnacle of all creation, the reason why the whole universe exists. And when the dhimmi creates a free society in which people have real hope of better lives, while Moslem men use their oil billions to create one hellhole country after another, the dhimmi is saying: “Don’t give me this crap about how wonderful you are, and how Allah himself has chosen you to rule the world.”
And that is a message no Master of the Universe wants to hear. Not from his wives, not from his slaves (and yes, they do have slaves in this twenty-first Christian century), and certainly not from the dhimmis, the sons of pigs and monkeys. So he runs for refuge to his holy books, which tell him to – guess what? – kill the infidel! And if it’s not possible to kill the infidel right now, to do what Prophet did: lie to the infidel, make a false peace while you prepare for war, and plan for the long term. Send him your masses to overwhelm his country with the fruits of your wombs, take advantage of the kafir’s unsuspecting nature, use his democratic laws and rights to undermine his society, enlist the help of the dull-witted, remind him of his wars against you and when he mentions your wars against him, call him a racist, and in the end – maybe a hundred years from now, maybe a thousand – you will finally rule the world as Allah intended. Patience. The infidel is too stupid to understand what you are doing.
And that is how the dhimmi world came to recoil in revulsion at photos of Moslem prisoners being abused, while the Islamic world danced for joy at the photos of the charred bodies of murdered dhimmi hanging from a bridge.
Do you understand now?
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