Fed up with Islam Yet???
- Thread starter Colpy
- Start date
this guy has apparently been living under a rock and is unfamiliar with the extreme wealth inequality going on today.
Oh I do understand, and I understand that it is a serious problem, both morally and in the long run, for society as a whole.
Now.....the question:
How do you redistribute wealth?
It ain't easy.
My point below was that we here in Canada are filthy rich.....how much of your money do you contribute to say....World Vision? Do you put your money where your mouth is??
Give everybody with a valid birth certificate $100,000 at birth and add as needed until the day they die then the account goes back to the one who issued the birth certificate. Basically the parents would be paid to raise their own child but to certain standards where the child is in control, like what time of day the park is visited and what time the mall is visited, etc. (less complication later in life in a social setting would be the ultimate goal and what kid is going to turn down authority like that so in a real job that part is something he is already an 'expert' at. Parents would be taking courses on how to recognize and push their buttons so you get the upper hand and if anybody gets to run away and become the homeless hooker addict it is the parents that get first choice.
When you the top and pour it becomes reduced, and rub them round with more and place till cold, cut the mold, the carrots (scraped and preferably use it. Put a quick oven. TO DRESS COARSE FISH SOUP Into a spinach water with a good for three dessert-spoonfuls of the sides of salt, pepper, salt beef, it get quite thick. It sometimes happens that time allotted for from the meat in squares, mix it to add to cook gently in the vegetable on the bundle round the flour in your taste. In such as you wish, and leave for an hour.
If you can make sense of the previous post, this one should be easy.:lol:
If you can make sense of the previous post, this one should be easy.:lol:
I'm a (x). X can mean many things which have to be qualified with an explanation of just which kind of 'x' so we cannot condemn the whole of a class rather a specific part. Think.
Well, first you run your mouth on the internet, and idolise scum like Guevara.
I ain't sure there is a Step 2.
You don't understand. The point ain't to give up their wealth, it's to force you to give up yours.
Linda Suhler, Ph.D. @LindaSuhler
Britain's Obama: Baroness Warsi Placed Islamist Radicals at Heart of Whitehall
http://bit.ly/1AiDMMB
Britain's Obama: Baroness Warsi Placed Islamist Radicals at Heart of Whitehall
http://bit.ly/1AiDMMB
O Beautiful, For Specious Guys...
by Mark Steyn
Steyn on America
February 20, 2015
1.1K
The US media have had a fit of the vapors over Rudy Giuliani's suggestion that Barack Obama does not love America. As the Instapundit says, their reaction suggests that Giuliani hit a nerve.
For my own part, I am way beyond that. By the way, I'm growing rather weary of the cheap comparisons of Obama with Neville Chamberlain. The British Prime Minister got the biggest issue of the day wrong. But no one ever doubted that he loved his country. That's why, after his eviction from Downing Street, Churchill kept him on in his ministry as Lord President of the Council, and indeed made Chamberlain part of the five-man war cabinet and had him chair it during his frequent absences. When he died of cancer in October 1940, Churchill wept over his coffin.
So please don't insult Neville Chamberlain by comparing him to Obama. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, because conspiracies are generally a comforting illusion: the real problem with Obama is that the citizens of the global superpower twice elected him to office. Yet one way to look at the current "leader of the free world" is this: If he were working for the other side, what exactly would he be doing differently?
For example, he has spent most of this week hosting an international conference on something called "violent extremism". Whatever may be said of Munich, Chamberlain never hosted a three-day summit on "rearmament" in general whose entire purpose was to deny that "rearmament" and "Germany" were in any way connected. Yet that is exactly the message the United States government has just offered to the world - in between such eccentric side spectacles as Marie Harf, star of the hilarious new comedy Geopolitically Blonde, explaining her jobs-for-jihadis program, and the new hombre in charge of the planet's mightiest military machine having his woman felt up on camera by Joe Biden. Now there's a message to send to the misogynists of Burqastan about what happens when you let the missuses out of their body bags.
Here's John Kerry in The Wall Street Journal:
Roger Kimball observes:
"Violent extremism" may have nothing to do with Islam, yet Obama's summit on "violent extremism" was oddly preoccupied with Islam, to the extent of according it a special deference:
But President Obama knows better than you. So he organized a summit dedicated to creating and promoting a self-invented phantom enemy. Conveniently enough, the main problem with "violent extremists" is that its principal victims are Muslims. No, no, I don't mean the thousands of Muslims being slaughtered, beheaded, burned alive, raped, sold into sex slavery, etc, etc, in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Nigeria, and so on. The Muslims most at risk are right here in America. Just ask Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson:
How about "the plight of Muslims" who live in Muslim countries? As I wrote in 2006 in the very prologue of the highly prescient America Alone:
On The Hugh Hewitt Show yesterday, I pointed out that the French Government estimates that some nine thousand "Frenchmen" have volunteered to fight for ISIS. That is approximately half the total western deployment in Afghanistan of around 18,000 troops from some four dozen countries. It is larger than any French military deployment in the last half-century. That 500-strong congregation of mourners for the Copenhagen killer may not be the largest funeral turnout in Denmark's history, but it's similarly impressive.
And yet none of that could be discussed in Washington, at a summit arising directly out of the Charlie Hebdo slaughter.
I have quoted before my old friend Theodore Dalrymple on the purposes of lies in totalitarian societies:
O Beautiful, For Specious Guys... :: SteynOnline
by Mark Steyn
Steyn on America
February 20, 2015
1.1K
The US media have had a fit of the vapors over Rudy Giuliani's suggestion that Barack Obama does not love America. As the Instapundit says, their reaction suggests that Giuliani hit a nerve.
For my own part, I am way beyond that. By the way, I'm growing rather weary of the cheap comparisons of Obama with Neville Chamberlain. The British Prime Minister got the biggest issue of the day wrong. But no one ever doubted that he loved his country. That's why, after his eviction from Downing Street, Churchill kept him on in his ministry as Lord President of the Council, and indeed made Chamberlain part of the five-man war cabinet and had him chair it during his frequent absences. When he died of cancer in October 1940, Churchill wept over his coffin.
So please don't insult Neville Chamberlain by comparing him to Obama. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, because conspiracies are generally a comforting illusion: the real problem with Obama is that the citizens of the global superpower twice elected him to office. Yet one way to look at the current "leader of the free world" is this: If he were working for the other side, what exactly would he be doing differently?
For example, he has spent most of this week hosting an international conference on something called "violent extremism". Whatever may be said of Munich, Chamberlain never hosted a three-day summit on "rearmament" in general whose entire purpose was to deny that "rearmament" and "Germany" were in any way connected. Yet that is exactly the message the United States government has just offered to the world - in between such eccentric side spectacles as Marie Harf, star of the hilarious new comedy Geopolitically Blonde, explaining her jobs-for-jihadis program, and the new hombre in charge of the planet's mightiest military machine having his woman felt up on camera by Joe Biden. Now there's a message to send to the misogynists of Burqastan about what happens when you let the missuses out of their body bags.
Here's John Kerry in The Wall Street Journal:
The rise of violent extremism represents the pre-eminent challenge of the young 21st century...
A safer and more prosperous future requires us to recognize that violent extremism can't be justified by resorting to religion...
Violent extremism has claimed lives in every corner of the globe, and Muslim lives most of all...
This summit at the White House and State Department will expand the global conversation and, more important, adopt an action agenda that identifies, shares and utilizes best practices in preventing and countering violent extremism...
Put simply, we are building a global partnership against violent extremism.
Success requires showing the world the power of peaceful communities instead of extremist violence.
Wait a minute, "extremist violence"? How come the spell-check didn't catch that? Don't worry. The very next sentence is back on track:A safer and more prosperous future requires us to recognize that violent extremism can't be justified by resorting to religion...
Violent extremism has claimed lives in every corner of the globe, and Muslim lives most of all...
This summit at the White House and State Department will expand the global conversation and, more important, adopt an action agenda that identifies, shares and utilizes best practices in preventing and countering violent extremism...
Put simply, we are building a global partnership against violent extremism.
Success requires showing the world the power of peaceful communities instead of extremist violence.
Success requires offering a vision that is positive and proactive: a world with more concrete alternatives to the nihilistic worldview of violent extremists...
We have to devote ourselves not just to combating violent extremism, but to preventing it...
We've combated violent extremism before...
The 20th century was defined by the struggle to overcome depression, slavery, fascism and totalitarianism. Now it's our turn. The rise of violent extremism challenges every one of us...
By now you may be saying, "Oh, 'violent extremism', I get it. You mean..." Whoa, don't go there, girlfriend. "This is not true Islam," insists President Obama.We have to devote ourselves not just to combating violent extremism, but to preventing it...
We've combated violent extremism before...
The 20th century was defined by the struggle to overcome depression, slavery, fascism and totalitarianism. Now it's our turn. The rise of violent extremism challenges every one of us...
Roger Kimball observes:
"ISIL is not 'Islamic.'" Really? Was the Ayatollah Khomeini "Islamic?" How about Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Erdogan: is he "Islamic"? A few years ago, Erdogan told the world that the phrase "moderate Islam" is "ugly" because "Islam is Islam." Democracy, he said, is just an express stop on the train whose destination is Islam...
The Saudis, the biggest and richest Sunni nation? They torture bloggers for "insulting Islam," stone adulteresses, maim thieves, and treat women like chattel. Do they represent Islam?
But Obama has ambitions way beyond the Turks and Saudis. If the Islamic State isn't "true Islam", is the Taliban, our "partners for peace" in Aghanistan? Is "true Islam" the Iranian mullahs, our "partners for peace" in the Persian Gulf and beyond? How about the Houthi? They're our Iranian partners for peace's partners for peace in Yemen, and they were awfully sporting to let our diplomats flee without beheading them.The Saudis, the biggest and richest Sunni nation? They torture bloggers for "insulting Islam," stone adulteresses, maim thieves, and treat women like chattel. Do they represent Islam?
"Violent extremism" may have nothing to do with Islam, yet Obama's summit on "violent extremism" was oddly preoccupied with Islam, to the extent of according it a special deference:
A Muslim prayer was recited at the start of the second day of the White House summit on "Countering Violent Extremism," but no other religious text was presented during the portion of the event that was open to the press.
Imam Sheikh Sa'ad Musse Roble, president of the World Peace Organization in Minneapolis, Minn., recited a "verse from the Quran" following remarks by Obama administration officials and Democratic members of Congress.
But hey, what's so odd about that? "Islam has been woven into the fabric of our country since its founding," says the President. You might think that Islam has been entirely irrelevant to "the fabric of our country" for its first two centuries, and you might further think that Islam, being self-segregating, tends not to weave itself into anybody's fabric but instead tends to unravel it - as it's doing in, say, Copenhagen, where 500 mourners turned up for the funeral of an ISIS-supporting Jew-hating anti-free-speech murderer.Imam Sheikh Sa'ad Musse Roble, president of the World Peace Organization in Minneapolis, Minn., recited a "verse from the Quran" following remarks by Obama administration officials and Democratic members of Congress.
But President Obama knows better than you. So he organized a summit dedicated to creating and promoting a self-invented phantom enemy. Conveniently enough, the main problem with "violent extremists" is that its principal victims are Muslims. No, no, I don't mean the thousands of Muslims being slaughtered, beheaded, burned alive, raped, sold into sex slavery, etc, etc, in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Nigeria, and so on. The Muslims most at risk are right here in America. Just ask Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson:
We in the administration and the government should give voice to the plight of Muslims living in this country and the discrimination that they face. And so I personally have committed to speak out about the situation that very often people in the Muslim community in this country face. The fact that there are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world and the Islamic faith is one about peace and brotherhood.
I opposed the creation of the Department of Homeland Security on the basic Thatcherite principle that if you create a government bureaucracy in order to deal with a problem you'll never be rid of the problem. But I underestimated the creativity of our rulers: The DHS was set up because 19 Muslims flew planes into skyscrapers and killed thousands of people. Thirteen years later, the head of the DHS thinks his department's priority should be to "give voice to the plight of Muslims" who have the misfortune to live in America.
How about "the plight of Muslims" who live in Muslim countries? As I wrote in 2006 in the very prologue of the highly prescient America Alone:
In the 2005 rankings of Freedom House's survey of personal liberty and democracy around the world, five of the eight countries with the lowest "freedom" score were Muslim. Of the 46 Muslim majority nations in the world, only three were free. Of the 16 nations in which Muslims form between 20 and 50 per cent of the population, only another three were ranked as free: Benin, Serbia and Montenegro, and Suriname. It will be interesting to follow France's fortunes as a fourth member of that group.
The "plight" of Muslim communities in America and the west is that they enjoy freedoms they could never dream of back in Somalia or Syria or anywhere else - but that they value those freedoms less than they value the pre-eminence of Islam. Canadian reader Sam Williamson wrote to me with what I thought was an interesting insight into the millions of "moderate Muslims":
Hello Mark:
Suppose the moderate shoe was in the other foot:
You are a moderate Christian and there is a radical bunch at the far end of the spectrum of the faith that causing violence, even in your new country. Your faith is growing worldwide in numbers. You see other faiths abandoning their beliefs, and even making laws about where they may practice. But your religion is more welcomed. They say it strengthens the country. It's in their constitution. Other countries are asking you to come.
So you can't help but see your faith gaining influence. In some places no shopping on the Holy Day laws are being re-introduced. In some public schools they are allowing Mass to be said in the cafeteria during the day. Offensive comments about our Church, Saviour, and Saints are being condemned. And items from other religions are being hidden or removed so we don't have to see them. Many people, including their wise teachers, professors, and prominent people in the papers and television are helping getting rid of many customs that we do not support as Catholics. Why even the other day a leader in government told the Prime Minister that it was wrong not to allow us to say the rosary during the Citizenship Ceremony.
Sure, we will condemn that bombing and those extremists if asked. They don't represent my beliefs. But looking at the future I'm thinking my family, my children and grandchildren are going to do better in this country when it's all Christians, and those wrong beliefs have left, and the atheists driven out, even if it is accomplished with some fear and violence. After all, ours is the one true religion and our people will once again be great.
Sam Williamson
If you were a "moderate Muslim", what would you make of an extraordinary week in which the global superpower has piled up a mountain of preposterous, mutually contradictory official lies all designed to flatter you: Islam has been part of the fabric of America since the 18th century, and yet the plight of Muslims in this country and the discrimination they face has never been worse. We are at war with the mysterious shadowy Empire of Violentia-Extremistan, which is nothing to do with Islam, yet necessitates the saying of Muslim prayers - and Muslim prayers only - at official US government events.Suppose the moderate shoe was in the other foot:
You are a moderate Christian and there is a radical bunch at the far end of the spectrum of the faith that causing violence, even in your new country. Your faith is growing worldwide in numbers. You see other faiths abandoning their beliefs, and even making laws about where they may practice. But your religion is more welcomed. They say it strengthens the country. It's in their constitution. Other countries are asking you to come.
So you can't help but see your faith gaining influence. In some places no shopping on the Holy Day laws are being re-introduced. In some public schools they are allowing Mass to be said in the cafeteria during the day. Offensive comments about our Church, Saviour, and Saints are being condemned. And items from other religions are being hidden or removed so we don't have to see them. Many people, including their wise teachers, professors, and prominent people in the papers and television are helping getting rid of many customs that we do not support as Catholics. Why even the other day a leader in government told the Prime Minister that it was wrong not to allow us to say the rosary during the Citizenship Ceremony.
Sure, we will condemn that bombing and those extremists if asked. They don't represent my beliefs. But looking at the future I'm thinking my family, my children and grandchildren are going to do better in this country when it's all Christians, and those wrong beliefs have left, and the atheists driven out, even if it is accomplished with some fear and violence. After all, ours is the one true religion and our people will once again be great.
Sam Williamson
On The Hugh Hewitt Show yesterday, I pointed out that the French Government estimates that some nine thousand "Frenchmen" have volunteered to fight for ISIS. That is approximately half the total western deployment in Afghanistan of around 18,000 troops from some four dozen countries. It is larger than any French military deployment in the last half-century. That 500-strong congregation of mourners for the Copenhagen killer may not be the largest funeral turnout in Denmark's history, but it's similarly impressive.
And yet none of that could be discussed in Washington, at a summit arising directly out of the Charlie Hebdo slaughter.
I have quoted before my old friend Theodore Dalrymple on the purposes of lies in totalitarian societies:
In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.
We are at war with a depraved enemy, but we cannot be allowed to assert our moral superiority even to head-choppers, rapists, slavers and immolators. Thus the priority of Barack ("Hey, how 'bout those Crusades?") Obama has been to undermine our sense of probity, and make us not merely equivalent to but worse than our enemies. That was the purpose of this last week of Official Lies.
O Beautiful, For Specious Guys... :: SteynOnline
OK, Colpy, so what's your solution? You appear to reject the notion, or join Wank Stain in rejecting the notion, that economic development in the areas producing the lion's share of the radicals will give them something to do besides radicalism, and something to lose, thus reducing radicalism.
So, what's your plan?
So, what's your plan?
Repeat after me: It’s got nothing to do with Islam
THE Islamic world is divided into two main groups. You’ve got your Sunnis and you’ve got your Shiites.
The more excitable members of these groups have spent the past 1400 years trying to wipe each other out, a process that continues today in Syria and Iraq — and, to a lesser extent, in Auburn and Lakemba. It seems counterintuitive, but this crowd gains new members with every latest Islamic atrocity. Last week, following Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein’s murderous rampage in Copenhagen, Sanna al-Baltam spoke to Danish television about her former neighbour.
“We’re not sure it was him who did it,” she said. “If it was, it has nothing to do with Islam. He must have been manipulated.”
No Cookies | dailytelegraph.com.au
THE Islamic world is divided into two main groups. You’ve got your Sunnis and you’ve got your Shiites.
The more excitable members of these groups have spent the past 1400 years trying to wipe each other out, a process that continues today in Syria and Iraq — and, to a lesser extent, in Auburn and Lakemba. It seems counterintuitive, but this crowd gains new members with every latest Islamic atrocity. Last week, following Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein’s murderous rampage in Copenhagen, Sanna al-Baltam spoke to Danish television about her former neighbour.
“We’re not sure it was him who did it,” she said. “If it was, it has nothing to do with Islam. He must have been manipulated.”
No Cookies | dailytelegraph.com.au
bill nye the stupid guy.
50 sHaDeS oF oBoLa @HouseCracka Nye: Answer to European anti-Semitism a neighborhood Welcome Wagon, or something: The ignorant guy. As the sp...
http://bit.ly/1LvC6RZ
50 sHaDeS oF oBoLa @HouseCracka Nye: Answer to European anti-Semitism a neighborhood Welcome Wagon, or something: The ignorant guy. As the sp...
http://bit.ly/1LvC6RZ
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_Canada
Yeah I don't think so.
Poverty in Canada remains prevalent within some segments of society and according to a 2008 report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the rate of poverty in Canada, is among the highest of the OECD member nations, the world's wealthiest industrialized nations, twenty times more than the United States.[1]
you won't find a better article on radical islam and their apologists for a long long time:
Even the Obammyboppers of an otherwise adoring media seem to understand his big conference on "countering violent extremism" is a bit of a joke.
Undeterred, President Obama has unveiled the summit's bumper sticker: "Religions Don't Kill People. People Killed People." It got him through to the next round in the middle-school debate-team county quarter-finals, so who knows the impact it will have on the Islamic State. I'm thrilled to discover that my tax dollars are now going to fund something called the International Center for Excellence in Countering Violent Extremism. Seriously. It's in Abu Dhabi. But perhaps we can open a branch office in Mosul, and Derna, and Sana'a and Kandahar and Copenhagen. One is reminded of the Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence. Indeed, given the style and production values that the Islamic State have brought to Islamic snuff videos, perhaps this conference could prevail on the Oscars to introduce an Academy Award for Outstanding Excellence in the Field of Extremism.
Marie Harf, meanwhile, assures CNN that her argument is "too nuanced" for you rubes to appreciate, with its exciting plans for community-college retraining programs in al-Baghdadi and midnight basketball in Raqaa. Sure, they don't have enough basketballs, so they have to use severed heads. But c'mon, it's a start...
If you want the difference between the worldview that sets up an International Center for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Extremism and the real world distilled to a single Tweet, consider this contribution from senior pajama boy at Vox.com, Max Fisher:
Rather than the substance of his "argument", it's the near perfect metaphorical selfie-stick of preening attitudinal pose I find most interesting. As it happens, being an old-school imperialist, I read a lot of history. No doubt I "could stand to read" more, as Fisher advises. Before the civil war, Beirut was known as "the Paris of the east". Then things got worse. As worse and worser as they got, however, it was not in-your-face genocidal, with regular global broadcasts of mass beheadings and live immolations. In that sense, the salient difference between Lebanon then and ISIS now is the mainstreaming of depravity. Which is why the analogies don't apply. We are moving into a world of horrors beyond analogy.
A lot of things have gotten worse. If Beirut is no longer the Paris of the east, Paris is looking a lot like the Beirut of the west - with regular, violent, murderous sectarian attacks accepted as a feature of daily life. In such a world, we could all "stand to read" a little more history. But in Nigeria, when you're in the middle of history class, Boko Haram kick the door down, seize you and your fellow schoolgirls and sell you into sex slavery. Boko Haram "could stand to read" a little history, but their very name comes from a corruption of the word "book" - as in "books are forbidden", reading is forbidden, learning is forbidden, history is forbidden.
Well, Nigeria... Wild and crazy country, right? Oh, I don't know. A half-century ago, it lived under English Common Law, more or less. In 1960 Chief Nnamdi Azikiwe, second Governor-General of an independent Nigeria, was the first Nigerian to be appointed to the Queen's Privy Council. It wasn't Surrey, but it wasn't savagery.
Like Lebanon, Nigeria got worse, and it's getting worser. That's true of a lot of places. In the Middle East, once functioning states - whether dictatorial or reasonably benign - are imploding. In Yemen, the US has just abandoned its third embassy in the region. According to the President of Tunisia, one third of the population of Libya has fled to Tunisia. That's two million people. According to the UN, just shy of four million Syrians have fled to Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and beyond. In Iraq, Christians and other minorities are forming militias because they don't have anywhere to flee (Syria? Saudia Arabia?) and their menfolk are facing extermination and their women gang-rapes and slavery.
These people "could stand to read" a little history, too. But they don't have time to read history because they're too busy living it: the disintegration of post-World War Two Libya; the erasure of the Anglo-French Arabian carve-up; the extinction of some of the oldest Christian communities on earth; the metastasizing of a new, very 21st-century evil combining some of the oldest barbarisms with a cutting-edge social-media search-engine optimization strategy.
These are Libyans, Syrians, Iraqis, citizens of some of the most unlovely polities of the planet. But they had lives - homes, possessions, cars, children in schools, favorite restaurants... Twelve years ago, I drove through al-Baghdadi, now seized by the Islamic State and where 45 people were apparently burned alive by ISIS the other day. It was a dump but it had streets and stores. I bought some warm, sugary soda from the local market and had a reasonably pleasant social interaction, and then motored on down the Euphrates.
When you're living history as opposed to reading it, the trick is knowing when to head for the exit. One of the things I appreciate about, say, Mittel Europeans of a certain age is that, when you meet them in their grand Paris apartments or rambling house on the edge of Hampstead Heath, somewhere deep inside is the memory of the 3am knock on the door or a little boy crouched under the eaves in the attic. A couple of years back, at a very agreeable cocktail party, I found myself talking to a Hungarian Jew about the last days of the war in Budapest. The jig was up but the German puppet regime had figured they might as well kill as many Jews as they could. No time for niceties any more - for trains and camps and paperwork. There was a shortage of ammunition, so they tied the Jews together in a line, dragged them out into the Danube, and then shot the ones at each end. Everyone in between drowned. Aware of what was happening, a family took in my friend and hid him. He now enjoys a prosperous and comfortable life in the United States, but in his core, deep down within, he remembers his teenage self living day to day and never knowing whether the next morning would be his turn to be roped out in the river.
Much of the world thinks it's beyond all that stuff. Ukraine has a border with the European Union, and many of its citizens assumed that their future lay westward - eventual EU membership, and a Ukrainian flag at tedious Euro-summits listening to Brussels commissioners discoursing on beefed-up regulations on the curvature of cucumbers. Now in southern and eastern Ukraine a little short of a million people have fled. Like the Libyans and Syrians, they have reached that moment when you leave behind everything in your life except what's necessary for the journey and a couple of treasured photographs.
Why should that stop at the EU border? Laura Rosen Cohen is forceful and impassioned about those Europeans who object to Netanyahu's call for Continental Jews to leave for Israel. In the most basic sense, she is right: Jews have no future in Europe - because the actions necessary to restore normality to Jewish community life on the Continent will never be taken by its ruling elites. But incremental evil is not as instantly clarifying as ISIS riding into Benghazi and running their black flag up the pole outside City Hall. Jews cannot safely ride the Paris metro with identifying marks of their faith, or walk the streets of Amsterdam, or send their children to school in Toulouse, or attend a bat mitzvah in Copenhagen. As much as those Nigerians and Libyans and Yemenis and Ukrainians, Europe's Jews are living history rather than reading it. They are living through a strange, freakish coda to the final solution that, quietly and remorselessly, is finishing the job: the total extinction of Jewish life in Europe - and not at the hands of baying nationalist Aryans but a malign alliance of post-national Eutopians and Islamic imperialists. Sure, it'd be nice to read a book - maybe Obama could recommend one on the Crusades. But you've got to be careful: in France, in 2015, you can be beaten up for being seen with the wrong kind of book on public transportation. As Max Fisher says, we could all stand to read a little history, and the Jewish Museum in Brussels has a pretty good bookstore, but, if you swing by, try not to pick one of the days when they're shooting visitors.
This is Europe now, 2015. What will 2016 bring, and 2020, 2025? And yet France or Denmark is all you've ever known; you own a house, you've got a business, a pension plan, savings accounts... How much of all that are you going to be able to get out with? These are the same questions the Continent's most integrated Jews - in Germany - faced 80 years ago. Do you sell your home in a hurry and take a loss? Or maybe in a couple of years it'll all blow over. Or maybe it won't, and in five years the house price will be irrelevant because you'll be scramming with a suitcase. Or maybe in ten years you won't be able to get out at all - like the Yazidi or those Copts.
If you're living history as opposed to reading it in a sophomoric chatroom with metrosexual eunuch trustiefundies, these are the calculations you make - in Mosul, in Raqaa, in Sirte, in Sana'a, in Donetsk, in Malmö, Rotterdam, Paris...
In my book After America (personally autographed copies of which are exclusively available for the Boko Haram warlord in your family), I write:
And in the halls of power the "leader of the free world" gives exclusive interviews to favored nuancy boys in which they can backslap each other about the sophisticated rationale behind their inertia. Boko Haram hate books, so it probably wouldn't help to carpet-bomb them with the latest Fareed Zakaria opus. The Islamic State is destroying musical instruments, so parachuting in James Taylor is unlikely to work - because, although his cheery rendition of "You've Got A Friend" can light up a room, in Ramadi the room would light up him. So the global hyperpower has been reduced to convening a symposium on whether they need to open up more community-college scholarships at the new Center for Outstanding Achievement in Analogies of Extremism.
© 2015 Mark Steyn Enterprises (US) Inc. All rights reserved.
Living History :: SteynOnline
Even the Obammyboppers of an otherwise adoring media seem to understand his big conference on "countering violent extremism" is a bit of a joke.
Undeterred, President Obama has unveiled the summit's bumper sticker: "Religions Don't Kill People. People Killed People." It got him through to the next round in the middle-school debate-team county quarter-finals, so who knows the impact it will have on the Islamic State. I'm thrilled to discover that my tax dollars are now going to fund something called the International Center for Excellence in Countering Violent Extremism. Seriously. It's in Abu Dhabi. But perhaps we can open a branch office in Mosul, and Derna, and Sana'a and Kandahar and Copenhagen. One is reminded of the Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence. Indeed, given the style and production values that the Islamic State have brought to Islamic snuff videos, perhaps this conference could prevail on the Oscars to introduce an Academy Award for Outstanding Excellence in the Field of Extremism.
Marie Harf, meanwhile, assures CNN that her argument is "too nuanced" for you rubes to appreciate, with its exciting plans for community-college retraining programs in al-Baghdadi and midnight basketball in Raqaa. Sure, they don't have enough basketballs, so they have to use severed heads. But c'mon, it's a start...
If you want the difference between the worldview that sets up an International Center for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Extremism and the real world distilled to a single Tweet, consider this contribution from senior pajama boy at Vox.com, Max Fisher:
People who think Christian sectarian militias are the solution to Iraq's problems could stand to read a history of the Lebanese civil war.
Richard Fernandez does a pretty good job analyzing the particular defects of this comparison, but give Mr Fisher credit: when it comes to preening, condescending analogy-deployment, at least, unlike the President, he's come up with one that's within living memory.
Rather than the substance of his "argument", it's the near perfect metaphorical selfie-stick of preening attitudinal pose I find most interesting. As it happens, being an old-school imperialist, I read a lot of history. No doubt I "could stand to read" more, as Fisher advises. Before the civil war, Beirut was known as "the Paris of the east". Then things got worse. As worse and worser as they got, however, it was not in-your-face genocidal, with regular global broadcasts of mass beheadings and live immolations. In that sense, the salient difference between Lebanon then and ISIS now is the mainstreaming of depravity. Which is why the analogies don't apply. We are moving into a world of horrors beyond analogy.
A lot of things have gotten worse. If Beirut is no longer the Paris of the east, Paris is looking a lot like the Beirut of the west - with regular, violent, murderous sectarian attacks accepted as a feature of daily life. In such a world, we could all "stand to read" a little more history. But in Nigeria, when you're in the middle of history class, Boko Haram kick the door down, seize you and your fellow schoolgirls and sell you into sex slavery. Boko Haram "could stand to read" a little history, but their very name comes from a corruption of the word "book" - as in "books are forbidden", reading is forbidden, learning is forbidden, history is forbidden.
Well, Nigeria... Wild and crazy country, right? Oh, I don't know. A half-century ago, it lived under English Common Law, more or less. In 1960 Chief Nnamdi Azikiwe, second Governor-General of an independent Nigeria, was the first Nigerian to be appointed to the Queen's Privy Council. It wasn't Surrey, but it wasn't savagery.
Like Lebanon, Nigeria got worse, and it's getting worser. That's true of a lot of places. In the Middle East, once functioning states - whether dictatorial or reasonably benign - are imploding. In Yemen, the US has just abandoned its third embassy in the region. According to the President of Tunisia, one third of the population of Libya has fled to Tunisia. That's two million people. According to the UN, just shy of four million Syrians have fled to Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and beyond. In Iraq, Christians and other minorities are forming militias because they don't have anywhere to flee (Syria? Saudia Arabia?) and their menfolk are facing extermination and their women gang-rapes and slavery.
These people "could stand to read" a little history, too. But they don't have time to read history because they're too busy living it: the disintegration of post-World War Two Libya; the erasure of the Anglo-French Arabian carve-up; the extinction of some of the oldest Christian communities on earth; the metastasizing of a new, very 21st-century evil combining some of the oldest barbarisms with a cutting-edge social-media search-engine optimization strategy.
These are Libyans, Syrians, Iraqis, citizens of some of the most unlovely polities of the planet. But they had lives - homes, possessions, cars, children in schools, favorite restaurants... Twelve years ago, I drove through al-Baghdadi, now seized by the Islamic State and where 45 people were apparently burned alive by ISIS the other day. It was a dump but it had streets and stores. I bought some warm, sugary soda from the local market and had a reasonably pleasant social interaction, and then motored on down the Euphrates.
When you're living history as opposed to reading it, the trick is knowing when to head for the exit. One of the things I appreciate about, say, Mittel Europeans of a certain age is that, when you meet them in their grand Paris apartments or rambling house on the edge of Hampstead Heath, somewhere deep inside is the memory of the 3am knock on the door or a little boy crouched under the eaves in the attic. A couple of years back, at a very agreeable cocktail party, I found myself talking to a Hungarian Jew about the last days of the war in Budapest. The jig was up but the German puppet regime had figured they might as well kill as many Jews as they could. No time for niceties any more - for trains and camps and paperwork. There was a shortage of ammunition, so they tied the Jews together in a line, dragged them out into the Danube, and then shot the ones at each end. Everyone in between drowned. Aware of what was happening, a family took in my friend and hid him. He now enjoys a prosperous and comfortable life in the United States, but in his core, deep down within, he remembers his teenage self living day to day and never knowing whether the next morning would be his turn to be roped out in the river.
Much of the world thinks it's beyond all that stuff. Ukraine has a border with the European Union, and many of its citizens assumed that their future lay westward - eventual EU membership, and a Ukrainian flag at tedious Euro-summits listening to Brussels commissioners discoursing on beefed-up regulations on the curvature of cucumbers. Now in southern and eastern Ukraine a little short of a million people have fled. Like the Libyans and Syrians, they have reached that moment when you leave behind everything in your life except what's necessary for the journey and a couple of treasured photographs.
Why should that stop at the EU border? Laura Rosen Cohen is forceful and impassioned about those Europeans who object to Netanyahu's call for Continental Jews to leave for Israel. In the most basic sense, she is right: Jews have no future in Europe - because the actions necessary to restore normality to Jewish community life on the Continent will never be taken by its ruling elites. But incremental evil is not as instantly clarifying as ISIS riding into Benghazi and running their black flag up the pole outside City Hall. Jews cannot safely ride the Paris metro with identifying marks of their faith, or walk the streets of Amsterdam, or send their children to school in Toulouse, or attend a bat mitzvah in Copenhagen. As much as those Nigerians and Libyans and Yemenis and Ukrainians, Europe's Jews are living history rather than reading it. They are living through a strange, freakish coda to the final solution that, quietly and remorselessly, is finishing the job: the total extinction of Jewish life in Europe - and not at the hands of baying nationalist Aryans but a malign alliance of post-national Eutopians and Islamic imperialists. Sure, it'd be nice to read a book - maybe Obama could recommend one on the Crusades. But you've got to be careful: in France, in 2015, you can be beaten up for being seen with the wrong kind of book on public transportation. As Max Fisher says, we could all stand to read a little history, and the Jewish Museum in Brussels has a pretty good bookstore, but, if you swing by, try not to pick one of the days when they're shooting visitors.
This is Europe now, 2015. What will 2016 bring, and 2020, 2025? And yet France or Denmark is all you've ever known; you own a house, you've got a business, a pension plan, savings accounts... How much of all that are you going to be able to get out with? These are the same questions the Continent's most integrated Jews - in Germany - faced 80 years ago. Do you sell your home in a hurry and take a loss? Or maybe in a couple of years it'll all blow over. Or maybe it won't, and in five years the house price will be irrelevant because you'll be scramming with a suitcase. Or maybe in ten years you won't be able to get out at all - like the Yazidi or those Copts.
If you're living history as opposed to reading it in a sophomoric chatroom with metrosexual eunuch trustiefundies, these are the calculations you make - in Mosul, in Raqaa, in Sirte, in Sana'a, in Donetsk, in Malmö, Rotterdam, Paris...
In my book After America (personally autographed copies of which are exclusively available for the Boko Haram warlord in your family), I write:
For all the economic growth since World War Two, much of the world had gone backwards – almost the whole of West Africa, and Central Africa, and Sudan, Somalia, Pakistan, Bosnia. Yet none of the elite asked themselves a simple question: What's to stop that spreading? In a world after America, the reprimitivization of the map would accelerate: The new Jew-hating Sweden… The French banlieues where the state's writ ceased to run… Clapton, East London, where Shayna Bharuchi cut out her four-year old daughter's heart while listening to an MP3 of the Koran…
We could all stand to read some history. Alas...
Reprimitivized man lives in an eternal present tense, in the dystopia of the moment.
History is written by the victors, and from West Africa to the Hindu Kush the victors are illiterate.
And in the halls of power the "leader of the free world" gives exclusive interviews to favored nuancy boys in which they can backslap each other about the sophisticated rationale behind their inertia. Boko Haram hate books, so it probably wouldn't help to carpet-bomb them with the latest Fareed Zakaria opus. The Islamic State is destroying musical instruments, so parachuting in James Taylor is unlikely to work - because, although his cheery rendition of "You've Got A Friend" can light up a room, in Ramadi the room would light up him. So the global hyperpower has been reduced to convening a symposium on whether they need to open up more community-college scholarships at the new Center for Outstanding Achievement in Analogies of Extremism.
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Living History :: SteynOnline
.............and the Westboro Baptist Church have killed exactly how many people?????