Dymphna posted last night about Fox News’ reports on Sheikh Syed Mubarik Ali Gilani, the Muslims of America and the Jamaat ul-Fuqra compound just down the road from us in Red House. Beach Girl, who is a CVF operative as well as a fellow Virginia blogger, has kindly provided us with a transcript of the second broadcast, which was hosted by Shepard Smith:

Shepard Smith:		New details tonight about the mysterious Muslim compounds right here in the United States. Fox News visited one of them just a couple of weeks ago. Now a former member is giving us a look at life on the inside. Catherine Herridge with the latest. She’s live with us now. Catherine.
Catherine:		Shep, a former member of the group, Muslims of America, spoke with Fox on condition that we obscure his identity. He claims that members are required to send money from their jobs right here in the US to a radical sheikh in Pakistan.
Former Member:		“Members [garbled] are forced to send 10% of all their earnings to the sheikh and that got bumped from 10 to 30%. And, um, they actually had a secretary of finance who actually wanted to see your pay stubs.”
Catherine:		Fox News visited one of the compounds in rural Virginia. According to law enforcement documents, the group, Muslims of America, has suspected sites in at least a half dozen states and the Feds believe they are linked to a group called Jamaat ul-Fuqra which is led by a radical Pakistani sheikh, Mubarik Gilani. Gilani received a lot of attention in 2002 because Wall Street Journal reporter, Daniel Pearl was on his way to meet Gilani when he was abducted and killed. Gilani has denied any involvement in Pearl’s death. In a recent interview, a spokesman for the group [Muslims of America] told Fox there is no connection between Muslims of America and radical groups.
		[NOTE: this next part is a little difficult]
Spokesman:		I honestly don’t know who or what Jamaat is [garbled]
Catherine:		You don’t…
Spokesman:		I don’t know because everybody asks me the same question… [garbled]… I don’t even know if they [Jamaat ul-Fuqra] exist.
Catherine:		A law enforcement source tells Fox they suspect money is being carried to Pakistan though it appears incredibly no laws are being broken because the amount is small. Anything over $10,000 must be reported to Customs. Shep.
Shep:		Catherine Herridge live in Washington.

[Nothing further.]

Further Update: More Fox News video here, this one with Shepard Smith.

Update: The video of the Sheikh Gilani feature with Catherine Herridge’s interview can be found here. [Wazpi has a much quicker wav file streaming video link in the commments — Dymphna]

Ms. Herridge says, “They have communes stretching from coast to coast.” She also talks about the fact that the sheikh’s disciples are now required to send 30% of their income (bumped up from 10%) to their leader in Pakistan.

After a year and a half of obscurity here and at CP’s place, it is very satisfying to see this information escape into the MSM.

Fox News says it has received government documents regarding the methods of transferring money to Pakistan. It is nice and basic: small amounts — a pocketful at a time, to avoid the government reporting requirements — are carried overseas and deposited into Sheikh Gilani’s hands.

Regular readers know that you heard it here first, in October 2005.

Further Update: And let’s not forget A. Jacksonian’s detailed and thorough analysis of the aerial photos of the Jamaat ul-Fuqra compound near Commerce, Georgia.

Larwyn reports that Fox News will be covering Red House tonight. Supposedly an ex-member will be interviewed and will spill the beans about their connections with Sheikh Gilani [see sidebar for all the stories].

Larwyn also says:

BREAKING – MUSLIMS OF AMERICA in Redhouse Va (see Gates of Vienna coverage) A former member admits that they work and send up to 30% of their $$$$ to Pakistan. ON FOX NOW — Catherine Herridge reporting. Check GOV who will be on this fully, I am sure! Oh, members also reported to have traveled to Trinidad!

But Gates of Vienna does not have a TV so anyone watching Brit Hume tonight at 7:00 pm is welcome to give us any information that comes up since we won’t be watching it.

Anybody want to volunteer to do a quick and dirty transcript of the interview? We can put it up then.

It’s so nice that after all these years, and the heckling from the Left, and the County Board of Supervisors’ insistence that these are “good people” that finally the MSM is going after this story.

Somebody kiss Fox for me.

[Nothing further.]

Brian De Palma’s 1974 movie Phantom of the Paradise tells the story of the songwriter Winslow Leach, who sells his soul to a Satanic music producer named Swan. When Winslow attempts suicide in order to escape Swan’s clutches, Swan utters these memorable lines:

What a foolish thing to do. Didn’t you read your contract closely? See where it says “terms of agreement”?

This contract terminates with Swan.

No more suicides. You gave up your right to rest in peace when you signed the contract. But if you do find a loophole, forget it. That stays sealed as long as I have the power to bind you.

Replace “Swan” with “Allah”, and Winslow becomes “Everymuslim”: This contract terminates with Allah.

You can’t leave Islam. Don’t even think about it.

Strangely enough, an increasing number of Muslims do seem to be thinking about it, and some of them are risking their lives in order to translate thought into action. As I have reported previously, individual apostates and groups of ex-Muslims are popping up all over.

There are prominent names like Ibn Warraq and Ali Sina, and groups such as Apostates of Islam, Former Muslims, and the German group Ex-Muslime. New chapters of the latter organization have recently appeared in Sweden and Denmark.

Our Danish correspondent Skjoldungen is actively involved with some of these apostate groups, and he sent us this report earlier today:

Here’s some more on the topic of the elusive “moderate Muslim”. Right now I’m very busy helping the new organisation Ex-Muslime in Germany, Scandinavia, and Britain. They don’t believe in “moderate Muslims”. According to them there are only two types of Muslims: the active ones and the “sleeper” ones.

The Ex-Muslime are atheists and — according to my contact person — are threatened by Muslims everywhere. He and his family are constantly on the move and in hiding. They originally came from Germany, but are establishing a foothold in Sweden and Denmark. Unfortunately, they don’t know very much about our countries, so they need a lot of hand-holding.

However, they claim that thousands and thousands of Muslims are just waiting for an occasion that can motivate them enough to leave Islam.

We’ll see…

Skjoldungen will be on the road in different European countries for the next fortnight or so, but has promised us a more comprehensive report when he returns to Denmark.

And now there’s the latest manifestation of the trend, in Britain this time, and reported in the Grauniad, of all places:

New ex-Muslim group speaks out

– – – – – – – – – –

A new group of secular-minded former Muslims in the UK has urged the government to cut all state funding to religious groups and to stop pandering to political Islam.

The Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain, launched yesterday in London, opposes the interference of religion in public life. Its spokeswoman, Maryam Namazie, said the group provided an alternative voice to the “regressive, parasitical and self-appointed leaders” from organisations such as the Muslim Council of Britain and the “oxymoronic” Islamic Human Rights Commission.

“We want to challenge the Islamic movement,” she said. “It does not surprise me people are afraid to criticise Islam. There has been too much appeasement from the government. There are specific policies and initiatives aimed at Muslims and this approach divides society.”

The council’s manifesto calls for the freedom to criticise all religions and the separation of religion from the state and legal system. Another aim is to break the taboos that come with renouncing Islam.

[…]

The launch of a Central Council of Ex-Muslims in Berlin has inspired similar groups in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland. The British branch has 25 members who are prepared to have their names and photographs published.

These apostates are putting their lives in danger by publicly renouncing their faith, but their increasing numbers indicate that fear is no longer enough to bind them to their barbaric and murderous “religion”.

There’s an old Arab proverb: “A thousand throats can be cut in a single night by a running man.”

But what about ten thousand? Or a hundred thousand?

Even riding the fleetest of camels, it simply isn’t possible.

Regular readers are familiar with Phanarath, our stalwart Viking translator and commenter from Århus. Fjordman’s recent posts have inspired him, and he sent his thoughts along to us. His essay is posted below.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

What are we as human beings ?

We can only ponder and try to get the most from our situation here on Earth. There is a spiritual reality beyond this existence that we cannot fully comprehend as long as we are in these forms that we are in now.

So what can we do?

We can try to be good. We can try to let ourselves grow to include our families, our friends and our fellow human beings.

When I was a child I read something in school that impressed me. It was the philosophy of an Indian — as in Native American — tribe. It said that we as humans start out with an understanding of our selfish needs. Later in life this understanding can grow and we can understand the needs of and feel a oneness with our family, and, as our empathy continues to grow, our tribe, mankind, all life, mother earth, the universe and all existence.

I think that was the most important thing I ever learned in school, and I also think that I learned it by accident. I don’t think I was supposed to learn that the self can grow. I was supposed to learn not to be arrogant about my own culture.

I learned not to be arrogant about my own culture, and I learned it well. For many years I believed everything from other cultures was automatically better then what my own could provide. I lost many important moments with my grandfather, arguing silly things that he didn’t have patience for, nor could he understand how I got them into my head.

I enjoy reading Fjordman’s articles, and how he speculates about how political correctness and Multiculturalism might be connected to or descended from Communism.

But I don’t think that there is a connection, other than the rejection of the self.

It’s like having a monkey running amok in our garden with an axe. If you break the axe and the monkey picks up a saw, it doesn’t mean that the saw is somehow a descendant of the axe. It just means that the monkey will do anything to create more destruction.

The monkey here is the rejection of the self. When the self is rejected, there cannot be empathy for others. Instead of letting the self grow naturally, it has been rejected as evil to begin with, and we are left with a hollow human being without the potential for growth.

It’s a Utopian idea: the selfless people of a dream about a perfect world. It must have somehow been inspired by an idea of very spiritually developed people, but when the primitive newborn self was declared evil, this was soon forgotten. And then all manifestations of the self were seen as evil. Love of self, love of family, love of one’s tribe or race, nationalism and so on.
– – – – – – – – – –
When I talk about “love of one’s race”, I don’t mean the ideological racism that claims that someone is more deserving of privileges then another for no other reason other than race. I mean our natural tendency to cheer for the football team of our hometown, to prefer our own kind, our nation, and in general what we see as our own people. But this would not be acceptable.

Only the fully developed self would be accepted.

But how was anyone to get to the fully developed self when all earlier forms of it were declared evil?

What is a man without a self? Is he a selfless being who only and greatly cares for others, like the Utopians dream he would be?

No. He has a careless hollow existence, only driven by vanity and perversion. There can be no understanding of others where there was never an understanding of self. When the world meets us with hatred for our very being, how can we respond with love?

We can respond with love because we are more that any of us can comprehend. But we might not be able to keep that up if we maintain a school of thought that degrades ourselves and our souls to be something lower then dirt.

Okay, let’s have another round of “you-can’t-make this-stuff-up”:

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said the government may take control of more private farms and food plants to increase production of beef and milk amid shortages.

Chavez asked government and military officials to help expose milk and beef companies that refuse to sell at regulated prices, and said the government will expropriate them, in comments broadcast by state-run Venezolana de Television.

“Where there’s a large land holding, the agricultural revolution is coming,’’ he said. “This is going to require a new attitude from producers.’’

“…a new attitude from producers”? A new attitude as in how far can you bend over and how fast?
– – – – – – – – – –
I hope the successful members of the agricultural sector have their passports in order and some money stashed in foreign banks where Hugo’s arm cannot reach. Anything less means ruin.

The government is promoting socialist farming cooperatives to boost domestic production and secure Venezuela’s food supply, Chavez said. He signed a decree today [June 17th] creating a state cattle- ranching company to help reduce the deficit in milk and beef production.

The government will also create a central planning commission to oversee all government-owned companies, doing away with autonomous management by individual company heads, Chavez said.

The president said yesterday the government will create a national electricity corporation that will take over 14 electricity companies by 2010.

Maybe he stays up at night and reads old collectivist novels translated from the Russian. Or maybe he thinks Mugabe’s ideas were really swell.

Maybe he’s using illegal substances?

Or maybe, just maybe, he’s going to show Fidel how to do it correctly and soon…

…everyone will be starving, just like all the other attempts to collectivize and centralize individual initiative.

Then Venezuelans will be sitting in the dark, humming “Where have all the farmers gone?” — in a minor key and sotto voce, of course.

Sad, sick, stupid, ignorant, megalomaniac… what else can you say about someone so charmlessly immune to the history lessons of the 20th century?

Hat tip to Luigi at LGF (# 140).

Back in March I posted an announcement about an organization called Stop the Islamization of Europe. SIOE is a joint effort put together by SIAD (Stop Islamiseringen Af Danmark) and Akte-Islam, a prominent counterjihad group in Germany. SIOE is organizing a demonstration at the EU Parliament in Brussels on September 11th, 2007, to protest the ongoing Islamization of Europe.

Since the launching of SIOE in March the plans for the demonstration have proceeded apace. Various other groups have joined forces with the two main sponsors, and besides Denmark and Germany, people from Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Sweden, Norway, and Finland are planning to come to Brussels to show their solidarity At least, those are the countries I’m sure about — I assume that the rest of Western Europe is also involved.

SIOE asked me to help with graphics and logos for their efforts, and I was glad to comply. In the process I decided to launch a parallel enterprise, one which fits in with the Brussels demo but which will continue afterwards. I call it the “Counterjihad Calendar Project”, and it will include an iconic image of a notable Western monument for each of the twelve months.

One of the themes of the SIOE rally is “Enough is enough!” With the help of people from the various countries involved, versions of the slogan in nine different European languages were created:

• Enough!
• Så er det nok! (Danish)
• Genug ist genug! (German)
• Nu får det vara nog! (Swedish)
• Basta! (Italian)
• Suffit! (French)
• Genoeg is genoeg! (Dutch)
• ¡Basta ya! (Spanish)
• Ωσ Εδω! (Greek)

Here’s the tentative design for the cover of the calendar (click for a larger image):

Bearing in mind what has happened to Cordoba Cathedral in Spain, Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, and uncountably many Hindu temples in India, I wanted to associate a well-known Western building or monument on each page of the calendar. I’ve finished seven months, and have five more to go.

To give you an idea of what I’m trying to do, here’s January — the French have the honor of going first (click for a larger image):
– – – – – – – – – –

Similar images will be used for eleven other countries. Since our focus at Gates of Vienna is not just on Europe, but on the ongoing Islamization of the entire civilized world, the countries on the calendar will include:

• France
• Germany
• Sweden
• India
• Denmark
• Britain
• The U.S.A.
• Italy
• Greece
• The Netherlands
• Spain
• Australia

Some of the monuments used in the images will be well-known to everyone; others will be familiar mainly to the citizens of the countries involved.

If all goes well, when the last month is ready, I’ll create a wall calendar that will be sold at our Café Press store.

Here’s where I need help from our readers in order to complete the project:

Along with the image for each month, there will be a list of URLs for a number of counterjihad blogs and websites. For example, the list for France would include ¡No Pasaran!, just to name one counterjihad blog off the top of my head.

So each time I unveil another month, I’d like readers to supply me with suggested blogs and websites to go on the list for that country.

Obviously, some of them are already on our blogroll, but there are many more. I’ll harvest the links from our email and the comments, and, depending on the amount of space available at the bottom or on the sides of the month’s image, I’ll make the URLs part of the calendar.

Today we’ll start with France. Just French websites to go with this post, please! The next post in the series will feature a different country.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

A reader wrote to us recently and referred to Gates of Vienna as “an effective propaganda institution.”

And so we are. That is indeed what we aspire to be, if we do our job right.

We are unabashed propagandizers of the Counterjihad. We have to be: the only way a couple of armchair pundits can play any part in this conflict is to help fight the information war.

We generate Islamophobic propaganda. And we’re proud of it.

At last! A politician who gets it and who is willing to enumerate the reasons that CAIR is a blight amongst us. I’m not a single-issue voter – e.g., I plan to look up his views on immigration, taxation, and the bloated size of the Federal government. However:

• I don’t care that he has an amply endowed trophy wife; in fact, it is to his credit to have been engaging enough that she found him attractive.
• I don’t know anything about his stand on abortion and whether or not it aligns with mine, and I don’t care.
• I don’t know anything about what he thinks of affirmative action, and I don’t care.
• Ditto for term limits, his religious faith or lack of it, or what he plans to do about our dreadful “education” system.

The fact that Fred Thompson understands CAIR and questions its comings and goings is enough for me, thank you.

I know, for the moment, that I’d vote for Thompson if the elections were held tomorrow. If someone comes out with an even stronger anti-CAIR statement and keeps hammering it home, well then… I’d have to reconsider.

His wife is going to be hard to beat, though. All by herself, she looks like the anti-Hillary.

From “The Fred Thompson Report“:

Good News about CAIR

I’ve talked before about the Council on American-Islamic Relations — most recently because it filed that lawsuit against Americans who reported suspicious behavior by Muslims on a U.S. Airways flight. Better known just as CAIR, the lobbying group has come under a lot of scrutiny lately for its connections to terror-supporting groups. This time, though, The Washington Times has uncovered some very good news about the group.

For years, CAIR has claimed to represent millions of American Muslims. In fact, they claim to represent more Muslims in America than … there are in America. This has alarmed Americans in general as the group often seems to be more aligned with our enemies than us — which isn’t surprising as it spun off from a group funded by Hamas. As you know, Hamas has been waging a terrorist war against Israel and calls for its total destruction. It also promises to see America destroyed. Nowadays, Hamas is busy murdering its Palestinian political rivals.

– – – – – – – – – –

Even with this history, and CAIR’s conspicuous failure to condemn Hamas by name, it has been treated as if represents Muslim Americans by our own government. The good news is that the financial support CAIR claims to have among American Muslims is a myth. We know this because The Washington Times got hold of the group’s IRS tax records.

CAIR’s dues-paying membership has shrunk 90 percent since 9/11 — from 29,000 in 2000 to only 1,700 last year. CAIR’s annual income from dues plunged from $733,000 to $59,000. Clearly, America’s Muslims are not supporting this group — and I’m happy to hear about it.

Of course, every silver lining seems to have a cloud; and this cloud is that CAIR’s spending is running about $3 million a year. They’ve opened 25 new chapters in major cities across the country even as their dues shrank to a pittance. The question is; who’s funding CAIR?

CAIR’s not saying. The New York Times earlier this year reported that the backing is from “wealthy Persian Gulf governments” including the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Obviously, we have a bigger problem here than the one with CAIR.

Hat tip: bev.

Last night I was a guest on a blog talk radio show hosted by Andrea Shea King, who also keeps a blog called The Radio Patriot. In addition to her podcast (which is on weeknights at 9 p.m. EDT), she has a weekly show every Sunday night at 9 p.m. EDT on WDBO, AM 580, Orlando.

She concentrates on immigration topics, and we had long discussions about the current situation here in the USA, and how the attempt to form the NAU resembles what is happening in Eurabia. Both Europe and the United States face a grand alliance of powerful moneyed interests which aim to destroy national sovereignty on both continents in order to serve transnational ends. Or should we call the end result “post-nationalism”?

Needless to say, I put in a good word for the Danes. I reminded our listeners that although the Europe has the EU, it is still a continent of different countries and different cultures, and Islamization is more advanced in some countries than in others. The Danes are a breed apart, even though they are first cousins to the Swedes.

The podcast of the show should still be available at this link, at least until this evening.

[Nothing follows.]

My post from the other day about immigration, assimilation, and the SPP prompted an email from a woman named Sarah Hoyt. She’s a full-time writer of fantasy and mystery novels, and a hyphenated-American herself, so she has some strong opinions about the misguided and malevolent demagoguery that passes for immigration policy these days.

She gave me permission to post an excerpt from her email. Here’s what she had to say:

The article on assimilation tickled me, as I’m Portuguese born and raised, married an American at 22 and moved here. There weren’t many Portuguese speakers in NC (where we first lived) and no Portuguese TV stations — though I will grant you that I’d learned English in school, both high school and college. On the other hand, I started learning English at fourteen, and no one else in my family speaks it fluently. When I came here I spoke good-for-second-language English, nowhere at the level needed for what I wanted to do. For what I wanted to do see my web site. As you see, I managed it. Without a single class since I came to the states, too. 🙂

If I can do this, when English is my third language, then people who come to the States less prepared should be able to learn English well enough to vote and graduate from high school and use other official channels in English.

In case you wonder, I did do this without most of the editors who bought my work even knowing I was not a native speaker of English. In fact, I outright lied to some of them and blamed my accent on mid-range-hearing loss (which I also happen to have). I didn’t want to win with help. No training wheels. I wanted to “get there” by the same rules as everyone else, otherwise what’s the point? I’m not “there” yet, but I’m further along than I ever hoped to be.

I did it by starting to read in English after my first year of the language — while in Portugal — and by getting American correspondents, so that I could use the language idiomatically. If it had been now, I’d probably have spent a lot of time surfing the web, too. And once I came here, though it would have been easy to continue reading fiction and magazines in Portuguese, I undertook it to do all my reading in English. Much harder and slower, but more productive in the end.

In addition to coming here at 22, I was an exchange student to the States with AFS between 17 and 18, for my senior year in high school (When I met my husband — he was the boy down the street). I don’t think this in any way negates my point — on the contrary. It could be argued that when I came here at 22 I had university-level English (trust me, doesn’t mean as much as you might think, but… it could be argued, anyway) .

However, when I came to the States as a high school senior, I had three years of English, and although I think I had an impressive vocabulary, etc., I was nowhere near being fluent. My first day I went through all my classes without understanding a single word. I went home and cried and was sure I would fail the year. Needless to say, I didn’t.

– – – – – – – – – –

There was no one in Stow, Ohio who spoke Portuguese; my host family was American; calling my parents would be way too expensive, and besides they couldn’t help me with English classes. Back in the dark ages — ‘80-’81 — there were, thank heavens, no “English as a second language” classes.

So, by the end of the year I was on the honors list. 🙂 Still, with all that, after going back to Portugal and college for four years, my English had deteriorated and it had never been at the level of writing professionally, anyway. That I had to earn, step by step.

Most students in my day came over with a very rudimentary handle on English. None of them had help in terms of foreign language assimilation. MOST of them left speaking fluent everyday English. I imagine it’s still the same, except perhaps for Spanish speaking foreign students — horrifying thought. Are those poor people being channeled into ESL classes?

I count and pray in Portuguese. That’s about it. Oh, and I swear in Portuguese. Which means it’s mostly the words my kids know. 🙂

I can attest that even today if I spend a long time speaking/reading in Portuguese it affects my English. I can also attest that, as my sons tell their Hispanic classmates “You have to want to be American, and if you don’t, what are you doing here?”

Not just Europeans have ridiculous red tape on immigration. I have a writer colleague, Dave Freer, who writes for American publishers and who lives in South Africa. For obvious reasons, he is thinking of moving from SA. Though he works mostly for American publishers, he’s not even considering immigrating to the US because it’s almost impossible for him to get here — writing not being a “job” you can import people for.

And though I intended to come to the States one way or another, I’m very glad I chanced to fall in love with an American. I might still be struggling, otherwise (And, yes, I’ve been married for 22 years, so it clearly wasn’t for the citizenship).

I fully agree with the president that more people are a good thing. I simply think we should be importing scientists and technicians and, for that matter, skilled carpenters and craftsmen. Not illiterate laborers who have bought into racist ideologies and ideas of revenge for territories supposedly stolen from them.

I’m all for immigration — I’m also for cutting ridiculous barriers to legal immigration, but not illegal immigration. And I’m not for people intent on taking over our culture and our institutions being allowed in.

The Danish philosopher Yggdrasil has sent us another guest-essay.

Freedom of Speech
by Yggdrasil

Freedom of speech is the essence of democracy.

The reality today is that freedom of speech is threatened in the West, threatened as never before. Politicians are being harassed; people fear for their lives; satirists fight a lonely battle for their cause — and that cause is freedom of speech.

Without freedom of speech democracy does not function. You cannot have one without the other, but its not an easy freedom to protect, since it always provokes — that’s the whole idea with freedom of speech.

Consider what Socrates, one of the first and foremost defenders of democracy, had to say on the topic. The story takes place in Athens around the year 400 BC. The tyrants and the Sophists — the spin doctors of those days, wanted to get rid of Socrates. They wanted to kill him if he didn’t shut up. And here is one of the things he had to say about that:

And now, Athenians, I am not going to argue for my own sake, as you may think, but for yours, that you may not sin against God, or lightly reject his boon by condemning me. For if you kill me you will not easily find another like me, who, if I may use such a ludicrous figure of speech, am a sort of gadfly, given to the state by God; and the state is like a great and noble steed who is tardy in motions owing to his very size, and requires to be stirred to life. I am that gadfly which God has given to the state, and all day long and in all places I am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you. And you will not easily find another like me; I would advise you to spare me. I dare say that you may feel irritated at being suddenly awakened when you are caught napping; and you may think that if you were to strike me dead as Anytus advises, which you easily might, then you would easily sleep for the rest of your life, unless God in his care of you gives you another gadfly.
– – – – – – – – – –
So Socrates is saying that if we stop criticising our society, our democracy will come to a standstill — we have to fight for people’s right to say what they want to, even when we don’t like what they are saying.

It is only when we are ready to criticise ourselves and those around us that we can move our democracy towards a better world.

It seems clear to me that the countries where people are ready to discuss this and that without killing one another are the most happy and dynamic countries. Democracy works!

The arguments against freedom of speech have been: You have to show respect, while using your freedom of speech. And that is indeed a good thing, but one should also think about what respect is.

To me, respect would rather be to listen to other people’s point of views without threatening to kill them. That’s the most important kind of respect in a democratic society: to respect that others have an opinion.

For a brief biography of Yggdrasil, go here.

The noted blogger Fjordman is filing this report via Gates of Vienna.
For a complete Fjordman blogography, see The Fjordman Files. There is also a multi-index listing here.

[The Jihad] has turned the civility of the United States and Europe, into a weapon and turned it against us. It has weaponized niceness, it has weaponized compassion, it has weaponized the fundamental decency of Western Civilization. It has weaponized our desire for peace. It has recognized that our goodness is no match for its savagery, and will continue to exploit that fact until we lose and they win. (…) We have become too civilized to defeat our enemies, perhaps too civilized to survive. The dagger of our decency stabs us in the back.”

                                                                   — American writer Raymond Kraft

Quite a few individuals among the anti-Western crowd hate Christianity passionately. You have to be an imbecile to believe that Christianity and Islam are “almost identical,” meaning “just as bad.” There’s a world of difference between the religious founders and their followers. Yes, it’s true that the Church has at times suppressed dissenters, including scientists. This is common knowledge. But to present Christianity as exclusively anti-science is factually wrong. Christianity’s concept of a rational Creator whose logic could be uncovered and predicted provided a crucial basis for the Scientific Revolution in Europe, although some would claim to also see the hand of Roman engineering skills combined with Greek logic in the Industrial Revolution. Still, even though most of the criticism dished out against Christianity is wrong, that doesn’t mean that no just criticism can be given. Christianity has many great qualities, some of them under-appreciated today, but it does contain some ideas that can be potentially problematic when confronted with Islam.

As one poster on American anti-Jihad blog Little Green Footballs said:

Jesus was persecuted
Jesus was poor
Jesus was a prisoner
Jesus was executed by the state

Therefore:

Those who are persecuted are more Christ-like than those who are not
Those who are poor are more Christ-like than the rich
Those who are incarcerated are Christ-like
Those who are executed are Christ-like

One can easily pick verses out of the Gospels and some of Paul’s letters (namely Galatians) to provide scriptural justification for the second set of assertions.

Here is where the nefarious logic really gets going in these writings: To be persecuted is proof of one’s inherent goodness and sanctity regardless of why or by whom you are being persecuted. Every prisoner is the face of the persecuted Christ; every homeless person is the persecuted Christ.

This love for suffering can potentially make — and has in the past made — Christians into perfect dhimmi material. Muslims inflict suffering upon others, thus following the example of their religious founder, and Christians suffer, thus following the example of their religious founder. Cynically speaking, Islam and Christianity can thus make a perfect yin-yang couple.

Paul Fregosi says in his book Jihad in the West: “Western colonization of nearby Muslim lands lasted 130 years, from the 1830s to the 1960s. Muslim colonization of nearby European lands lasted 1300 years, from the 600s to the mid-1960s. Yet, strangely, it is the Muslims, the Arabs and the Moors to be precise, who are the most bitter about colonialism and the humiliations to which they have been subjected; and it is the Europeans who harbor the shame and the guilt. It should be the other way around.”

But why do we harbor such guilt, whether it is warranted or not? I believe this is somehow related to the Judeo-Christian strand of the West, not the Greco-Roman or Germanic ones. Bad things could be said about Julius Caesar, but suicidal guilt definitely wasn’t his major problem. Slavery has been a fact of life on all continents throughout human history. It was widespread in the Greco-Roman world and was continued for some time by the modern West but was eventually abolished, partly on specifically Christian grounds. Slavery is a dark chapter in our history and shouldn’t be denied, but we’re not the only culture which has done this. In fact, we’re the only civilization which has banned the practice worldwide. So how come we are the only ones who are supposed to feel guilty about it?

As Euripides said: “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” Well, the West is currently stark, raving mad, and sometimes actively hates itself. We feel guilty about past colonial history or slavery, but Muslims have done the same and worse, and never produced any of the great advances for mankind that we have, yet they don’t feel even the slightest guilt over this. One component of Western self-loathing is the idea that we should we be punished for crimes, perceived or real, committed by our ancestors before we were even born. It could be argued that this idea has its roots in the Christian concept of original sin. Christian ethics have proved more durable than Christian beliefs. Even when we have supposedly left the religion behind, we still believe we have to make atonement for the sins of our forefathers, but since we no longer believe that Christ has made that sacrifice for us and washed away our sins, we end up sacrificing ourselves instead. However, I’ve noticed that Jews have elements of this, too, so maybe it’s a Judeo-Christian thing.

Whatever its cause, our guilt complex is skillfully cultivated and exploited by both external and internal enemies. Modern Westerners are told to feel vaguely guilty all the time, frequently without knowing specifically why. Needless to say, this weakens us considerably. According to the blogger Conservative Swede, Christian ethics is more unfettered in modern liberalism than it is in Christianity itself. The West, and Europe in particular, is sometimes labeled as “post-Christian,” but this is only partly true. We have scrapped the Christian religion, but we have still retained some of the moral restraints associated with it, which have been so mired in our cultural DNA that we probably don’t even think about them as Christian anymore. Yet our humanitarian ideas are secular versions of Christian compassion, and it is Christian or post-Christian compassion that compels us to keep feeding and funding the unsustainable birth rates in other cultures, even actively hostile ones.
– – – – – – – – – –
The Italian Renaissance philosopher Machiavelli was more attached to Roman than to Christian culture, and held the view that Christianity was totally unsuited as the basis for any empire. His ideas were echoed by the 18th century English historian Edward Gibbon, who stated in his work The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that the preceding advances of Christianity were responsible for the downfall because it made the Romans too soft. But the eastern half of the Empire, centered around Constantinople, was just as much Christian, and yet survived for another thousand years after the fall of Rome in the West. The collapse of civil society in Western Europe in the 21st century has been preceded by the retreat of Christianity. There is a strange kind of irony in this that might have surprised Mr. Gibbon.

The 20th century Irish author C.S. Lewis, who converted to Christianity following long conversations with good friends such as writer J. R. R. Tolkien, insisted that the “turn the other cheek” idea in no way means that Christians have to be pacifists, and he was probably right. After all, if Christianity had to be a pacifist religion, Islam would have overrun the West a long time ago. There are those who believe that Marxism could only have been produced within the matrix or wider cosmology of Judeo-Christian culture.

The Canadian writer Stephen R. C. Hicks believes that the German philosopher “Hegel’s philosophy is a partly secularized version of Christian cosmology. The Christian history of the world begins with a creation or projection from God, and the world goes through a grand drama of struggle and conflict before ultimately being reunited with God. (…) For God he substitutes the Absolute, which is an impersonal mind or spirit, and it is the Absolute’s development that is the history of the world.”

According to the scholar Keith Windschuttle, “Forty years later, Karl Marx modified Hegel to argue that the underlying force of history was the class struggle which was driving human society to ever higher stages of development, of which the final plane would be Communist society. (…) The Christian theologians like St Augustine who developed the original version knew that it depended on a powerful force to act as the engine of history, in their case God. Hegel and Marx recognised something similar. Though their concepts of reason and class struggle were secular, and generated from within mankind itself, they still functioned as theoretical engines, driving everything along and bringing new stages of history into being.”

I’m not sure this view is correct, but I don’t laugh at the proposition. Marxism does require a linear view of time, where the world moves towards a specific end goal. This is implicit to Judeo-Christian thinking, but alien to, say, Hindu civilization. It is thus plausible to say that Marxism could have been produced in the West, but not in India. I have debated the thesis put forward by Max Weber that Christianity, or at least Protestant Christianity, formed the basis of capitalism, which could explain the hostility many Marxist display towards the religion. However, Socialists are hostile to the traditional culture in non-Western countries as well, because they need to break down the past in order to successfully mold the future. And Christian Socialists do exist. They tend to focus on the radical egalitarianism and the suspicion of wealth that can be found within the Gospels, and view Jesus as a revolutionary hero standing up for the oppressed.

Some Marxists have seen an early Communist society described in the work Utopia from 1516, by the English writer Thomas More. More’s work is open to several interpretations and some has viewed it as satirical, but he does describe a radically egalitarian society where private property doesn’t exist. More was a devout Catholic, and may have been inspired by the communal life of the monastic movement. Of course, if you really want to, you can trace a blueprint for an early Communist Utopia all the way back to Plato and ancient Greece.

It would be more than a little ironic if ideas that may ultimate have been partly derived from a Judeo-Christian or wider, Western cosmology have later been used to harass Christians, but it would hardly be the first time such a thing has happened. Human rights, initially an outgrowth of the Judeo-Christian West, are now used to prevent Western nations from upholding their borders and from retaining their Judeo-Christian heritage. It is possible to argue that our one-world Utopians are secularized versions of Christian universalism.

This thesis gets strengthened by the statements of Michael Gerson, a speech writer and advisor for U.S. President George W. Bush, in the Washington Post :

The Christian faith teaches that our common humanity is more important than our nationality. That all of us, ultimately, are strangers in this world and brothers to the bone; and all in need of amnesty. This belief does not dictate certain policies in a piece of legislation, but it does forbid rage and national chauvinism. And this is worth a reminder as well.

From two blog posts by Conservative Swede on the subject:

Catholicism — anecdotal conservatism

Today the European Union no longer represents Europe, it represents the European Union and its commission and its many politicians who profit from it. It’s a hungry beast that need to be fed, that needs to grow, so that’s why it consider Turkey being such a juicy steak. Likewise with the Catholic Church. It is already predominantly a Third World organization, and therefore in all aspects already represent those interests. As an open border lobby group for more mass immigration from the Third World. Urging its adherents to do good Christian deeds with regards to the ‘poor’ and ‘vulnerable’ illegal immigrants. All in all, as bad as any other universalist NGOs we know about.

The ‘save the world’ mentality leads to false paths such as global warming activism, open border policies, and providing Third World people with Western money and medicine to facilitate their exponential population explosion. All against the common good for this planet. The ‘saving the world’ mentality leads in the opposite direction from the issues about saving ourselves, such as national sovereignty, law enforcement and civilizational defense. There is no ourselves for the Catholic Church, so it is an impossibility for this organization to do the shift from ‘saving the world’ to ‘saving ourselves.’ Protestantism and Orthodox Christianity are differently politically organized, so they stand a chance.

Catholicism—birth control and birth rates (part II)

I use the concept of European civilization as an umbrella concept for what is generally referred to as the Roman/Greek civilization and the Western civilization. And in spite of how things are today, under the surface we have the many layers of history with us. When I look around I see Roman cultural DNA in so many places. Another reason for using the concept of European civilization is to explicitly include the Orthodox countries.

Conservative Swede’s solution to this is for Europeans to reconnect to our Roman heritage. CS is close to Niccolo Machiavelli with his emphasis on the Roman rather than the Christian aspects of Western culture. I still believe there are good aspects of Christianity that are worth keeping, and I believe people need religion. The Catholic historian Christopher Dawson wrote in his book Progress and Religion in 1929:

It is the religious impulse which supplies the cohesive force which unifies a society and a culture. The great civilizations of the world do not produce the great religions as a kind of cultural by-product; in a very real sense the great religions are the foundations on which the great civilizations rest. A society which has lost its religion becomes sooner or later a society which has lost its culture.

The loss of our traditional religion in Europe has left us prey for all kinds of stupid quasi-religions, threatening heretics with Hell and promising Paradise if we follow them. It can sometimes be useful to think in terms of traditional religions and political religions. Political religions are belief systems based mainly upon faith, a total framework for understanding the world, and have their own set of angels and demons, yet they refuse to recognize themselves as religions and thus claim to be above the scrutiny befitting religions. At least the traditional religions had the benefit of being put to the test over centuries.

Even though Christianity has been highly important in shaping our culture, and should be respected for this, it is not synonymous with Western civilization. Judaism has contributed significantly, too. Moreover, there are many countries that are Christian, but not Western, and the first recognizably Western men, such as Socrates and Aristotle, came from ancient, pre-Christian Greece. We should not discount the impact of the Greco-Roman heritage on European identity nor should we forget the pagan Germanic influences, which frequently tend to be left out. These impulses were important in shaping who we are, and we may well need a touch of Roman ruthlessness and Germanic fighting skills in addition to Christian compassion if we are to survive the challenges that now confront us.

Matt Sanchez is embedded with the troops in Iraq. Via Pajama Media, he observes:

As a media embed in the United States military, a big part of my job is to observe, but as I watched the members of the 96th Transportation Company out of San Antonio, Texas, work tirelessly in preparation for their mission, I got to thinking that something was missing. Something was definitely different between wartime Americans deployed overseas and peacetime Americans hunkered down in the United States. And then it struck me, like the game show contestant who beats his opponents to the buzzer, what was missing from the time I left the United States, only a week before, was the sense of despair, frustration and self-centered complaining.

Someone tell me when the American public went from being the can-doers to the will-whiners?

Well…Westhawk happened to visit this question from another direction when he reviewed an essay by Robert Kaplan in The American Interest. Kaplan calls his essay “Forgetting the Obvious” and it’s one of those analyses that makes you smack your head and wonder why you haven’t been able to articulate these ideas, even though they were there, a kind of “unthought known” as Gagdad Bob would say.

Mr. Kaplan lays out his case for America’s inability to fight what I would call “manly wars.” We castrate our military and then send them out to die…for what, precisely? Here’s Mr. Kaplan’s observation, which explains the whining that Matt Sanchez sees:

Some truths are so obvious that to mention them in polite company seems either pointless or rude. What is left unstated, however, can with time be forgotten. Both of these observations apply today to the American way of war. It is obvious that a military can only fight well on behalf of a society in which it believes, and that a society which believes little is worth fighting for cannot, in the end, field an effective military. Obvious as this is, we seem to have forgotten it.

Then, Mr. Kaplan proposes a way to remember that will make us more effective:

1.		It will permit us to see that the problems with our struggle against radical Islam is a problem in morale.
2.		It will allow some understanding of a festering problem we refuse to acknowledge, much less debate, and that is the poor state of relations between civilians and military in America, which in turn
3.		It will demonstrate why the kinds of war we engage in have become inherently impossible to win (note — he says “difficult” but I think we are long past that stage).

First, of course you start with history, and he brings out Sun Tzu and Clausewitz (to which I would add Colonel John Boyle, USAF). What he notices about them is their presuppositions:

Both Sun-Tzu and Clausewitz believe-in their states, their sovereigns, their homelands. Because they believe, they are willing to fight. This is so clear that they never need to state it, and they never do.

What is obvious, however, is left unstated not because it is insignificant, but because it is too significant: War is a fact of the human social condition neither man wishes were so. Sun-Tzu, concerned with war on the highest strategic level, affirms that the greatest warrior is one who calculates so well that he never needs to fight. Clausewitz, interested more in the operational level, allows that war takes precedence only after other forms of politics have failed. Both oppose militarism, but accept the reality of war, and from that acceptance reason that any policy lacking martial vigor- any policy that fails to communicate a warrior spirit-only makes war more likely. [Emphasis added]

Sun-Tzu and Clausewitz could rise to the level of theory only because they had absorbed practice. So I could only grasp their meaning after living beside junior officers and senior NCOs whose logic, like theirs, flowed from patriotism and personal commitment. Now, patriotism, we have heard, is the last refuge of the scoundrel. It can be that when patriotism is misappropriated by those who have little loyalty to place, and who therefore lack any accountability for their words or their views. It is easy, after all, to be in favor of this or that cause, or against some other ones, if one has no real stake in the outcome. But while some patriots are scoundrels, the vast majority are more trustworthy than those who are not, precisely because they do accept a stake in outcomes. And they do so most often because patriotism overlaps with what, for lack of a better phrase, is a kind of moral hardiness, by which I mean an attitude of serious engagement concerning right and wrong behavior. I saw this in one American soldier, marine, sailor and airman after another.

Meanwhile back at home, the sneering continues unabated, the fifth column that aids and abets those who would destroy us. The jihadists have created the perfect weapon out of America’s lack of will and the jihadists über will: a machine of destruction made of human body parts, including many brains that are willing, even eager, to annihilate themselves in order to bring about our destruction. That’s some asymmetrical weapon they have created out of all-too-mortal flesh. How do we respond to it without losing our deepest selves in the process?
– – – – – – – – – –
It used to be that our military was expected to hold that place for us, while we at home held their places here intact. But that world is gone, destroyed mainly by the machinations of the elite and the press in the Vietnam slide to dishonor and despair. Dishonor on the part of civilians who failed to hold the places for those men engaged in a long and bitter war, and despair on the part of the military who watched helplessly as the elites turned victory into sour defeat — in the process leaving million of South Vietnamese to their horrific fate.

Kaplan says it boils down to a lack of faith which has resulted in a bitter divide — a chasm — between military and civilians here at home. The warrior class, which still exists like some anachronistic samurai guild, seldom “interfaces” with the elites in their various transnational guises. Military families stick together; they know too well the pain of disengagement that civilians begin to set in motion as soon as they become uncomfortable about the facts of death, destruction, and uncomfortable truths about war’s grim necessities:

Never-say-die faith, accompanied by old-fashioned nationalism, is alive in America. It is a match for the most fanatical suicide bombers anywhere, but with few exceptions, that faith is confined to our finest combat infantry units-and to specific sections of the country and socio-economic strata from which these “warriors” (as they like to call themselves) hail. They are not characteristic of a country in many ways hurtling rapidly in the opposite direction. This is not the 1950s, when Americans felt a certain relief in possessing “the bomb.” Fifty years later, most Americans feel a certain relief in never having to even hear about “the bomb.”

Faith is about struggle, about having confidence precisely when the odds are the worst. Faith is the capacity to believe in what is simultaneously necessary but improbable. That kind of faith is receding in America among a social and economic class increasingly motivated by universal values: caring, for example, about the suffering of famine victims abroad as much as for hurricane victims at home. Universal values are a good in and of themselves, and they are not the opposite of faith. But they should never be confused with it. You may care to the point of tears about suffering humankind without having the will to actually fight (let alone inconvenience yourself) for those concerns. Thus, universal values may pose an existential challenge to national security when accompanied by a loss of faith in one’s own political values and projects.

The loss of a warrior mentality and the rise of universal values seem to be features of all stable, Western-style middle-class democracies. Witness our situation. The Army Reserve is desperate for officers, yet there is little urge among American elites to volunteer.

I would venture that the warrior class in this country is diverted somewhat into the police force and fire brigades. These are jobs requiring valor and extremes of courage. But their numbers are not enough to sustain us against our aggressors. Where are the officers to come from? Many elite schools don’t even permit ROTC components on their campuses, though they are more than glad to take federal monies. In a real world, schools which banned the military should not be eligible for federal aid. But then again, except for a few outstanding examples, our Imperial Congress is made up of people who definitely do not belong to Mr. Kaplan’s warrior class. Far from it: even those charged with military affairs are rude and demanding when they call officers from the Pentagon to appear before their courts to be admonished, blamed, and sarcastically ridiculed.

I grew up in a warrior town during the period of national service. It was simply expected: at some point in your late teens or early twenties, you gave two years to your country and then you went home. The warrior class then was distributive and many men remembered their service if not with fondness, at least with a wry understanding of how much they’d learned and grown in those years. It is seldom I have run across men of that generation who complained about the burden. For the most part, they were glad to have done it — to have it behind them.

That world is gone. Now our warrior class must be drawn from a shrinking population of those who believe in this country and share a common faith that it is worth defending. Those who do not share that faith also often don’t respect the motives or character of those who remain proud of their service to their country.

Mr. Kaplan is right: that is the unbridgeable gap. I do not see a way to build a bridge across this chasm, but unless we do, unless we make welcome room for our returning warriors and give them the respect their faithful service deserves, we will be at the mercy of those countries with plenty of young men to spare — plenteous because they have killed off the girl babies of this cohort who would have become their wives. As Tibet was over run, so will be Taiwan. There will be millions of soldiers to choose military special forces from. And the men will be glad to go, to be able to escape otherwise empty lives, sans wife or children.

But here? Mr. Kaplan notes:

Without a draft or a revitalized Reserve and National Guard that ties the military closer to civilian society, in the decades ahead American troops may become less soldiers, marines, sailors and airmen, and more…in essence a guild in which the profession of combat-arms is passed down from father to son. It is striking how many troops I know whose parents and other relatives had also been in the service, especially among the units whose members face the highest level of personal risk. Contrast this with the fact that, at the 2006 Stanford commencement ceremony, Maj. General Lehnert, whose son was the lone graduating student from a military family, was struck by how many of the other parents had never even met a member of the military before he introduced himself.

The future Baron hung out with the ROTCs at college. He enjoyed their company and it was the only place he could get military history courses. But even his school graduated only a handful this year.

Like orders of nuns and priests, the old military order may be passing. The idea of service to something larger than oneself has certainly passed, and we are the poorer for it. In fact, it may be the death of us.

Our Swedish correspondent LN is following the news about Dahn Pettersson, the notorious criminal politician in Skåne who dared to utter the truth about Kosovar Albanian immigrants and the heroin trade in Sweden.

Here is his translation and condensation of a report in yesterday’s Sydsvenskan:

A local radio broadcast of a meeting between the politician convicted of slander and the chairman of the Albanian Club

Not only Dymphna and the Baron appear on the radio — the convicted slanderer Dahn Pettersson was also lured to appear on a local radio program at 10 o’clock last Saturday morning, together with his party boss Leo Harvigsson and the chairman of the local Albanian Club, Luan Bajra.

Luan Bajra was hoping to get an apology from Mr. Pettersson for having declared that Kosovar Albanians are behind almost all heroin smuggling into Sweden.

According to Dahn Petterson some 10-15 persons have contacted him and expressed a wish to help pay his fines. “The amount is high for a half-time pensioner like me,” said Dahn Pettersson.

The radio broadcast that was intended to be about the conviction in the district court quickly developed into a back-thumping feast between the moderator and call-in listeners about everything that is wrong with “all these foreigners coming into Sweden”.

“Most of those we are importing are criminals,” one listener said.

“We Swedes are naïve,” said another.

– – – – – – – – – –

Then the discussion changed to deal with the difference between refugees and ordinary asylum-seekers. This is a theme that fascinated many.

Somewhat later in the radiocast Luan Bajra got what he had been hankering for: Dahn Pettersson expressed his apology “— to all honest Kosovar Albanians”. However, this apology will not prevent him from appealing the conviction.

How the conviction will influence his role as a politician in the future will be decided at the next party meeting. “Anyone confined to prison will be expelled — but for me it didn’t result in prison…”, Dahn Pettersson said.

I don’t understand the part about Mr. Pettersson being a “half-time pensioner”. Can any of our Swedish readers explain why an elected politician is also a pensioner? Does it mean that he works at another job half-time and draws a part-time government salary as an elected official?

The noted blogger Fjordman is filing this report via Gates of Vienna.
For a complete Fjordman blogography, see The Fjordman Files. There is also a multi-index listing here.

This post is a followup to Fjordman’s report from earlier today.

The photo you just found is from a demonstration against Islamophobia, racism and discrimination in December 2006 in central Stockholm. Helle Klein, then the political editor-in-chief of Sweden’s largest newspaper, is standing in front of a banner which reads “A Sweden for all — Stop the Nazi violence,” warning against Islamophobia in the media. If you pronounce “A Sweden for all” in Swedish, it sounds pretty much like “A Sweden for Allah.” Purely coincidental, of course.

Klein held her speech at Medborgarplatsen, a square in Stockholm with a mosque notorious for its anti-American preaching. According to several Internet sources, Helle Klein is a member of the Christian Social Democrats, an organization with close links to and cooperation with the Muslim Brotherhood. Helle Klein is known for her sympathies with terrorist organization Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. She has even met some of their senior leaders, while warning against the dangers posed by the Christian Zionist Right in the Unites States. She is obsessed with Israel, in a highly negative way. But she doesn’t want to talk about the rapes committed by Muslims in her own country. She wants to talk about Islamophobia.

[Nothing follows.]