Seek and you shall find.

Ever since the news of the Anglican cowardice it’s been a frustrating search to find a place to sign on for investment in Israel. And then along came an ad from The Jerusalem Post for an organization called The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews.

In addition to a petition you can sign to protest the perfidy of the mainstream Christian churches, they have a number of organizations you can support: Guardians of Israel describe their work:

a program to alleviate the suffering of poor Israelis, help those who have lost family members in terrorist attacks and help to prevent future attacks. Your support of Guardians allows us to fund initiatives that provide needy Israelis with food, housing, childcare, and language and job training, and helps build a future for those whose lives and families have been devastated by terrorism.

Isaiah 58 helps elderly and poverty-stricken Jews left in the collapsing Soviet Union:

The near-total economic collapse of the former Soviet republics following the breakup of the Soviet Union was devastating to elderly Jews. More than 80 percent are trying to survive on meager government pensions of $25-45 per month. More than 60 percent have no family; many lost all their relatives during the Holocaust or to brutal Communist repression during the Soviet regime and are too old or too ill to come to Israel.

On Wings of Angels suppports the travel of Russian Jews emigrating to Israel:

When the 74-year reign of Communism ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, the door to freedom opened for one of the most oppressed groups of people on earth — Soviet Jews, who long had been denied permission to return to Israel, their ancestral homeland.

Stand for Israel:

…aims to engage people both spiritually and politically on behalf of Israel and the Jewish people, by encouraging them to pray for the peace of Jerusalem and providing them with the facts they need to advocate for the Jewish State and fight anti-Israel bias in the media.

Each of these groups are under the umbrella of The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. Each of them has a good rating from Give.org . Over eighty-two percent of the monies raised goes to their programs. The rest is divided between fund-rasing expenses and administrative costs, with the latter being the least amount.

There is some real choice here re: social programs. Choose the one which most appeals to your heart.

Me? I’m feeding the kids In Israel and the old people in Russia.

Meanwhile, I’m still looking for a fund to actually invest in, one that is publicly traded and has a balance sheet. The Christian in me likes the idea of charity, but the free market side of my soul wants to express itself, too. If nothing else, investing in something you believe in puts a thumb into the eye of the silly Utopian pie-in-the-sky idea of living interest-free.

 
In September of 2003 President Bush said, “We have a responsibility that when somebody hurts, government has got to move.”

Why??

Government must intervene in the lives of private citizens in order to ensure their wellbeing: President Bush’s sentiment is a commonplace one, and is notable only for being uttered by a conservative Republican president. Why is this concept unexceptional?

The virus of socialism has infected Western thought for at least a century and a half. The ideas of Marx and Engels, of the anarchists, communists, and social revolutionaries, have floated though our cultural air for so long that we hardly even notice them. But the left-wing revolutionaries were not the ones who ushered in the welfare state; that job was left to a reactionary Prussian aristocrat who believed in the divine right of kings.

Prince Otto von Bismarck was the greatest political genius of modern times. As Minister-President and Foreign Minister of Prussia in the 1860s, he successfully steered Prussia through two major wars, enlarging its power and humbling its Austrian and French rivals. When he engineered the unification of Germany and created the German Empire in 1871, he became its first Chancellor under Kaiser Wilhelm I. Facing a collection of fractious and hitherto independent principalities, he managed to consolidate and strengthen the new empire. By the time he was forced into retirement by Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1890, he had wielded political power for thirty years and experienced unparalleled success, transforming Germany from a semi-feudal federation of states into one of the world’s pre-eminent cultural, political, and military powers.

One of the reasons for Bismarck’s success was a shrewd understanding of the socialist movement. As an aristocratic Junker landowner, his natural tendency was to suppress the socialist nuisance — which he did, banning socialist organizations and arresting their leaders all through the 1870s — but he realized the appeal of the socialist ideas, and co-opted them with his own programs.

The Revolutions of 1848 had concentrated the minds of the European elites. Liberalism as a revolutionary force gradually gave way to socialism, and the Paris Commune in 1871 was a wake-up call for the hereditary aristocracy and governing classes all across the continent.

In the 1880s Bismarck responded by instituting mandatory health insurance for workers, followed by accident insurance, old-age pensions, and disability insurance. His early version of the welfare state was modest by today’s standards, taking at most 6% of a worker’s wages. But it was enough to sap the power of the socialist impulse in Germany until after the Great War.

In the early 20th century the other European powers looked to Germany as a model, and gradually adopted variations of the same ideas. As Communism emerged as the dominant rival ideology to democratic capitalism, the West was compelled by political necessity to expand the welfare state. Communism is dead and gone, but the ideas of socialism remain, and the welfare state continues to expand.

As long as it is grafted to a strong and expanding capitalist economy, it poses no problem. However, when the demands of an ever-increasing welfare state exceed the productive capacity necessary to meet them, an unavoidable crisis ensues. Given the demographic crisis in the West, existing trends cannot be maintained much longer. As Anthony Mueller points out in “Bye-bye Bismarck“,

	With the promotion of “social progress”, the modern welfare state has dissolved all limits to government. Together with the traditional goals of protection and social justice, the extension to social progress has opened the way to all kinds of absurdities, abuses and interventions.
	With social policy becoming ever more comprehensive, it has turned into a severe and suffocating burden for the economy. The boon — however great or small it may have been in its early stages for a specific group — has turned into a massive plague. Now, the dismantling of the welfare state emerges as the major policy challenge of the 21st century.

Bismarck would be dismayed by his legacy.

The modern welfare state was a reactionary creation, adopted by Western governments to forestall revolutionary socialism. True socialism, in its Communist manifestations, was politically and economically unsustainable, and has taken its well-earned place on history’s ash heap. But the welfare state, as a parasite of prosperous capitalist economies, has proven more robust.

How long it can be sustained? This an open question.

 
The Scotsman ran a 4th of July editorial that deserves wide distribution in this country. Its author, Alex Massie, is to be commended on understanding and conveying so well what America means at this moment.

We are not unique. As he says, we follow in the Victorians’ footsteps, accepting the politically incorrect, the very politically incorrect mantle that Kipling called the “White Man’s burden.” He would have been more accurate to term it “the burden of democracy” for that is what it is and what it was when Kipling first named it.

We follow in Britain’s footsteps, though we do not wear her Imperial shoes. Wherever Her Majesty’s people went they left a legacy of property rights and the rule of law. Was it a bloody road to liberty? Indeed. The Victorians were sure they were right and they sought to impose their vision.

Sometimes we suffer from that Victorian vice of hypocrisy, too. No nation is perfect. But this one was conceived in liberty and thus it follows that America’s citizens are born free. Sometimes it is hard to see how astonishing, how extraordinary is our freedom. It is the air we breathe, the environment we swim in; it’s understandable that we can lose our sense of amazement sometimes, or that we fail to understand why others can’t grasp the absolute rightness of what liberty means. Mr. Massie reminds us all:

	one need not have ever visited the US to feel in tune with what it means to be an American. It is an empire of the mind (and the imagination) as much as it is a military and economic superpower. The principles of the American Revolution remain sound. The World Trade Centre no longer stands, but the language of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights does.
	No other country has embedded the “pursuit of happiness” – the great goal of mankind – in the foundations of the state; nowhere else is the idea of liberty so revered. There is such a thing as an American sensibility and it can be felt from the Baltic to the Pacific.

So, Mr. Massie says, let’s reframe the question. It is not “could America be doing a better job?” Instead, he says —

Wrong question. If not America, then who? No-one, that’s who. At its best, America and American ideals remain, in Lincoln’s famous words, “the last, best hope of mankind”.

Thank you, sir. Your words are an antidote to the poison of those who would see us defeated. And they give hope to those, like the Eastern Europeans, who know only too well that we are their best hope.

Hat tip: USS Neverdock

 
Daniel Pipes fisks a proposal by Reuel Gerecht, who finds profit in comparing the political histories of Iran and Algeria to make his point — which seems to be this: give the Islamic radicals enough rope and they will hang themselves. That is, if they come into power, as they have in Iran, the resulting widespread “disaffection” will be enough to bring the Islamoterrorists to defeat. If not now, then soon.

Mr. Gerecht uses as his contrast the case of Algeria where the military intervened in the elections and brought on eternal civil war. The country remains a violent and deeply divided place, which he claims it would not be had the radicals come to power and then been voted out. Eventually.

Leaving aside the untold suffering that this idea has already brought to Iran, let’s consider Mr. Pipes’critique and solution.

Obviously, Daniel Pipes disagrees with this novel and radical approach to the problem of Islamic terrorism. For him, the middle way provides the best solution. Rather than begin with elections, these ought to be the culmination of a long process that includes establishment of the rule of law, freedom of speech, property rights, etc. Once these are in place — and it would take years — only then would elections make sense.

Mr. Pipes is right in theory. However, there is one problem which he doesn’t mention: none of these ideas — private property, freedom of speech, etc., — are compatible with any kind of Islam, be it moderate, radical, or some peace-loving Sufis. As Fjordman puts it in “Camel Economics”:

Time is long overdue for some brutal honesty: Islam cannot coexist with Western society. All its basic tenets are hostile to every single idea on which liberal democracy and Western civilization are founded. Islamic culture cannot be integrated into the West any more than fire can be integrated with water.

One needs only to add that the converse is also true: Western culture cannot be grafted onto Muslim culture. The graft will not take; the body politic that is Islam will slough it off. What else can you expect in a society in which only Muslim men can ever be full members of the commonweal and that this law is written into the very heart of Islam?

Aren’t we forgetting something here? In the good old days of the Soviet Union, the most equal of its citizens were the members of the Communist Party. This arrogant elitism has appeared in many forms throughout history. It has always been defeated, though not without a blood-and-toil response on the part of those it would seek to subjugate.

It’s the same old un-freedom song, no matter how they try to transpose the key.

 

If you have found this page through a search engine, here is what you need to know: BILL GATES DID NOT CONVERT TO ISLAM. He is not a Muslim. The Christian Science Monitor did not publish that article. The entire story is a HOAX. It was not even a Jewish or Crusader plot; it was perpetrated by a Muslim website as a joke with Muslims as the intended audience.

Regular readers of Gates of Vienna will remember the “Bill Gates Converts to Islam” hoax from this past spring. Previous posts on the topic are here, here, here, here, and here.

It reputedly started as an April Fools’ joke on secularkuwait.org, and then spread though message boards throughout the Arab Middle East and in the Islamic immigrant communities in the West. By an unfortunate (or serendipitous?) coincidence of keywords, Gates of Vienna became a major target of google searches on “Bill Gates Islam” and similar phrases — “Bill” from “Bill’s Comments” in our blogroll, “Gates” from our blog title, and “Islam” from innumerable posts. The meme created by the hoax proved to be tenacious, and (despite my best efforts), the debunking of the hoax never made it into the MSM or the major blogs. Neither about.com Urban Legends nor Snopes ever picked it up, so the gullible continued to search for “Bill Gates Muslim” and thus continued to wash up against the Gates of Vienna. For a couple of weeks in April, more than half of our (admittedly meager) traffic came from such referrals.

The initial surge has slowed, but a steady trickle of search engine referrals keeps coming in even now. Over the July 4th weekend the “Bill Gates”-related searches were as follows:

Search string		Country/Region
bill gates and islam		Canada
bill gates and islam		Jordan
bill gates islam		Arab Emirates
bill gates islam		Europe (2)
bill gates jew		Sweden (2)
bill gates jew religion		Australia
bill gates muslim convert		UK
bill gates converted to islam		Europe
bill gates converts to islam		Europe
bill gates converts to islam		Saudi Arabia
bill gates islam		Albania
bill gates islam		Egypt
bill gates islam		Europe
bill gates islam		Saudi Arabia
ryach “christian science monitor” bill gates		Saudi Arabia

That makes for 17 referrals out of about 1,500 hits during that time, or somewhat over 1% of our traffic.

So the meme will not die. The idea of Bill Gates converting to Islam must be attractive to Muslims because he is a rich and powerful American, emblematic of the Internet Age. There also seems to be an assumption that he converted from Judaism to Islam; presumably, since he is a rich infidel, he must have been a Jew!

Make of it what you will; in a few months I will report back on the latest status of the hoax.

In the meantime, this post, with its surfeit of the most popular search phrases, will catch most of the faithful looking for information on this topic. One hopes they will read the intial notice, and help stop the spread of this disinformation.

 
They knew.

Before a CIA paramilitary team was deployed to snatch a radical Islamic cleric off the streets of Milan in February 2003, the CIA station chief in Rome briefed and sought approval from his counterpart in Italy, according to three CIA veterans with knowledge of the operation and a fourth who reviewed the matter after it took place.

As the Post points out, the accusation has increased anti-American feeling in Italy. Perhaps that was the whole point of this story?

Evidently, Italy not only knew about the operation, but there was mutual agreement beforehand that if it were to become public knowledge, the standard response is that neither side would confirm involvement.

But here’s what happened instead:

Warrants were issued in Milan by a local magistrate. Later they were upgraded into “European” warrants, meaning that any of the agents currently stationed in Europe could be arrested there.

The story stayed at that puzzling level until it became obvious that this had not been a national government move, but an action by a local magistrate in Milan. The question then arises whether or not the national administration knew ahead of time. Probably not. Another question to consider is whether the magistrate in Milan was cooperating with the national oppositon. Probably so.

Nonetheless, to save face, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi summoned the American ambassador, Mel Sembler, and read him the riot act about Italian sovereignty. According to the statement released by the Prime Minister’s office,

Sembler confirmed to Berlusconi that the U.S. government’s respect was “complete and total and won’t be neglected in the future.”

The Italian opposition was contemptuous of the meeting, dismissing it as a “waste of time”:

“Berlusconi and Sembler could have spared us this farce,” said Pietro Folena of the center-left Olive Tree coalition. The United States, he said, “hide the truth about Calipari, kidnap presumed terrorists, and then give no explanations.”

The comment about the “truth about Calipari” refers to the death of the Italian agent in Iraq following the failure of Italy to inform the Americans or Iraqis of their work in Iraq:

	Italian agents likely withheld information from U.S. counterparts about a cash-for-freedom deal with gunmen holding an Italian hostage for fear that Americans might block the trade, Italian news reports said yesterday.
	The decision by operatives of Italy’s SISMI military intelligence service to keep the CIA in the dark about the deal for the release of reporter Giuliana Sgrena, might have “short-circuited” communications with U.S. forces controlling the road from Baghdad to the city’s airport, the newspaper La Stampa said

Conclusion: the strange incident of the warrants issued by a magistrate in Milan for CIA agents dating back to a case in 2003, a situation Italian intelligence helped plan and execute, may have a simple explanation. That is, a reasonable person could assume the following motive for the opposition government in Italy: after the fact, this anti-American-to-the-core faction dreamed up a payback for the death of the unauthorized Italian intelligence agent, Nicola Calipari, on the road to the Baghdad airport. This payback was issued in the coin of betrayal of the thirteen CIA agents who removed a thorn from the side of the Italians — this thorn being the very destablizing presence of the terrorist Imam in Milan.

Thanks, Italy. We needed that. It’s good to know who you can count on.

See earlier post: Italy Seeks Revenge

Baldy had a link in the comments on Little Green Footballs to a story about a murder conviction reported by the newspapers in Bangladesh:

The man to die is Nazrul Islam of Char Monsha village under Sadar Upazila. The prosecution alleged that Nazrul Islam after his marriage with Lyzu Begum pressed her to bring a dowry from her father. Physical torture on Lyzu became a regular feature. On July 9, 2003 Nazrul picked a quarrel with his wife as she failed to comply with his demand for dowry and beat her to death.

What appears to be the anomaly in this story is that the man was convicted.

Bangladesh is a desperately poor country. Domestic violence is so prevalent that women have resigned themselves to the grim facts of married life.

Dowry demands and the stress and hardship they impose on many families and on new brides [are] of paramount consideration in decision-making about marriage…—a consideration that increasingly seems to dwarf all others, such as social status or the quality of the groom and his family… For most [families]… managing a daughter’s marriage negotiations is an agonizing process fraught with tension and fear. The economic burden of dowry can be high—even exorbitant—but mothers often reported feeling that dowry is necessary for their daughters’ well-being…these concerns can clearly translate into downward pressure on age at marriage, because young women’s marriageability is believed to diminish with age, not least because of concerns about “sexual purity”; mothers feared that they would have to pay higher dowry to find acceptable husbands for older daughters. Although numerous women expressed a strong desire to educate their daughters, the apparent social and, increasingly, economic imperative to marry daughters early is likely to compromise girls’ educational attainment and undermine the potential for girls’ increased education to translate into delayed marriage.

As it is in India, so in Bangladesh: very young women — girls, really — are married off to older men. In what should function as a kind of economic surety for the girls, the dowry that accompanies marriage is used by the husband and his family for their own purposes. Once used up, the girl is pressured to return to her family for further extractions of money.

Domestic violence is used in both Bangladesh and India to extort dowry payments and other property from the families of young married women. Violence—often of escalating severity over time—may be perpetrated against women in conjunction with demands for outstanding (often unaffordable) dowry payments or demands for additional amounts. In a study in India, perceived dowry inadequacy was one of the main reasons.

So there you have it. A nicely packaged equation: poverty breeds domestic violence. The implied solution is to raise the education and income levels of the rural poor. Right?

But it’s not that simple. What actually happens is that violence rises in tandem with the rise in education, and not merely the education of women.

Thirty-two percent of men with zero years of education and 42 percent men with one-to-five years of education reported sexual violence. Among men with six-to-10 years of education–as well as those with high-school education and higher–this figure increased to 57 percent. A similar pattern was seen when the problem was analyzed according to income and socioeconomic standing. Those at the lowest rungs of the socio-economic ladder–migrant labor, cobblers, carpenters, and barbers–showed a sexual violence rate of 35 percent. The rate almost doubled to 61 percent among the highest income groups.*

Spreading the idea of democracy is difficult enough., but democracy and the rule of law, while necessary, are not sufficient for the experience of freedom. For authentic freedom to exist, there has to be liberty and liberty is a radical concept.

Personal liberty is the most radical concept of all.

*emphasis ours

 
All the recent controversy about the so-called “International Freedom Center” proposed for Ground Zero is quite disturbing for most of us.

The point of the memorial at the main site of the September 11, 2001 atrocities is, or ought to be, a somber contemplation of what we lost that day. This is not about “International Freedom”; this is about rebuilding our resolve, rebuilding it on the foundation of our fellow citizens’ liberty to pursue their dreams in the greatest city in the world. They were immolated for their pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness.

Go somewhere else to erect those politically correct America-bashing victimology centers! They don’t belong at the hallowed ground where the World Trade Center used to stand.

Gates of Vienna is proud to unveil the architects’ plans for the proposed “Dar al-Harb Towers” to be erected at Ground Zero. The new towers will be four times as high as the Twin Towers, and will proudly display an enormous version of the famous Gadsden Flag at their summit.

An artist’s impression of the Dar al-Harb Towers is shown at the right.

Nothing else could better represent the spirit of the United States of America. It’s time for us to remember who we are, what we stand for, and why we’re proud to be Americans.

Don’t let the Islamists keep the spirit of America in ruins! It’s time for us to erect two gigantic middle fingers to the Great Islamic Jihad, ones they can’t possibly miss.

Right Wing Nuthouse stands atop the heap this week for his essay on the Left’s word deficit:

The word “enemy” has been removed from their lexicon – except as it relates to the President and their political foes on the right. Our enemies are called “insurgents.” They’re called “rebels.” They’re referred to as “the opposition.” Some on the far left have gone so far as to call them “freedom fighters.” Even al Qaeda fighters in our custody are called “detainees.” But to call them “the enemy” opens an intellectual chasm beneath their feet that the left simply cannot look into without blanching in horror.

Do you think this kind of intellectual black hole is akin to aphasia?

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The Non Council winner is Maxedoutmamma. I can only say thank heavens someone finally did this. We talk about that fool Erlichman’s stoooopid predictions all the time, but never thought to fisk him the way MM has. Brilliant woman. First she quotes some of his more egregious predictions:

	Some words of extinct wisdom from Paul Ehrlich, the man who singlehandedly made environmental idiocy a scientifically respectable and profitable endeavor (this was inspired by this WSJ article about how Americans refused to become hysterial over global warming):
	“This vast tragedy, however, is nothing compared to the nutritional disaster that seems likely to overtake humanity in the 1970s (or, at the latest, the 1980s) … A situation has been created that could lead to a billion or more people starving to death.” [Paul Ehrlich, “The End of Affluence” (1974), p.21]

As Maxedoutmamma puts it:

See, in the magical world of environmental Cassandraism, you don’t have to be right. In fact, you can be completely wrong over a matter of decades. All that matters is your devotion to doom. And this brings me back to Thomas Bray, writing in the WSJ about the American public’s refusal to scream and run in circles about global warming…

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It’s all here on the Watcher’s page. Some great reading, too. A good way to cover a lot of blog territory in a short time.