Newsday reports:

This is where the real GWOT action is — not at the airport, where the TSA is spending 18 gajillion dollars of your tax money to search your grandma for icepicks. Thank God for an alert Customs official.

Guys holding these IDs would breeze right through airport security. How many more of these are in circulation right now?

 
In his latest post, An American Expat in Southeast Asia writes about the intricate process by which Muslims from Southeast Asia enter the United States illegally via the hawala money-changing system:

Coincidentally, the Daily Telegraph reports that EU commissioner Margot Wallstrom advocates the abolition of national borders (Hat tip: Fjordman):

Let me see if I have this straight: the EU drove the Soviet Union from Eastern Europe and ended Communism by making its borders porous, allowing in all the Muslim immigrants who want to come, creating a lavish welfare state, and reducing its defense spending as close to zero as possible.

The American Left, in its admiration of all things European, presumably approves of this no-borders policy. Let all who wish to come walk across from Canada and Mexico – why, that would eliminate the need for the hawala people-smugglers! No more illegal aliens dying in overheated shipping containers! No more desperate parched immigrants crawling the last few yards over the border!

Then NPR could do one of its tear-jerk pieces about the plight of the newly unemployed hawala workers in Southeast Asia. The copy would write itself.

 
Dymphna has recently lamented the deleterious effects of political correctness on the culture at large. Earlier I addressed the issue of “the enemy within” and how PC undermines our country and our culture. This narrow thinking puts us in mortal danger from the Great Islamic Jihad.

Political correctness insinuates itself into the body politic under many aliases – multiculturalism, diversity, tolerance, conventional wisdom, progressive thought (how’s that for an oxymoron?), all the smelly little orthodoxies of our time. It comes in a number of varieties and flavors.

As a public service, I have gathered together the ten basic principles of PC. You might call them the Ten Postulates of PC; or maybe they could be couched in the imperative as the Ten Commandments of Multiculturalism.

1. America is uniquely evil.
2. America is never justified in defending itself.
3. Illiterate people from poor societies are superior to Americans.
4. The Earth would be better off without human beings.
5. Making a profit is always immoral.
6. Differences between individuals or groups are unfair.
7. For Designated Victim Groups, strong feelings excuse all behavior.
8. Policies informed by Judæo-Christian principles are inherently suspect.
9. Conservatives are hypocrites; liberals are sincere.
10. There are no acts of God; there are only acts of Government.

There are numerous corollaries, extensions, and exceptions to the Ten Postulates, so a little exegesis is in order.

1. America is uniquely evil.

American “democracy” is a charade. The US is really a fascist dictatorship ruled by the Bush cabal manipulated by Zionist neocons.

Other countries can be arranged in descending order of evil: Israel, Britain, Australia, Italy, and so on, until we arrive at the Arab countries, Iran, North Korea, and Cuba. Cuba, of course, has no evil in it whatsoever.

There are occasionally exceptions to American evil, but only under a Democratic administration, and with the approval of France and Germany.

2. America is never justified in defending itself.

War never solved anything. Negotiations through the UN are always the best way to address issues. Nations coming together in goodwill through common dialogue can work with each other to solve their problems. If Americans were more sensitive to the diverse concerns of other cultures, there would never be any aggression against us.

Etc blah yak.

3. Illiterate people from poor societies are superior to Americans.

People who are raised without all the technological distractions that afflict us in the West are better able to reach intuitive understanding of the world and live in tune with their environment. Just ask Drew Barrymore – she thinks it’s better to live in an earthen-floored hut without electricity than in a Malibu beach house.

Like, y’know, these people, they can, like teach us stuff about Mother Earth and all that.

4. The Earth would be better off without human beings.

Humankind is a scourge, an affliction, upon the face of the planet. We must reduce our ecological “footprint”, preferably to zero. The human population must be drastically reduced.

Exception: we Greens will remain, in order to decide who has to die.

5. Making a profit is always immoral.

Property is robbery. All economic activity should be controlled by special government bodies to make sure prices are fair and nobody gets ripped off. See #6 below.

6. Differences between individuals or groups are unfair.

Affirmative action. No child left behind. Everybody is above average. No game has a loser. Nobody is richer than anyone else. Nobody is stupider than anyone else. No one knows more than anyone else.

We await with eager anticipation the equality of the grave.

7. For Designated Victim Groups, strong feelings excuse all behavior.

When South Central LA is burning, it’s understandable because members of a Designated Victim Group were aroused to ire by a court verdict. When Arabs crash jets into skyscrapers, they’re angry because our policies have made them poor and backward, and, besides, Israel oppresses their Palestinian brothers. When a junior thug eliminates half his high school class with gunfire, it’s because he was bullied and held in contempt by jocks.

8. Policies informed by Judæo-Christian principles are inherently suspect.

To act on moral principles is judgmental, and we must not be judgmental. Except, of course, when condemning racists, sexists, homophobes, bigots, fundamentalists…

9. Conservatives are hypocrites; liberals are sincere.

If a conservative’s policies benefit his constituents, he’s being cynical. When a liberal lines his pockets with public funds, sleeps with his secretary, and assaults his subordinates – well, he’s doing it “for the children”.

10. There are no acts of God; there are only acts of Government.

When a tornado takes out a trailer park, the government’s warning system is inadequate. When a hurricane devastates South Florida, building codes must be improved, and FEMA will pay for the damage. When people die in floods, earthquakes, ice storms, and asteroid strikes, the government is to blame for not warning them or protecting them.

On the positive side, government creates jobs and distributes benefices through the generosity of its welfare programs. Government makes the sun to shine and the rain to fall, especially on subsidized agriculture.

————————————————————–

Political correctness is a corrosive ideology that has eaten its way through most of the major institutions of Western culture, leaving them hollowed out and weakened in the face of the Great Islamic Jihad. Our enemy is filled with righteous zeal, ready to die for his beliefs, and has no doubt in the superiority of his religion. We Westerners, with our self-deprecatory posturing and theology of self-loathing, have inadequate spiritual defenses against this onslaught.

Scandinavia is the canary in the coal mine of the West. As Rune and Fjordman have repeatedly demonstrated, something is rotten in Denmark (and Sweden and Norway). The Netherlands is already plucking the first fruits of its radical multicultural tolerance.

These brave people in Europe are giving us their early warnings. It is past time to update our virus definitions before the PC Worm shuts us down.

Saudi ‘justice’ has a strange and exotic flavor. It must be an acquired taste.

A month ago, an Indonesian maid was left at the hospital by her employer. She had been beaten, tied up for long periods of time in the bathroom, not permitted to sleep in the house, and not given sufficient food.

The doctor who treated her on arrival described her condition as “critical.” Her employer was charged and arrested, his wife was interrogated and released.

Her case was so outrageously criminal that even Crown Prince Abdullah intervened, sending his Minister of Health to investigate, and having her transferred to King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center. Both the Prince and the Minister declared the situation “disgusting.”

That was then. This is now. Here is the latest report:

Brutalization is not just a family affair in Saudi Arabia. The state is a willing and eager partner. And it can twist arms with a mighty force, especially arms with hands whose fingers are missing. On the one hand, there is the medical committee’s report:

On the other hand is the reality. Here is the new story:

And here is the outcome of this charade:

There has been no trial date set, though all three will appear in court as defendants.

Whatever.

Here’s what you’ll look like if you use those dangerous chemical detergents. Maybe she could sue Procter and Gamble?
 

 
The winner for this week’s Watcher of Weasels submissions is Carpe Bonum, and deservedly so. He speaks to the painful problem of hostages and even more important has some creative ideas about the situation:

Go there and see his strategy. Then buttonhole everyone you know and make them read it.

The non-council winner won outstandingly, with three votes. This is an important vote because it was so large and because it sounds the warning for coming World War:

Perhaps they are right, that WWIV is coming. However, at Gates we think it’s already here.

New Sisyphus uses the incident of the downed helicopter and the subsequent shooting of the wounded to begin the post,

Now, see the point at which these two winners intersect. They are telling us that the old ways are not only useless, they are lethal in the face of Islamofascism. However, it might be best to take one step back here at home and slay, once and for all, the dragon of political correctness.

Let’s start by ripping its claws away from the State Department so that our foreign service officers can function in an environment of truth and in the interests of our country. Then we continue on down the road to academe, where we cut off its food supply by refusing to fund any more ghettoized study devoted to victims and resentful multi-culti frauds. Ward Churchill goes first, followed by any supposedly adult and professional academics who faint or vomit when they hear something they don’t like. Having banished those folks back to a world of real work, we can make life uncomfortable for the anti-Americans within our borders, the seditious ones who make jokes about assassinating the President.

Only then will be sufficiently prepared to deal with the foreign fascists — i.e., when we’ve dealt with our own.

Go read them all. Thoughtful, provocative ideas.

What we have here may be the ultimate tongue-in-cheek subversion. Who even knows if the Burka Band is female? Maybe it’s Afghanistan’s version of transgendered rock ‘n roll. Whatever the genre, please support their efforts. Whatever the truth is, here’s the promotional materials (with no corrections):

Sounds like they’ve gotten out and about quite a bit. More than Gates of Vienna does, at any rate. So if you’ve already heard them, enjoy the photo. If you haven’t’ make arrangements to buy the disc.

Meanwhile, enjoy the delicious victory that plays like a counterpoint to the whole story. The Taliban tried to make the music die and Burka Band is the flagship of their abysmal failure. Sure, the capture of yet another “third in command” Al Qaeda hotshot is good news, but it doesn’t cheer the soul. Burka Band makes your heart sing. Even if you don’t like rock ‘n roll. Or maybe even if you do, knowing how much it makes the Taliban gnash their teeth in the outer darkness every time they hear one of BB’s melodies.

Hat tip: Buzz Machine

 
The Muslim Public Affairs Committee UK (MPACUK) reposted a list of prominent Jews in the media made by Jeffrey Blankfort and posted on the al-Jazeera.info website, including with it the following commentary:

These comments are followed by a list of prominent media people, including such familiar names as Wolf Blitzer, Larry King, Michael Savage, Dennis Prager, and Michael Ledeen.

This brought to mind part of an earlier Gates of Vienna post:

Interesting: Muslims observing the same data came to a slightly different conclusion. What do you suppose the “simple program” was that the Jews organized in order to insinuate themselves into the loftiest eyries of Western culture? Was it the Protocols of the Elders of Zion? Or the Ten Commandments? Or a culturally-based striving for excellence in all intellectual endeavors?

In any case, MPACUK seems to have its arm up to the elbow in the tail region of the elephant, while here we are poking with our red-tipped cane at the tusks and trunk.

Hat tip: Andrew Apostolou

Have you ever heard of muta’a? It means ecstasy in Arabic — but a truer definition might be prostitution.

Saddam Hussein outlawed the practice in Iraq; it’s generally looked down upon by the Sunni Muslims. However, the Shi’ites have Mohammed on their side as he is supposed to have recommended it as a way for widows to earn extra income.

Muta’a is a pleasure marriage, a temporary arrangement lasting from an hour to a decade, depending upon the ability of the man willing to pay for such an arrangement.

Your probably don’t need to be told that this arrangement is legal only for men. Women cannot and do not initiate any such arrangement.

According to the news report,

Why is this not surprising?

Good on them. It hardly bears thinking about what the “revival of other Shiite traditions” might entail.

Meanwhile, with the addition of each new Arabic word to our rather sheltered vocabulary, there is no commensurate addition of esteem for a supposedly poetic language. If this be poetry, let’s hear it for prosaic Anglo-Saxon.

Walter Williams doesn’t fly commercial airplanes much anymore. He used to, traveling to speaking engagements several times a month. But then along came 9/11. Or rather, along came Norman Mineta with his truly bizarre idea of “security”:

Never mind that the sentence itself is strange bureaucratese. We’ve become inured to the debasement of the language. Here’s what’s appalling: we may not speak about the reality that a particularly gendered ethnic group created the hell of 9/11. The elephant in the airport is the disproportionate self-selection of Muslim males on the “Most-Wanted” terrorist Lists.

The only group we avoid criticizing more than Muslim males are gay Episcopalian bishops.

This demand for political correctness has gone beyond the ridiculous into the regions of banal evil. There is an ugly strain of utopian idealism in our country, a virulent insistence on ‘fairness’ that undermines intelligence, merit and achievement. Not to mention virtue, the refuge of the uncool.

The malignant organism that rips the social fabric of American life, leveling differences while it pretends to celebrate them, PC everywhere insinuates itself into the crevices, using a cover of well-meaning to create vacuous, bizzare realities like “zero-tolerance” and unattended college sports programs for women (while men’s programs are eliminated).

It demands — and gets — bathrooms for the transgendered who cannot decide which restroom to use.

Pornography is our constitutional right but we shouldn’t be looking at images of the Twin Towers falling.

“Give Peace A Chance” means no dodgeball at recess.

“No Child Left Behind” means all will be mired in ignorance together. Even fewer will be able to point to Europe on the map, or know a quadratric equation from an interrogative sentence. A what??

No, ignorance is not the perceived problem. Unfairness is. The smallest infraction is insufficiently negligible to escape its notice. Yet PC has so blinded formerly normal people that children wander the school halls bent on murder and no one sees them until bodies are lying on the floor. “But he was such a nice boy.” More calls for gun control and therapy for bullies.

Political correctness has made us so stupid that some of us demand conversation with vaginas.

If we don’t rise up and call a halt to this social rot, terrorism will be irrelevant. We’ll be protozoa.

Orwell had no idea, absolutely none.

Read all of Walter Williams’ “The Sad, Stupid State of Airport Security.” It’s a three-parter at Human Events, beginning with the above link.

UPDATE: Broken link fixed. Thanks, Greg.

 
Fjordman has a powerful post today about the coming collapse of Swedish democracy and culture. He just sent us this note on the same topic:

 
Religion of peace update: According to the South Asia Terrorism Portal,

The partially clothed bodies of a woman and her two daughters were found on the side of a road near the capital of the northern Afghanistan province, Baghlan. There was a note attached to their chests calling them whores and warning other women not to work with non-governmental aid groups.

Dr. Abdul Khalil, a doctor in Pol-e-Khomri, 95 miles north of Kabul, said that the women had been sexually assaulted.

The desperately poor in this region of the world have few opportunities for employment or income. There are several micro-credit organizations which extend small loans to women who want to start their own businesses. Two of these NGOs, BRAC and Grameen, deserve to be supported.

BRAC, formerly the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, moved into the northern province in Afghanistan in 2002 as some of the refugees who fled to Bangladesh began to return home when the Taliban were driven out of power. It was this group that the women probably worked for.

BRAC was founded in 1972 in Bangladesh. BRAC and Grameen have assisted women in rural areas, improved thousands of lives, and made formerly destitute families self-supporting. With micro-loans, women are able to keep up their small businesses without going into debt to usurers for capital or product. The rate of default on these loans is extremely low; the programs are structured so that women help one another, in addition to agreeing to a code of living for the duration of their involvement with the programs.

When the founder of the Grameen project was asked by the US Congressional Forum why more than 94% of their loans go to women he said,

In other words, they have ambition and tenacity. What happened to the men, that all they have left is the violent, envious subjugation of women and children?

 
Scandinavian correspondent Rune, who appears to be quite a polyglot, sent us this message last week:

Here’s a French piece dating from before the battle of Fallujah; I didn’t see it on any of the blogs, in fact never saw it in an English translation. It’s out-of-date now of course, but sometimes it’s worth revisiting old horrors so as to congratulate oneself that things really are going in the right direction. Also to remember that we have not, and shall never, forget Nick Berg’s killers and who we’re dealing with. This month [April] it’s a year ago.

“Higher religious level” huh?! Oh yeah, Religion of Peace. Anyway, Sara Daniels is a very courageous woman, and the lessons are clear; never give in to threats and never negotiate with hostage takers. Also this is a fight to the end. There can be no negotiations and never any settlement with such men.

— Rune

 
Victor Davis Hanson rightly compares the anti-war demonstrations in the West with the liberation demonstrations so recently — and suprisingly — seen in Lebanon. The precious, self-referential despair of the Western rallies of the last several years can be viewed so much more clearly against the backdrop of the one million adamant Lebanese demanding freedom.

It is in situations like this, where people are willing to risk their safety and even their livelihood, that the spiritual bankruptcy of the Western Left becomes so glaringly obvious. This group has not moved on, particularly in America, since Vietnam. There is no evolution of thought, no solutions to problems, no dialogue. These Western nay-sayers have remained their father’s revolutionaries, caught in a time-warp of derivative ideas that date back to the beginning of the last century. Au courant they are not.

This would be sad were they not so uncivil. But the arrogant hatred and the projection of spittle into every BushHitler diatribe leaves one, finally, unmoved by their predicament. The world is going to continue on without them; engaged as they are in their own monologue, it is doubtful they will notice how truly peripheral they have already become.

One of the differences between the Lebanese demonstrations and the rallies in the West is their focus. The Lebanese people are for something — their own freedom . The anti-rallies, on the other hand, are simply against whatever it is the US government, in the form of George Bush, says it is going to accomplish.

In the end, hatred can only demolish. It is never generative, as love is. Love of country, of freedoms, of individual rights, of the rule of law. These are the things love and hope create and they call their effort patriotism. The elitists sneer. Let them. These ideas are the very air of the Middle East now. Whatever the short-term chaos and cost, there is no turning back…except to look in wonder at how far we have come since 9/11.

There are still mountains to climb. But a pause, please, to thank the Lebanese people for their courage and their belief in the US delivering on its promises. Without that belief, they never would have marched. And had they not marched, Iraq would be an even harder slog than it is, Iran’s restless prisoners would have less hope, Syria’s Hassad would not be trembling in his dreams.

Thank you, Lebanon, for rushing in where angels fear to tread.