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David Horowitz’s book A Point in Time is at root an exposé on the nature of Time, that double-edged sword which, by obliterating all in its path, highlights the precious from the superfluous in our lives.

In structure, the book consists of Horowitz’s reflections — from his childhood and father to his deceased daughter and own mortality — not unlike the approach of Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, whom the author quotes at length and has apparently learned much from (and a better instructor can scarcely be found).

But this is not an abstract or theoretical book; Horowitz often begins with the mundane and concludes with the profound.  So chapters starting with anecdotes concerning his pets progressively develop into philosophical reflections.  Nor does Horowitz merely quote the great men; he participates in and synthesizes their thoughts, showing their applicability to modern times.

For instance, the stoic emperor asserts that things outside us “do not touch the soul, for they are external and immovable; our perturbations come only from our opinion of them, which is within” — words to be echoed well over a millennium later by Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “Nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.”  Horowitz simplifies: “You cannot alter the world, so do not make yourself miserable trying.”

Considering that the author has spent a great deal of his career as an activist, his musings — all of which lead to the inevitable conclusion that our lives are but a tiny speck in the spectrum of time, soon to be forgotten — make his reflections especially poignant; for here we have a man whose profession wholly revolves around “making changes” coming to the realization that “[t]his is nature’s way, to come and go.  Let it go.”  He even confesses to wondering whether, “knowing what I do now [i.e., the temporalness of life,] I would have been able to go forward at all.”

To continue reading this article, click here.

Most of the nation is still celebrating the elimination of Osama bin Laden, the monster behind one of the worst days in American history. Some are relieved bin Laden can no longer aid the jihadist cause; others take pleasure in knowing the suffering he caused us has been partially repaid.

But at least one voice is having none of it. At the Huffington Post, “specialist in transformational change” (whatever that means) Dr. Pamela Gerloff writes that celebrating bin Laden’s death is mentally unhealthy and geopolitically dangerous:

“Celebrating” the killing of any member of our species–for example, by chanting USA! USA! and singing The Star Spangled Banner outside the White House or jubilantly demonstrating in the streets–is a violation of human dignity. Regardless of the perceived degree of “good” or “evil” in any of us, we are all, each of us, human. To celebrate the killing of a life, any life, is a failure to honor life’s inherent sanctity.

Plenty of people will argue that Osama Bin Laden did not respect the sanctity of others’ lives. To that I would ask, “What relevance does that have to our own actions?” One aspect of being human is our ability to choose our own behavior; more specifically, our capacity to return good for evil, love for hate, dignity for indignity. While Osama Bin Laden was widely considered to be the personification of evil, he was nonetheless a human being. A more peaceable response to his killing would be to mourn the many tragedies that led up to his violent death and the thousands of violent deaths that occurred in the attempt to eliminate him from the face of the Earth; and to feel compassion for anyone who, because of their role in the military or government, American or otherwise, has had to play a role in killing another. This kind of compassion can be cultivated, as practitioners of many different spiritual traditions will attest […]

It is hard not to think that some of the impulse to celebrate “justice being done” may also contain a certain pleasure in revenge–not just “closure” but “getting even.” The world is not safer with Osama Bin Laden’s violent demise (threat levels are going up, not down); evil has not been finally removed from the Earth; the War on Terror goes on–so any celebration must be tempered with the sobering fact that much work still needs to be done to establish peace.

There’s a lot to unpack here, most of it awful. But first, for the sake of fairness and decency one fair point must be acknowledged: If we truly recognize the intrinsic worth of all human life, we have to recognize that even the worst among us have souls, warped and polluted though they may be, and be careful not to think casually of any killing—even just and necessary killing, as bin Laden’s death clearly was. Now, I’d be lying if I told you I haven’t found some satisfaction in the confidence that Osama now knows the afterlife isn’t quite what he expected, but I also have to admit those thoughts don’t live up to the standard my Savior has set for me.

So we shouldn’t take pleasure in exacting bloody vengeance, but there is another aspect to the celebration that is entirely appropriate. As I survey the reactions of friends, acquaintances, and pundits, it seems to me bloodlust is not the primary animating force of their celebration. Justice is. People are celebrating the fact that an act of tremendous evil has been punished, ensuring that bin Laden will never again threaten the United States and sending a clear message to our surviving enemies: hurt us, and we’ll find you, no matter where on earth you go, no matter how long it takes. And when we do, you won’t like what comes next.

Celebrating the destruction and punishment of evil is not only a proper impulse in a free society it’s a necessary one. Quite simply, a society that does not strongly embrace and venerate the punishment of evil is a society that is incapable of survival.

Gerloff’s failure to understand this is bad, but it’s not what makes her piece one of the most disgustingly immoral things I’ve read in recent memory. No, that would be the moral equivalence between America and the jihadists who want us dead. “Good” and “evil” are placed in scare quotes. We’re told a better response would be to “feel compassion” for anyone involved in any military or government who “has had to play a role in killing another,” as if a drone strike on a terrorist hideout and detonating yourself in a crowded subway are equally tragic. And then there’s this:

The truth is that “celebrating justice” when one person is killed–as happens regularly in the gang wars of American cities–only incites further desire for revenge, which, from “the other side’s” viewpoint, is usually called “justice.”

Consider this: If a leader in our country were killed in the manner in which Osama Bin Laden was killed, as “justice” for his acts of aggression in the War on Terror–and supporters of that act were shown proudly chanting their country’s name, singing their national anthem, and demonstrating in the streets–Americans would likely feel more sickened than joyful, wouldn’t you think? The impulse to celebrate a death depends on what side you’re on.

It doesn’t matter how little you think of Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, or any American leader. It doesn’t matter how much you disagree with US military operations in Libya, Pakistan, Iraq, or Afghanistan. There is no comparison between any of our leaders or actions and those of al Qaeda, Hamas, or Hezbollah. “The other side” might say their cause is justice and ours is revenge, and some might even believe it. But reality is what it is regardless of “viewpoints.” Those who seek to kill and dominate infidels are the bad guys, and the ones trying to stop them are the good guys.

Period.

If the rest of the country were so foolish as to believe that the key to peace with monsters is quashing the celebration of monsters’ deaths, the ensuing suffering would be staggering. However unhealthy the “psychology of revenge” may be, it pales in comparison to the poison that is the neurosis of moral equivalency.

In a period when we face a fiscal emergency and the threat of Islamist death worshipers, social issues have taken a sideline in our political discourse. To an extent, that makes sense. Our ability to deal with social issues depends first and foremost on our continued existence. Whether homosexuals can obtain a marriage license is a lesser concern than whether we can feed ourselves or keep our throats from being slit.

Even so, social issues remain a prism through which we can discern the priorities of those who would lead us. On Friday, Bill Maher offered a troubling glimpse through that prism on HBO’s Real Time.

New Rule: If you can force a woman to look at a sonogram to see what will happen if she has an abortion, you also have to let her see a crying baby, a bratty five-year-old, and a surly teenager to see what will happen if she doesn’t. And you have to tell her it costs $204,000 to raise it until it turns 18 in 2028, where it will be a slave to the Chinese in a radioactive world with no animals, fish, or plants.

At face value, this is a tasteless joke. However, its underlying sentiment is relevant beyond the issue of abortion.

Consider the principle Maher is expressing. Life is not valuable unto itself, but endowed with value by others. A mother who does not want to bear the burden of raising a child may therefore dispose of it.

This is indicative of the collectivism which defines the Left, and cause for concern about life and death decisions placed in their hands. It is not a huge leap from thinking a child’s worth is defined by their parents to thinking an adult’s worth is defined by the state. Particularly when the state acts as the single-payer for its citizens’ provision, as the Left would have it, each person becomes an expense subject to a cost-benefit analysis.

If it cost $204,000 to raise a child from birth to adulthood, how much more does it cost to sustain them until natural death? If a mother can rightly decide to terminate her child’s life because if its cost, why can’t the state terminate any life for the same reason?

Setting aside the morality of terminating a life on account of its cost, note that the life of another cannot impose cost when it sustains itself. This is why the collectivism of the Left is an ideology of death, and the individualism of classical liberalism is an ideology of life. When each person is responsible for sustaining themselves, they require nothing of others and are free to thrive. When each person is responsible for his neighbor, life becomes a burden for which death is a solution. That solution has been embraced not only at abortion clinics, but by leftist regimes throughout the past century.

It is ironic that producing for yourself and keeping what you earn is considered selfish, while demanding that others provide for you is not. Yet it is the latter which assigns a price to life and advocates for death.

According to the Ministry of the Interior in France, there are 20,000 African polygamous Muslim men living there. These Muslim immigrants know how to work the system. First, they come in with a tourist visa, apply for a residency card, and then go on social welfare.  Even though it is an illegal practice, France will not deport them because of the children involved. And the more children they have, the wealthier they become.  According to the statistics, there are 300,000 people living under such arrangements.  A little math will tell you that this translates into an average of 15 people to a family and French taxpayers are on the hook for them, since they are occupying social housing–an expensive venture.

In Ontario, Canada, a similar thing is happening:  although polygamous marriages are illegal, these Muslims have found a loophole: When they simply marry several wives in another country, the existing arrangements are permitted into Ontario.  A scandalous report came out in the Toronto Sun charging that hundreds of polygamous men are receiving welfare and social benefits for each of their spouses.

There needs to be a public outcry, but because of political correctness–fueled by special interest guard dogs and of course the far Left manipulated media–nothing is done.

Many of these polygamous marriages are not only a drain on taxpayers, but a throwback to the strides made toward women’s equality.  These women exist like sub-humans ruled by Neanderthal men, and preference is always given to those women who give birth to boys.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a brave Somali-born Muslim who became an atheist.  This courageous lady is as despised and hated by Islamists as Salman Rushdie is.  She provided personal tell-alls in her  books Infidel and Nomad, both describing the oppressiveness of living under Islamic rules.  She deals with the polygamy issue as described in a book review:

Ms. Ali’s maternal grandmother supplied her husband with nine children.  But only one of them was male and so her life spiralled into jealousy and bitterness when a new wife came along and quickly produced a trio of boys.

Ms. Ali’s mother was abandoned (along with her three co-wives) by her polygamist husband, and spent her last years alone, hauling wood for camel herders. – National Post

This is the degrading and wretched life Islamists are transporting into the West as hardworking taxpayers continue to fund it at the expense of their own children. It’s a  lucrative deal, particularly for the men.  Some other alarming cases:

• In London, a mother of 8 boasts about her luxurious 3.8 million dollar townhouse funded by British taxpayers.
• In Australia, a Muslim man sets up multiple homes with multiple wives and he’s so pompous and brazen about it, he throws a chair at an investigating news crew.  Click here to see video.

It is mind boggling that there are those still denying the phrase,  ”a clash of cultures.”  Those who practice such backward customs and live off of taxpayers are multiplying exponentially, having no guilt about using our hard earned dollars to support and further their way of life, while detesting us. If we don’t stop them, who will?

Swedish artist Lars Vilks has joined a Facebook group entitled Kill Lars Vilks in order to engage in discussion with his antagonists as part of his ongoing art project to explore the bounds of free speech.

"I have joined the group Kill Lars Vilks," the artist confirmed.

Vilks' notorious sketch of the Muslim prophet Muhammad as a dog was published in 2007, and since then he has lived in threat for his life. He was recently attacked at a lecture in Uppsala and his home was targeted in an arson attack.

Furthermore a woman sits interred in a US jail for allegedly plotting to kill the previously little known Swedish artist.

In response to recent events a group of ex-Muslims arranged a discussion meeting on Monday and invited Vilks to talk about the defence of freedom of expression and to stand up to extremist Islamist violence.

"It doesn't matter if it is right or wrong to draw Muhammad, but he has a right to do so. Others have as much right to protest, but they have to learn that they can not threaten," Karim Shamihammadi, who represents the secular group, said.

The meeting was arranged to take place at Medborgarhuset in central Stockholm just a few hundred metres from the main city mosque.

Vilks was keen to stress that the incident in Uppsala did not involve people representative of the group often generally referred to as "Muslims".

"It is a question of a small clique who should not be given the opportunity to grow," Vilks said.

Despite calling them "a howling mob" the artist has been seeking contact with his enemies and opponents via Facebook, active in groups such as Kill Lars Vilks (Döda Lars Vilks) and We Who Hate Lars Vilks (Vi som hatar Lars Vilks).

"I have joined all of those groups. Many are intransigent, but there are a couple who are ready to discuss," he told the media after the meeting.

Vilks reported that he had been in contact with around a hundred people, even some who had threatened his life.

"There are a surprising number that can be engaged in discussion, they can in some way understand me."...

Good luck with that.

The world is sick again with an old disease for which no cure has ever been found. It tends to go into remission here and there at various times but it invariably reappears, as virulent as ever, developing new strains as the bacillus adapts to the antibiotics of reason, shame or distraction. The disease is called anti-Semitism and it can afflict even those who would seem best prepared to resist it. Few are immune.

It can assume racial forms, the Jew regarded as a quasi-human deformity, as rodent, monkey or untermensch. International jurist Jacques Gautier, who finds it “shameful” that under the dispensation of the Human Rights community it is understood that Arabs will have legal and political rights in Israel while it is accepted that Arab countries can be judenrein, concludes that Jews do not enjoy human rights because they are not reckoned as human. Why extend the norms and principles that presumably govern human behavior and the relations between states to a people and a state tacitly considered as beyond the pale, as not quite “like us”? This is how double standards are implicitly justified. Judaism has also been condemned as a cultural and economic perversion that contorts the structure of society. This is a very old story. Indeed, whatever manifestation it assumes, anti-Semitism has been with us almost as far back as human memory goes. What historian Robert Wistrich has called the world’s longest hatred is also the world’s oldest sickness.

It is, in fact, best construed as a universal epidemic, the emotional and intellectual equivalent of the Black Death that decimated Europe in the fourteenth century. The difference is that those who have contracted this septicemia of the mind do not die, except inwardly. Ironically, their victims are precisely those who do not suffer from the plague that has contaminated its bearers—except, of course, for those apostate Jews who are sick with the same morbid distemper. The list of such despicables would fill the devil’s Rolodex. But they too must eventually succumb to the fury of the demented carriers of the pathology. Unfortunately, the Israeli pharmaceutical firm Teva, one of the world’s largest suppliers of antibiotic medicines, has no psychic or endocrinal equivalent to treat the malady.

In Anti-Semite and Jew, Jean-Paul Sartre argues that anti-Semitism is not an idea but “first of all a passion” that is akin to hysteria. This passion connects schematically with “the idea of the Jew” to which individual Jews are made to conform irrespective of their personal attributes. For Sartre, anti-Semitism is founded in the “fear of the human condition”—of solitude, responsibility for oneself, and the terror of contingency. The Jew is made responsible for the inescapable distress of being human along the entire spectrum from the empirical to the ontological—an excuse for failure, a means of false absolution and a convenient repository of all we are unwilling to acknowledge about ourselves. As such he has been zoned for apartheid, whether metaphysical or social. Sartre concludes that “If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.”

For all his innovative phrasing, Sartre is really playing variations on the grizzled notion of the Jew as scapegoat, derived from Leviticus 16, which is true enough—witness the current U.S. administration’s treatment of Israel which, as historian Moshe Dann suggests, is a species of collective scapegoating to cover its own foreign policy failures. Philosopher René Girard adds a certain twist to the etiology of this recurrent sickness and proposes the concept of “ritual mimesis” or “mimetic victimage,” an ironic conflict-management elucidation of the scapegoat philosophy. In Girard’s thinking, the violence between groups in a given society is resolved by projecting it upon a third party—the Jew—who is then expelled.

In T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form, Anthony Julius suggests an interesting comparison/contrast between Homeric mythology and anti-Semitism. They both “offer explanations intended to make sense of puzzling misfortunes in human life, the one by the intervention of the gods, the other by the intervention of the Jews.” The trouble is that “Jews are not malign Olympians who dispose of humankind by manipulative wizardry.” But tell that to the anti-Semite, who craves an easy explanation for what he does not comprehend in the larger world or cannot resolve in his own circumscribed life. By making the Jew responsible for all he cannot clarify, come to terms with or vanquish, the anti-Semite forfeits both courage and morality. What will he do when the Jew is no longer there? He would be like the parasite that has devoured its host and now faces starvation.

This suggests another definition of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is a form of spiritual parasitism, the always tempting resort of the human leech who feeds his appetite for security, justification and self-acquittal from the life-blood of others—in this case, of course, from the body of the Jewish people. Put less offensively, anti-Semitism is blind ignorance, both of the world and the self. Psychologists like to call this psycho-reflex “projection” or “cathexis,” but these terms don’t even begin to cover the malice inherent in so invidious an emotional investment or to parry what Wistrich in his recent book, A Lethal Obsession, has identified as a “Judeophobic virus.”

Today, anti-Semitism has adopted a new expression, dubbed by Robin Shepherd in A State Beyond The Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel as “neo-anti-Semitism” which is “virulently anti-Israeli”. The Neurozone is gravely compromised, but the syndrome is making significant inroads on this side of the Atlantic as well. While not entirely ridding itself of its racial and socioeconomic baggage, neo-anti-Semitism converges on the Jew-as-Zionist, associated with the state of Israel as the modern embodiment of a discredited colonial enterprise. The purveyors of this claim affect not to be anti-Semitic, but their protestations are not convincing. It looks more like lying by ancillary focus.

The proof resides not only in the fact that Israel is unfairly and disproportionately singled out for opprobrium while flagrant and undoubted human rights offenders are generally given a free pass. It is also evident in the fact that Israel is conceived as no ordinary colonialist power. Israeli Jews are regarded as reviving the pestilence of Nazism, cleansing, or approving of the cleansing, of ethnic populations, aka the Palestinians—which is nothing short of a gross misreading of the historical archive and a wrenching misrepresentation of the present circumstance. For despite the fictions of a perjurious world, there can be no question that the Jewish people enjoy a religious, historical and legal right to their homeland, as Jacques Gautier, who spent twenty years studying the issue of ownership, as attorney and legal specialist Howard Grief in his The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law, and as many others have established beyond the slightest doubt. The effort to deny what is the cadastral address of the Jewish people is a pattern of what Melanie Phillips has called, in her new book of that title, The World Turned Upside Down.

Interestingly, the accusation that Israel is the new SS is the contemporary distortion of the theme of Albert Camus’ The Plague, an obvious allegory of the Nazi invasion of Europe and North Africa. The wrinkle added to this fabric of defamation is that Jews have no right to any kind of power or authority. As Bernard Lewis writes in Semites & Anti-Semites, Jews have no business being anything other than, at best, “a tolerated subject minority.” Therefore, “by appearing as conquerors and rulers the Jews have subverted God’s order in the universe.” This calumny, says Lewis, is both the Muslim and “the fashionable leftist or progressive line.” But it is only a symptom or manifestation of the same old sickness. To paraphrase Stephen Toulmin in Cosmopolis, it is, in effect, “the narrative of a past episode reflected in a more recent mirror.”

And yet the mystery persists. But whatever theory we advance to decrypt what may be largely unfathomable or at least not wholly explicable, one thing is certain. Anti-Semitism is here to stay. Jessica may elope with Lorenzo but she or her children or grandchildren will one day be forced to accept the indelible fact of origins. Anti-Semitism is not a contagion that, like Daniel Defoe’s description in A Journal of the Plague Year of the catastrophe that visited London in the year 1665, will ever be “enervated and its malignity spent.” This is because anti-Semitism is unlike other forms of irrational hatred and operates under a different set of laws, which appear to be immutable.

Indeed, today once again, as we confront a new world-generation of venomous and commissurotomized anti-Semites, we might plausibly conclude that anti-Semitic sentiments and irruptions, in virtue of their millennial repeatability, have become entrenched in human consciousness as a natural inevitability. As I have written before, “It is something that it is perceived in the depths of the psyche to have moved from the dimension of history over into the structure of nature. It is as if anti-Semitism has now become part of our synaptic equipment.”

As a result, the destiny of the Jew is to be eternally unsafe in this world, despite the narcotic of assimilation or the illusion of self-rejection. The time seems invariably to come when the Jew is thrown back on his identity and regarded not as a human being or as an ordinary citizen but as, ab ovo, a Jew. After which, measures are adopted. Of no other people can this be said. And this is why the Jewish people cannot afford the luxury of historical amnesia, self-betrayal or the hallucination of ultimate security, but must remain vigilant, conscious and always prepared for the resurgence of the plague.

Day in and day out, my wife prayed for my health and for my continued presence on this earth. Her brother Joe and his wife Martha, who attended a Catholic church, St. John’s of Vianney, had organized thirty Hispanic men, women and children, including my nieces, to pray for me too. There were others. Every morning these relatives and strangers whispered my name in their intimate conversations with God, and implored him to spare me. I was touched and strengthened by their love and by their answered prayers. I was saved – at least for the moment– and was grateful for that. I would be able to share life with April again, to be with my children and grandchildren, to rise in the morning and greet the sea.

Was God really behind this good fortune? Had he intervened to rescue an agnostic soul as a reward to the believers? Thankful as I was for their concern, I didn’t like to think so. For if He had saved me to answer their prayers then I would also have to hold Him responsible for the others, whose prayers went unheard.

One of the patients who came regularly at my appointed time was a young woman who seemed to be in her twenties. She did not come in from the parking lot where her husband might be waiting for her as my wife did for me. She came in a wheelchair accompanied by a sad woman who appeared to be her mother and who had wheeled her to the radiation clinic from one of the recesses of the vast hospital complex we were in. She had barely begun life, but her eyes had already traveled to a distant space, displaying a vacancy that could have been equally the result of medications or resignation. For her this life had become a waiting room from which there was no exit. I could not help thinking, each time I saw her, of the many lives I had been privileged to live in my span, and those she would not.

I was acutely conscious of the inhabitants of the cancer ward whose prospects were worse than mine. Along with those who loved them they had endured multiple operations, multiple setbacks, years of a crippled existence, and a fate on hold. “Life is a hospital,” the poet Eliot wrote. I could appreciate the metaphorical truth in the image, but it still felt like a violence to the reality that confronted me. Not all life’s hospitals were equal and not all God’s children were saved.

– The End of Time

If you have a favorite Horowitz quote you want to highlight for others then please submit it here. Please include:

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When I think of the proposed mosques at Ground Zero, I think of the above……for starters.

The idea of the Twin Towers towering and overshadowing the icon of Islam is a good way of illustrating that our way of life always has and always will tower above their own.

To those who don’t know, the black box being overshadowed in the above image is called the Kaaba, located in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, and felt by Muslims to be the most sacred site on earth. Ground Zero itself is considered to be “sacred ground” by most Americans, and New Yorkers in particular. Since our elected officials have decided to hold Islam above America in all ways big and small since 9/11, it’s up to the American people to stop the bastards from getting away with yet another attack on New York. Here is Robert Spencer on Why There Should Be No Mosques at Ground Zero.

Which is more likely to elicit an irate Muslim response: 1) public cartoons of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, or 2) public proclamations that Muhammad was a bisexual, sometime transvestite and necrophile, who enjoyed sucking on the tongues of children, commanded a woman to "breastfeed" an adult man, and advised believers to drink his urine for salutary health?

Based on the recent South Park fiasco--where an animated episode depicting Muhammad in a bear suit sparked outrage among various Muslim groups, culminating with the usual death threats--the answer is clear: cartoons, once again, have proven to be the Muslim world's premiere provocateur. Indeed, during a university lecture the other day, Swedish artist Lars Vilks, whose life is in jeopardy due to his depiction of Muhammad as a dog, was violently assaulted to ululations of "Allahu Akbar!" (Islam's primordial war cry).

Yet how can cartoons rouse Muslim ire more than public assertions that Muhammad was a bisexual, a transvestite, a necrofile, et al? First, context:

The evangelical Arabic satellite station, al-Haya (Life TV), regularly takes the Muslim prophet to task, especially on two weekly programs: Hiwar al-Haq (Truth Talk), hosted by Coptic priest Fr. Zakaria Botros, and Su'al Jari' (Daring Question), hosted by ex-Muslim Rashid. Both shows revolve around asking uncomfortable questions about Islam and its founder in an effort to prompt Muslims to reconsider the legitimacy of their faith. (It is on these shows that the aforementioned, unflattering assertions of Muhammad originate; see here and here for English summaries.)

These broadcasts are viewed by millions of Arabic-speaking Muslims around the world. That the satellite station strikes a Muslim nerve is evinced by the fact that it is formally banned in several Muslim nations, including Saudi Arabia, and is regularly condemned by Islam's demagogues on mainstream Arabic media, including al Jazeera.

When the programs first began airing, they certainly caused uproar in the Muslim world. Then, Muslims regularly called in cursing the hosts, promising them death and destruction (both here and in the hereafter). Al-Qaeda reportedly put a $60 million bounty on Fr. Zakaria's head; and the priest is on CAIR's radar. (See the father make his famous "ten demands" of Islam here and explain his mission in this rare English interview.)

Far from being cowed by the daily death threats, however, Life TV and its unrepentant hosts have responded by upping the ante and providing even more anecdotes discrediting Muhammad. Rashid recently examined the theological implications of Muhammad's hatred for the gecko lizard, which the prophet accused of being "an infidel and enemy of the believers." Muslims who kill it in the first strike receive 100 "heavenly-points," whereas those who kill it in two strikes receive only 70. More graphically, Fr. Zakaria recently examined canonical hadiths (authenticated Muslim accounts) that record Islam's first believers eating Muhammad's feces, marinating food in his sweat, drinking the water he gargled and spit out, and smearing his phlegm all over their faces--all to his approval....

Read it all, if you have the stomach!

Love death. This is the improbable instruction that the founder of an Egyptian sect called the Muslim Brotherhood imparted to his followers in the 1920s. A disciple named Mohammed Atta copied this instruction into his journal just before leading the attack on the World Trade Center three days before my biopsy. Was it a coincidence that this dark creed took root in a country of monuments to the human quest for life beyond the grave? The sentence Mohammed Atta actually jotted down was this: “Prepare for holy war and be lovers of death.”

How can one love death? This is a question that is incomprehensible to us unless we are overwhelmed by personal defeats. But it is the enigma at the heart of human history, which is a narrative moved by war between men. For how can men go to war unless they love death, or a cause that is worth more than life itself?

– The End of Time

If you have a favorite Horowitz quote you want to highlight for others then please submit it here. Please include:

1. “Horowitz Quote of the Day” in subject line.
2. A link to where the quote is from. (No need to include this if it’s from a book.)
3. Any remarks you’d like published explaining what value you take from it.
4. Your preferred name and a link to your blog or homepage (if you have one.)

How can we remember the cinema of the 1970s without the drug-induced rants from Dennis Hopper in both Easy Rider and Apocalypse Now? Unfortunately, last year it was revealed that Hopper was battling something just as serious as his previous drug addiction, prostate cancer. Hopper died this morning at the age of 74.

After battling drug addiction as well as playing addict characters, Hopper became one of Hollywood’s go-to guys for villainous roles. Among his memorable “bad guy” credits are films such as Blue Velvet, True Romance, Speed, Waterworld and the first season of the irreplaceable 24.

Hopper was also politically active for most of his life, Businessweek reports:

“Unusual for a countercultural figure, Hopper was a political conservative for much of his life and moved left in his later years. “I was the first person in my family to have been Republican,” he told reporters shortly before the 2008 U.S. presidential election. He said he had supported Republicans George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush but was planning to vote for Democrat Barack Obama.”

Regardless of a left political turn, he did play a role in the conservative film An American Carol in 2008. His characters have long been solidified in the memories of film audiences around the world. Many can agree that Hopper was an underappreciated treasure in Hollywood, he will certainly be missed.

Bill Gates has proclaimed, despite the increasing lack of evidence, that global warming is the single greatest threat to humanity. Apparently, no one has tipped him off that the science of global warming is most definitely not settled. One of the most recent projects coming from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, announced this past week, is a $300,000 grant to “whiten” clouds.

This is the idea, as described by Karl Burkart:

Basically a fleet of ships equipped with screens and vacuums pump up millions of gallons of ocean water and using high-powered water canons, introduce the water some 3,000 feet in the air, where clouds are formed. The added moisture content would increase the thickness of the water vapor, making the clouds whiter and thus more reflective. Of course this, as with all other geoengineering solutions, is not without environmental impacts. No one really knows exactly what happens when humans alter the atmosphere in such a way.

Another opinion from a respected cell and molecular biologist:

This type of experimentation is ludicrous. As a molecular and cell biologist, I continue to be amazed at how delicate a thread on which life is hanging. Our cells operate on the balance between dozens of nonlinear signaling pathways. In English, altering the expression level of a single enzyme or other signaling protein by even a few percent could have exponential effects on a downstream pathway. We have only scratched the surface on our understanding of the fragility of life. Furthermore, our current biological knowledge only deals only with the molecular interactions of life, a grave limitation to our ability to wrap our fingers around the life force. Every molecular bond is associated with a quantum energy field. The configuration of this field undoubtedly plays as much a role in our life force as our molecular configuration, and is the aspect which is most likely to be affected by geothermal tweaking. And yet, we haven’t even begun to characterize it because we don’t even know how to measure it! Finally, the subtle effects of “a little tweaking” on our gene pool may not be obvious for centuries. We need to step back, slow down and deal with the simple things that we can control, like preventing the damage to begin with. The biggest danger to life is man’s foolish assumption that we have the ability to master it.

Previously, in 2009, Gates applied for multiple patents in a plan to cool the ocean waters, thereby controlling hurricanes. Of course, any good progressive knows that hurricanes are greatly increased by global warming, despite scientific evidence to the contrary. Not only is there no evidence that global warming increases hurricanes, but it is doubtful that this would be feasible anyway. Regarding this project, Kerry Emmanuel, an MIT professor in atmospheric sciences, said:

“The key is doing it a little sooner than the storm itself does it and make [the hurricane] weaker than it would have been,” he said. “There are enough experiments to find out whether hurricanes’ natural cooling could steer the storm in a different location, and the answer is no, or it’s a very small chance.”

While Emanuel believes the physics are conceivable, he says the cost of implementing the system shouldn’t outweigh the benefit. “This would only be practical if the amount [of money] you spend doing this would be less than the damage caused by the hurricane,” Emanuel said.

Even Jim Thomas with the progressive ETC Group had this to say:

Bill Gates and his cloud-wrenching cronies have no right to unilaterally change our seas and skies in this way.

Despite much educated opinion against these methods, Gates continues to pour heart, soul and dollars into these manipulative projects. You have to ask why? Could it be the promise of future riches, like the carbon credit scam? From USA Today:

Five U.S. Patent and Trade Office patent applications, made public on July 9, propose slowing hurricanes by pumping cold, deep-ocean water in their paths from barges. If issued, the patents offer 18 years of legal rights to the idea for Gates and co-inventors, including climate scientist Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Caldeira declined to comment on the patents.

Or is it just an incredibly expensive act of faith?

We must abandon scientific method, and act on faith.
–Al Gore

While progressives like Gates display reverence towards Gaia, they seem to have no problem manipulating Gaia when it suits them. Whether the motives are completely innocent, driven by a “green” agenda or the promise of huge profits, it seems clear that this type of atmospheric manipulation disregards the possible effects on us all, and to call it arrogant is surely an understatement.

In February of this year, New York Democrat Anthony Weiner said, from the House floor: “Make no mistake about it. Every single Republican I have ever met in my entire life is a wholly owned subsidiary of the insurance industry.” In March, Weiner launched an assault against “right-wing” media, accusing them of having disseminated “an enormous amount of disinformation” about the recently passed health-care legislation. Now he is accusing talk show host Glenn Beck of misleading his viewers into buying over-priced gold coins from a sponsor. This is the same Anthony Weiner who was once fined $47,000 for election-law violations.

To view the complete Anthony Weiner profile, click here.

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Remember in our most recent video from UCSD when David Horowitz  said to the cleverer-than-thou college communist, “Enough. Enough. It’s boring. You’re boring”? That sentiment keeps repeating in my head these days.

Socialist journalist Chris Hedges writing at New Left Marxist Robert Scheer’s online magazine Truth Dig:

The oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, estimated to be perhaps as much as 100,000 barrels a day, is part of our foolish death march. It is one more blow delivered by the corporate state, the trade of life for gold. But this time collapse, when it comes, will not be confined to the geography of a decayed civilization. It will be global.

Those who carry out this global genocide—men like BP’s Chief Executive Tony Hayward, who assures us that “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume’’—are, to steal a line from Ward Churchill, “little Eichmanns.” They serve Thanatos, the forces of death, the dark instinct Sigmund Freud identified within human beings that propels us to annihilate all living things, including ourselves. These deformed individuals lack the capacity for empathy. They are at once banal and dangerous. They possess the peculiar ability to organize vast, destructive bureaucracies and yet remain blind to the ramifications. The death they dispense, whether in the pollutants and carcinogens that have made cancer an epidemic, the dead zone rapidly being created in the Gulf of Mexico, the melting polar ice caps or the deaths last year of 45,000 Americans who could not afford proper medical care, is part of the cold and rational exchange of life for money.

I’ve confronted many of my “progressive” friends with the video of Jumanah “Genocide Girl” Albahri and the Palestinian Nazi assault to destroy Israel that it represents. The answer I get back from them is some variant of: well this is bad but there are plenty of extremists out there. Then they start talking about abortion clinic bombers, anti-gay cult leader (and registered Democrat) Fred Phelps, and violence in the Old Testament.

Next they start berating me for not focusing more on the “fat cats” on Wall Street and the horrific things that the super rich are allegedly doing to America. I ask them to tell me which books they’ve read on the economic crisis that I need to read too so I can become as enlightened as them. And they have no recommendations because all they’ve actually done is imbibed the articles of neo-communists like Hedges, Scheer, and their MSNBC representatives.

And… I… am… so… bored…

We are defined by who we choose to make our enemies. It’s a simple question that ultimately defines who we are politically: what is the single most dangerous threat today?

To leftists the answer is white collar criminals on Wall Street, corporations who accidentally pollute the planet, and anyone who stands in the way of universal healthcare (in other words, conservatives and Tea Partiers.) These are the Nazis, the “Little Eichmanns.” And what the neo-communist Left and the more moderate, “liberal Left” share is that both fundamentally agree on this point. The only difference is the methods each faction utilizes.

Genuine conservatives committed to the survival of free societies have a different answer to the question: those who are self-confessed Nazis, who display the Swastika, lionize Hitler, and are quite frank in their desire to enslave the world under the yoke of Sharia law.

And my progressive friends — who have not studied history or Islam since they’re so busy chronicling the excesses of capitalism — will then ask why.

And I’ll answer by conceding a point to them: the West certainly is like ancient Rome. If you want to call us an “empire,” fine. But remember why the Roman empire actually fell, who was responsible for it, and what Western civilization endured as a result. Barbarian hordes — who were far less advanced — sacked Rome and plunged Europe into centuries of darkness.

If we are Rome then Islamofascism is the barbarian at the gate. And just because we are more advanced technologically it’s no reason to think we are invincible. History clearly demonstrates otherwise. Brains will not save us. As the great Howard Bloom wrote in his must-read first book The Lucifer Principle,

Never forget the pecking order’s surprises. Today’s superpower is tomorrow’s conquered state. Yesterday’s overlooked mob is often the ruler of tomorrow. Never underestimate the third world. Never be complacent about barbarians.

You might think that being a Supreme Court justice would be the top of the line job for someone in the legal profession. But, many Supreme Court decisions suggest that too many justices are not satisfied with their role, and seek more sweeping powers as supreme policy-makers, grand second-guessers or philosopher-kings.

The latest example of this is the recent Supreme Court decision in the case of Graham versus Florida. The issue was whether the Constitution permitted a state to impose a sentence of life without the possibility of parole when the criminal was a youthful offender. The Supreme Court voted 6 to 3 that this was a violation of the Constitution.

If your copy of the Constitution doesn’t say anything about youthful offenders, do not worry that you have a defective copy. There is no such statement in the Constitution. What the justices cited as the alleged basis for their decision was the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishments.”

Since 37 out of the 50 states permit sentences of life without the possibility of parole, such a sentence is not unusual. How about cruel? If it is cruel, then why is it OK to impose that sentence on people who are not youthful?

The case of Graham versus Florida involved a 16-year-old repeat offender, who was convicted of a home invasion robbery while on probation from a previous felony. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. The Supreme Court then over-ruled that decision.

The role of an appellate court is not to simply second-guess the decision of the trial judge and jury, much less usurp the responsibility of legislatures to make social policy. But the pretense of applying the Constitution gives appellate judges the power to do both.

The bolder justices go further, citing practices in other countries as supporting their decisions that are supposedly based on the Constitution of the United States. If justices can pick and choose which legal principles and practices they will follow, from the many widely varying principles and practices in countries around the world, then they can find a basis for doing just about anything they feel like doing.

This too goes counter to the very basis of American government, as a system in which “We the people” ultimately govern ourselves through representatives of our own choosing and the officials appointed by them.

Once appellate judges are free to base their rulings on what people do in India, Egypt or Germany, Americans are no longer a self-governing people.

As if to add a touch of farce to lighten the tragedy of the dismantling of the Constitution, Supreme Court justices on opposing sides of the case of Graham versus Florida cited statistics seeking to show that there was national consensus for or against life sentences without the possibility of parole.

Appellate courts, including the Supreme Court, are not institutions equipped to make policy judgments like that. Legislatures exist to make policy judgments— and to be voted out of office if these policy judgments turn out to produce results that the electorate do not want. But there are no such corrective mechanisms in place if Supreme Court justices misjudge.

Finally, there is the old, moth-eaten argument cited by Justice John Paul Stevens, that the society is evolving and therefore the interpretation of the Constitution must evolve with it.

Nobody— from the moment that the Constitution was adopted in the 18th century to the present— has ever denied that societies evolve, and that their laws must evolve to meet changing circumstances. But, unless Justice Stevens is either stupid or dishonest, he cannot leap from a need for laws to change to the conclusion that it is judges who must be the ones to make those changes.

Just saying the magic word “change” does not justify judges grabbing the power to make whatever changes they please in the law. There are, after all, two other branches of the federal government, specifically charged with legislative and executive responsibilities and powers, not to mention the Constitutional Amendment process.

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His Web site is www.tsowell.com.

The explosion in the blogosphere about the crowning of a Muslim Miss USA comes at a time when Americans have been tested to the limit, at least for the many patriots who recognize the threats to the American way of life since the declaration of the War on Terror.

Some pressing issues: Questions about Barack Obama’s Muslim sympathies are still unresolved, complicated by his pitiful bowing to American enemies and plans to build a mosque on ground zero, a site of grief and trauma for New Yorkers and fellow empathizers.  So now with the crowning of a Muslim Miss America, it should come as no surprise that questions will be raised.   Rima Fakih has become more than a beauty queen.  She has become the battle ground between those critical of her crown (branded as racists) and politically correct appeasers.

From the moment he took office, Obama’s posture has served to divide America, racially and otherwise:  he took to insulting long-standing American allies while apologizing for America’s sins among the country’s worst enemies.  Obama snubbed British Prime Minister Gordon Brown on a visit to the White House right after he took office.  More recently his deplorable treatment of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has left Israel aghast.  Then there was his reading of the riot act to Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai, and his promise to unveil a detailed strategy on nuclear nonproliferation in the middle of a War on Terror. To top it off, the Obama administration’s support for illegal immigration at the expense of hard-working American citizens and the president bowing to foreign tyrants:

President Obama has disgraced the United States – again. During this week’s nuclear summit in Washington, he bowed when greeting Chinese President Hu Jintao.

The act was not only shocking but revealing. Mr. Obama has come under intense criticism for bowing to leaders in the past – the king of Saudi Arabia, the emperor of Japan. But never before has America’s commander in chief prostrated himself to a foreign tyrant on U.S. soil.

By bowing, Mr. Obama degraded and cheapened the office of the presidency; as commander in chief, he represents every American when meeting with other heads of state. He is supposed to embody the dignity of the Oval Office, reflecting our collective heritage as a self-governing, constitutional republic.

Sadly, the crowning of Rima Fakih as Miss America comes at a bad time and has raised questions among the political Right.  Among them, conservative scholar Daniel Pipes who asserted in his blog that this and five other recent Muslim beauty pageant winners in the West indicate “an odd form of affirmative action.”

For even posing this question, Pipes was branded a racist:

That rate of wins is enough to send Daniel Pipes to the moon. This is a perfect example of how some people are brainwashed to think one person who’s white and female should be a beauty standard, and someone of color like Rima Fakih could only win a contest due to affirmative action. His view is so sick it makes me sick.

And let’s not forget, this not the first time that politics has run rough shod over the Miss USA pageant.  Carrie Prejean—despite the scandal surrounding her that followed—faced a grilling by openly gay blogger Perez Hilton about her conservative views regarding gay marriage.  Did the left come to her rescue?  No, she was then taken to the woodshed.

Keith Lewis, who runs the Miss California competition, tells FOXNews.com that he was “saddened” by Prejean’s statement. Associated Press.

So could it be true that Rima Fakih’s win represented affirmative action in action?  She is undeniably beautiful and the countdown of any beauty pageant is a close one, so who could prove either way?  At least we can still entertain discourse in our superior way of life:  democracy.

There is a win-win to this for all those who support freedom:  Rima Fakih is an icon of a liberated Muslim. She would be brutally murdered under strict Shariah law—yes under those inferior cultures—for not wearing a head covering, let alone baring skin for a swimsuit competition.  Leftists can meditate on that as they contemplate how to berate America — and make excuses for Islamic gender apartheid — the next time around.

(L-R): Robert Spencer, Harvey Kushner, Hamid Mir, 2006

The other day at JW we learned more about Hamid Mir, a prominent figure in Pakistani broadcast journalism. The source was an article in The Daily Times, a Pakistani paper, fittingly titled: "Hamid Mir's terrifying indiscretions."

That article spoke of "a shocking audiotape of a conversation between Hamid Mir - one of the country's top TV anchors - and a man purportedly linked to the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, has revealed that negative information that Mir passed on to the Taliban could have led to the execution of Khalid Khawaja, the retired Air Force official allegedly killed by a group calling themselves the 'Asian Tigers.'"

The article also contains a list of "points of interest in the conversation" - that is, in the taped conversation with Hamid Mir - that need a little fleshing out. For example, it notes Hamid Mir's contempt and hatred for those described as Qadianis - that is, Ahmadis, who on official government forms in Pakistan are not allowed to describe themselves as Muslims. That contempt and hatred is shared by many Pakistanis, but is most pronounced among those who are most fanatically Muslim. And when such people describe the Ahmadis as "Qadianis" and as "kuffar" - that is, as Infidels - they are consigning them, in Muslim Pakistan, to a cruel fate.

It further appears that Hamid Mir, in discussing the Air Force officer Khalid Khawaja who was murdered by the Pakistani Taliban, may have suggested that there was some connection between Khawaja and the Qadianis. It may be that Mir accused Khawaja of having "Qadiani" sympathies, or perhaps suggested that he was related by marriage to "Qadianis" or even that he had been "Qadiani" - that is "Ahmadi" - himself. All of that would make him, in the eyes of many in Pakistan, but certainly in the eyes of the Taliban, to be as an Infidel -- and thus deserving death in the endless war between Islam and All The Rest.

The article also notes Hamid Mir's "nonchalance" about "suicide bombings" of NATO trucks. This "nonchalance" shows, in parvo, what is the more general attitude of Muslims in Pakistan. That includes those in the Pakistani military who are now, for reasons of their own, beginning to turn, very slowly and very reluctantly, and only because their interests are threatened. (The various terrorist groups in North Waziristan are a threat not only to Americans and other Infidels, but to the ruling class of generals and fabulously rich and famously ruthless and cruel landowners - zamindars -- in Pakistan).

And there was a personal story as well behind Hamid Mir's hatred of Khawaja, and willingness to see him killed. Hamid Mir blamed Khawaja for getting him fired from a previous job. But why would Khawaja have done that? Because Khalid Khawaja, an Air Force officer, apparently had been enrolled for some years in the campaign to identify, and possibly to engage in outreach to, the most fanatical Muslims. He knew who was who, and could winnow the Taliban wheat from the Pakistani chaff. Perhaps he understood Hamid Mir better than most, and perhaps even had evidence of Hamid Mir's dealings and sympathies. This might have led to his being discharged because, in Pakistan now, there are powerful forces who have at long last recognized that the Taliban and other, similar groups (so far still finding refuge in North Waziristan) are a threat not only to Infidels (who cares about them?) but to themselves and their interests.

The taped conversations which Hamid Mir, famous television personality, had with others, showing his sympathies, may have been described as and may even have been for some Pakistanis a "revelation." But surely such "revelations" would not have been presented in such a way if some in the Pakistani ruling class that is now eager to preserve itself and its power and privileges from Taliban assault - generals and zamindars who remain resolutely Muslim, that is, permanently anti-Infidel in their deepest attitudes and sympathies - had not out of self-interest decided to start taking down those who openly or secretly supported the Pakistani Taliban. And that included Hamid Mir.

The story, as I noted at the time, was, and remains, both incredible and not at all incredible. It is incredible in the sense that the story of Hamid Mir perfectly encapsulates, beyond anyone's wildest rhetorical dreams, the way in which Muslims are capable of fooling the world, or much of it. For Hamid Mir also came to America four years ago. His mission was to slyly promote the interests of fanatical Muslims by offering up a smooth and plausible façade, something Anglophone Pakistanis have become past masters at doing. And he fooled, it appears, a great many people in the United States when he came on his mission, just as he may have fooled, in a different way, even some fellow Muslims in Pakistan. While they were prepared to indulge him as long as Al Qaeda and other groups consisting of people who took their Islam straight up were waging war on Americans, or Indians, they are no longer prepared to indulge or support or protect or forgive him, because the groups and individuals he has now been linked to have decided to wage war on fellow Muslims, that is, the landowners in feudal Pakistan. And that is not to be tolerated.

The story of Hamid Mir is incredible, yes. But at the same time it is not at all incredible to those who have been coming to this website. We are not surprised, just in the way that Ayaan Hirsi Ali has said that when she heard, late on September 11, 2001, of what had happened that morning, she was both surprised and not at all surprised. She was surprised at the operation itself, but not at all surprised in another sense, for she immediately understood who had done it and why. She had been living with the texts of Islam, and the attitudes of Muslims toward Infidels, all of her life.

When Hamid Mir came to the United States in 2006, no one in Pakistan saw him as anything more than a trusty true-blue Muslim. And in the United States, no one cared to see him as anything other than a plausible, nice guy, one more candidate in the "Moderate Muslim" competition. But he said this, and he said that, and Robert Spencer detected the telltale clues of what gives away the phoniness of various "moderate Muslims."

When Robert grasped what Hamid Mir was about, he said so, thus possibly earning himself, when he was on that panel in 2006, a little distancing scorn from fellow panelists. But for posterity he made the happy choice at the time not to leave it at that, and to forget about that panel and Hamid Mir, but to put up a posting about the man. And it remains there for all to see.

I was surprised, I admit, when so little was made by posters of the Hamid Mir article the other day. It struck me as far more consequential. It had to do, after all, with an example of duplicity, of a Taqiyya-and-Tu-Quoque master who, apparently, plied his trade not only among credulous and unwary Infidels when he came to America, but also among Pakistanis for whom he was simply a television announcer, a good Muslim, but not one to be suspected of complicity in the death of Khalid Khawaja, or of deep terrorist sympathies.

But now let us see - and not merely link to - the original JW article that was posted about Hamid Mir not this month in Pakistan, but the one that was posted by Robert in November 2006:

The America's Truth Forum symposium in Las Vegas ended with a bang on Saturday afternoon, when a Q-and-A featuring most of the participants (some, alas, including Walid Shoebat and Babu Suseelan, had earlier flights to catch) devolved into an exchange between Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir and me about Islam and the Qur'an.

This was because Hamid Mir asserted in his address that the Qur'an did not sanction lying, and that it held a non-Muslim's life to be equal in worth to that of a Muslim's, and that Islamic tolerance was exemplified by the fact that Jewish and Christian women could marry Muslim men without having to convert to Islam.

I responded during the Q and A to point out that Qur'an 3:28 and 16:106 not only sanction deception of unbelievers, but are taken to do so by mainstream Qur'anic commentators such as Ibn Kathir and others, and that mainstream Islamic law does not hold a non-Muslim's life as equal in value to that of a Muslim, and that the fact that a Jewish or Christian man may not marry a Muslim woman without converting to Islam was a manifestation of the Islamic supremacism that was fueling today's jihad activity.

Mir replied by saying he really didn't know much about Islam, and asked, "Why are you pushing me to adopt a more radical form of Islam?" This is, of course, a charge that Dean Esmay and others have made: that by speaking of the way jihadists use the Qur'an and Islamic theology, I am only encouraging them. But whether coming from Mir or Esmay or anyone else, this charge is false, and hides an unwillingness by self-proclaimed moderate Muslims to do what they must do: confront and combat the jihad ideology. Mir, after all, made several assertions about the Qur'an and Islam. If he wasn't prepared to back them up, he shouldn't have made them -- although perhaps he wasn't expecting to be challenged on factual grounds.

And this is the problem. Islamic spokesmen in the West make statements like Mir's to non-Muslims every day, and those non-Muslims are eager to hear them and be reassured about Islam. But I continue to maintain that such reassurance is worthless if these moderates are not able or willing to do battle with the jihadists on theological grounds. If the moderate version of Islam is not convincing to Muslims, it is worthless. And if I can see the holes in it from an Islamic standpoint, so can Muslims. Thus I stand by my statements at the symposium on Saturday afternoon: the jihadists are making recruits among Muslims daily by appealing to the Qur'an and Sunnah. Peaceful Muslims should not ignore or deny this, but should acknowledge the aspects of Islam that are giving rise to violence, and repudiate and fight against them. Otherwise this recruitment will continue unabated.

It is consequently unfortunate that many in the crowd were vociferously supporting Mir throughout this exchange. Evidently even in a crowd of hardcore anti-jihadists there are some who would prefer to believe comforting falsehoods rather than face unpleasant realities.

But then there is Q. I spent a very pleasant Friday afternoon in Las Vegas with my friends Patrick Boylan and Q. Patrick Boylan, you may recall, is a fearless teacher who has made waves at UNLV and elsewhere by speaking the truth. Q is a military man who just returned from Afghanistan, and has also spent considerable time in Iraq. Q is unflappable and unfoolable, and he knows from extensive personal experience what is in the hearts and minds of all too many citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan. Had he heard Hamid Mir's soothing words, he would not have been misled for a single moment: he has seen too much, and knows too much.

Thus I left Las Vegas with a sense of hope, for every day brings more evidence, for people like Q who are willing and able to see it, of what we are really dealing with. May there be many more Q's.

Show both this posting, and the follow-up posting put up the other day about Hamid Mir, to others to whom you are trying to convey an understanding of Muhammad's "war is deception," and what Taqiyya is, and Kitman, and Tu Quoque. Explain to them that there was nothing magical or divinatory about Robert's understanding of Hamid Mir. It was merely that he came to the encounter with a mind that was well-prepared, and behind him long experience dealing with Muslim apologists, and thus well-versed in recognizing all the telltale phrases and evasions and deliberate ambiguities that give away the Muslim apologist, and that allow one to gauge the level of meretriciousness, and level of danger, that such a person - a Hamid Mir - presents. I had thought, the other day, when the piece on Hamid Mir was put up, that there would be many dozens of comments. I regarded that piece as among the most important to appear at this site. I thought that posting, and the previous one about Hamid Mir four years ago, made a perfect little package. I hoped that some would run with the name hamid-mir, and help to use it in such a way that it might be made to enter the language, and hence a wider consciousness, a name that might stand as a representative example of all such Muslim apologists who offer themselves as "moderates" and then later are revealed, through an audiotape, or a videotape, to be quite different. Just like such names as Quisling, Martinet, Guillotin, Elbridge Gerry, have entered, for good and bad, the language.

And you know what? There is still time to do this. You can refer airily to the "hamid-mirs" of this world, and then when asked "Waaah?," you can go into details about him. And if you choose, you can allude to or discuss a great many similar cases.

And that is why, or partly why, I decided to return to the little matter, passed over I thought just a bit too quickly the other day, of The Tale of Hamid Mir.

In the business of mothers dying, fate dealt me a better hand than it did Saul Bellow. My mother lived to a ripe age and was vigorous to the end. When she had her first stroke my children were already adults, and had given me two grandchildren besides. I was well into the cycle of the generations. This prepared me in a way that the young Bellow could not have been for the cold hand of mortality that a parent’s death lays on your heart. When the time arrived for my mother to go, it seemed almost natural that her life should draw to a conclusion. Even though her death was sudden and unannounced, I had time enough to prepare for it, to see the vortex coming.

On the other hand, the months before she died were not unlike the day remembered in Bellow’s story. I, too, let myself go round like a turntable, running about the business of my life while the clock on hers ticked mercilessly away. What else I could have done? Can one focus on death like a watched pot, waiting for it to boil? If we concentrated on our dying with an intensity that never let up, everything in our lives would come to a stop, until our days would seem like the grave itself. So, instead, we don’t pay attention to where we are headed but go round on the turntable and pretend we are standing still.

Here’s a tip. As you go spinning round, turn one eye to the side every now and then. Look over the edge and focus on a fixed object. Find a way to calculate your progress. Otherwise, life will pass you by before you wake up.

My father — may his memory be blessed — was right: Never forget the cells that are dying. Life is not a turntable, and one day the music will stop. 

– The End of Time

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Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks has enraged Islamic supremacists by drawing the cartoon of Muhammad above. There have been multiple attempts on his life, and now this. Swedish language story here (thanks to Fröken Sverige).

Will the West defend the freedom of speech?

Today and yesterday, disconcerted emails were fluttering around the New York pro-Life community regarding an abortion industry exposé which was shut down by the pro-choice rabble in Albany, NY. Several of these emails wound up in my mailbox at the New York State Right to Life office which is located in the city. 

“The pro-aborts ran amok,” our Legislative Director quipped. “The Spectrum Theatre caved.”

The documentary is called “Blood Money” and was made, in part, by a local, independent film-maker. Originally set to premiere May 5th and 6th at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany, the theatre canceled “after receiving phone calls from pro-abortion interests who threatened to protest and disrupt the showing of the film.” This, despite one of the showings already being sold out and demonstrating continuing strong sales. 

Local advocates of the film described the situation as such:

The film contains interviews of whistle-blowing former employees of the abortion industry who expose the deceitful tactics used by the billion dollar Planned Parenthood corporation to increase its profits without regard to ethical practices.  This film has potential to be released nationally based upon its popularity in the Capitol District.

Because the film was shut down, the local film-maker, Roman Jaquez had no choice but to meet disappointed ticket holders outside the theatre to refund their money. 

Nonetheless, enthused pro-lifers decided to hold a prayer vigil outside the theatre during the original show times. They claimed to represent a threefold message:

• [To] support full rights of pre-born human beings.  
• [To show that we] are unhappy about how threats of protests are stifling the free speech rights of Roman, a local independent film maker.  
• [To] support a heroic artist who is standing up to threats by supporters of a billion dollar industry attempting to prevent its former employees from revealing its unethical practices.

Events taking place this week in Albany are truly disturbing for a number of reasons. Foremost, it illustrates the tremendous lengths pro-abortion interests will go to spin every pro-life message into an evil caricature — in this case, something not even worthy of free speech. This is a tactic not about “choice,” of course, but ensuring the societal view toward the pro-life cause as “evil” and “anti-woman” while abortion is “standard” and “uncontroversial.”  

Relatedly, what this incident demonstrates is the concerning trend among leftists to deny legitimate political speech by their opponents; this, despite the fact that their modus operandi is making political points in the most outrageous manner imaginable. Somehow, sending symbolic coat hangers to politicians is an acceptable form of expression, yet a film exposing the realities of the abortion industry is utterly impermissible. What possible sense is there in this?  

Take a look at the trailer below and judge for yourself if the film is unfit for the silver screen. It looks to provide a fascinating account of the unseemly history and practices of the American abortion movement. Such a perspective has generally enjoyed pitiable publicity. With enough support (which you can lend here), the film can go national.