04 September 2014

Self-Indulgent, Western Navel-Gazing During 'Allah's Wrath'



'All we are saying is give peace a chance!'



The other day, I read where yet another Imam has warned people that this will 'invite the wrath of Allah'.  While I was tempted to laugh, I got to thinking more about it,  especially when the news of Steven Sotloff's beheading broke:

It's soooo weird that the guys, who claim that such-and-such will invite the wrath of Allah, are always the ones that show up in his place.  It's strange how that always seems to happen with this crew. /

 It is said that the pen is mightier than the sword, but when the guys wielding the sword are always the ones telling you to put down 'the pen' (do this, do that, you can't say this, you can't draw that), it might behoove society to stop disarming itself of both and speak to the barbarians in a manner that will be understood.

 These thugs aren't saying that something will invite the wrath of Allah.  They are making a threat so that society will acquiesce to their demands.  It's not an issue of free speech because you don't have a right under any law to make threats against another.  At the very least, if civilised people were smart, they'd start locking these people up.  In reality, the sword is what they understand so, maybe, that is the language that should be used to speak to them.

 For all of those, who have called people like me 'Islamophobes' when we have spoken out against Islamism in recent years, the blood of innocents is on your hands.

The West is infected with a virus:  One of unilateral disarmament in the face of a metastasising  threat known as Islamism (although I must say, I am for the first time beginning to move away from the 'Islamism isn't Islam' towards the 'Islam is the problem' camp)...and it is too self-indulgence and preoccupied to realise it.

Remember last week when the MSM was amazed by Sotloff's mum's video to ISIS and claimed that it was 'brilliant'?  It was always idiocy, but after his execution, the extent of the failure of the press and others to grasp the true nature of the problem with which we are faced was left for all to see.

If mum’s video was going to ever work, its recipients had to have compassion, empathy, and basic human understanding. ISIS lacks all of these, which is why its members can behead someone that they have held hostage for months. For even most harden criminals, it becomes more difficult to execute a hostage the longer that they have time to bond with them and see them, even negligibly, as a human being. These fanatics are missing that capability, which just further explains why #hashtag diplomacy, negotiations, economic sanctions, ‘naming and shaming’ will NEVER WORK. 

These people are immune to all of that and only understand one thing: The sword.

Yet, we are constantly told that 'Islam is the Religion of Peace' and Jews and Christians are the really bad guys...especially if they oppose in any way the agenda of the Left.  And, don't even think about attacking multi-kulti  because 'if we embrace them, they will love us.'  Well, except for the fact that multi-kulti is a one-way street.

Don't take my word for it.  Let's look at what is being said in one of Obama's favourite countries...

Turkish Minister: “Christianity Is No Longer A Religion,” It’s A Culture That Threatens Islam…

As opposed to Islam, which is a cult that threatens the entire world.

But, Progs will continue to run around screaming about non-existent Christian barbarians ... because, after all, we live in such a diverse and tolerant - albeit bankrupt on so many levels - society that we can afford to spend our time demanding that other people do business with us...because 'equality' or something ... screaming about nail lacquer and 'rape culture' ... because poor, white girls being raped in England or Arab minorities being sold into slavery isn't 'sexy' and, besides, we might jeopardise our standing in the perfunctory PC world ... and whining about the Redskins or where Michael Sam is going to play ball ... because, well, doing something about the actual skinnings alive, beheadings, crucifixions, the torture, maiming, and executions of women and homosexuals, and real life human slaughterhouses in the ME is hard and would require us to actually do something more than complain about 'micro-aggressions', various 'privileges', 'institutionalised' this and that, and abstain from engaging in the overall navel grazing that decaying, decadent and on-the-road-to-destruction societies tend to believe that they can afford to indulge indefinitely.

Sssh!  Don't tell anyone about this...because it might interfere with the snipe hunting search for the Christian bogeymen (and those of you who know me are aware that I write this as an atheist):
 

But, but, but, wedding cakes, football team names, ‘free’ contraception, Twitter feeds, the Kardashians, and ‘fake, but accurate’ hate crimes to teach social justice or something!


UPDATE #1:

Via WeaselZippers.com:


My heart breaks for the family, but they really should do more research before lecturing the Islamic State about how they have Islam all wrong. 

(Reuters) - The family of Steven Sotloff, the second American journalist beheaded by Islamic State militants, said on Wednesday he was “a gentle soul”, and challenged the group’s leader to a debate on the peaceful teachings of the Muslim holy book, the Koran.

The group, which has captured territory in Syria and Iraq, released a video on Tuesday of Sotloff being beheaded. U.S. officials confirmed its authenticity on Wednesday. President Barack Obama vowed to “degrade and destroy” the group.

Barak Barfi, a friend of Sotloff who is serving as family spokesman, began a prepared statement from the family in English, remembering the slain journalist as a fan of American football who enjoyed junk food, the television series “South Park” and talking to his father about golf.

Barfi ended the statement with off-the-cuff remarks in Arabic, saying “Steve died a martyr for the sake of God.”

He then challenged Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to debate Islam, saying, “Woe to you. You said the month of Ramadan is the month of mercy. Where is your mercy?”

“God does not love the aggressor,” added Barfi, who is an Arabic scholar and research fellow at the New America Foundation think tank in Washington.

He went on, “I am ready to debate you with kind preachings. I have no sword in my hand and I am ready for your answer.” 


More people that think they know more about Islam than Islamists.  




UPDATE #2:


'(You want) to argue that this is a ‘threat to civilization itself’. Because 2 guys were killed by some psychopaths?

- verbaluce on September 2, 2014 at 3:42 PM


No, not because 2 Americans were killed by psychopaths.  See below:


'At this point you are playing word games. If invading another country half way around the world is self preservation to you then I guess we can agree to disagree.'

- weedisgood on September 4, 2014 at 11:01 AM

 
Nice strawman you've got there.  Who is calling for an invasion?  If we did, in fact, send troops back into Iraq, it would be with the cooperation of the Baghdad government and the Kurds.  That is NOT an 'invasion'.  An 'invitation' isn't an 'invasion'.

Islamists must be destroyed before they destroy us.  For you and anyone else who doubts that this can or will happen, I have 1,400 white girls in Rotherham for you to speak with and a bunch of evidence from around the world for you to read.

You people think this can all be contained and it is only a regional issue.  Please.  Such thinking is so 10 September 2001.

It is not limited to a region.  If Islamism could be contained within a geographic region, we’d be having a different conversation. It can’t…and, thanks to a lot of people in the West, who have encouraged massive immigration from the ME, northern Africa, and southeast Asia – and, I’m SPECIFICALLY looking at the ‘Rub their noses in diversity’ crew like Mssrs Mandelson, Blair, Miliband, and Balls – it has become ‘a threat to civilisation itself’.

Do not forget that both James Foley and Steven Sotloff were beheaded by a Brit, who has been celebrated by the same people in the UK that cheered the beheading of Lee Rigby, a soldier, on a British street.

Do not forget that Canadians have died fighting for IS and 3 of them were responsible for the kidnapping and torture of 2 American journalists, Theo Curtis and Matt Schrier, in Syria.

Do not forget that 16% of the French population - that's 10.6 million people, for those keeping score at home - support IS.

Do not forget that at least 3 Americans - two of whom attended the same high school in Minnesota - have died fighting for IS.



UPDATE #3: UPDATED

Breaking: Man Arrested After Beheading Woman In London 


Hey, Dems, this is what a real 'war on women' looks like!

 'London is crawling with radical Islamists. Is it crazy to hope that it’s just some crazy lunatic and not an Islamist?'


No...and we still don't know the identity or motive, but 32% of the residents in Islington, a generally poor/working poor area of Londonistan that is home to several council estates, were born outside of the UK and most of them are 'Asians'.

In a way, neither matters.  We've had 2 beheadings in London in the last 15 months, but it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Labour's plan from the 1990s to flood the country with immigrants from the Middle East and Southeast Asia to 'rub the Right's nose in diversity.'


'It is merely a coincidence that the more people that we import from countries that have no problem with beheadings, the more beheadings we have. Seriously. Pinky promise! We must be diverse and tolerant...because multiculturalism.'


When you claim that all cultures are equal and import millions of people, who are immersed in another culture and are unwilling to assimilate, then don't be surprised when that culture infects your own.

Again, thanks sooo much, Mssrs Blair, Mandelson, Miliband, and Balls, among others.

 From the Daily Mail: 

Cmdr Letchford said they were still trying to establish the attacker's motive.

Eyewitnesses had reported seeing a 'madman with a machete' in the area around lunchtime.

Sky News reports that other potential victims fled in a car from the area where the attack took place. 

It is believed they escaped the scene in a Blue Ford Focus car, which reportedly made it only a few hundred yards before it was stopped.

Two 'crying and screaming' young boys were seen being lifted out a window by police from a house where the woman was allegedly beheaded.

Taxi firm manger Kharul Islam, 40, saw the officers being handed two boys aged around three and seven out of the window and then led to safety as they tried to raid the house in Nightingale Road.

They surrounded the front and back door and asked a woman in the house to pass out the weeping children.

He said: 'When the police arrived there was a lot of panic and they were trying to get through the windows on the ground floor.

'They were talking to the family inside. I saw two kids being held out of the window, I think they were boys by a woman. She looked like their mother and was older than the guy arrested.Then the police smashed their way into the house.

'The family looked like they might be from Afghanistan. They were screaming and crying. I saw a police lady holding both of them.

'The mother came out and then they went into the van.'

Cmdr Letchford said the investigation has now been handed over to the Homicide and Major Crime unit. The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) have also been informed after the man was injured during the arrest.

The next door neighbour of the house where the attack took place, who wished not to be named, said: 'I heard lots of screaming and shouting coming from next door.

'Then a guy with a knife was in our back garden. There was a lot of blood on the knife and he was just hacking away at stuff. It's just unbelievable, I'm so shocked.'

Now, from The Telegraph:

Ms Silva, 82, was pronounced dead at the scene. 

One line of inquiry for detectives is now understood to be whether the man had been inspired by recent footage of the Isil beheadings of two US journalists in Syria.  

Locals last night claimed the arrested man had converted to Islam last year.



UPDATE #4:

 
From Ed Driscoll...

In “ISIS’ Theater of Evil and the Thirst for Blood,” Jean Kaufman, aka Neo-Neocon, resuscitates a great decade-old quote from author Lee Harris, which deserves much wider distribution:

For example, Foley’s alleged executioner, Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, was raised in England in a West London home worth nearly two million dollars. In this respect he fits the profile of many if not most of the al Qaeda terrorist leaders, who were brought up in milieus that were hardly primitive. From what we know about ISIS (and al Qaeda and other terrorist groups), a significant portion of their jihadis are quite familiar with the modern world but have purposely cast off their background and its refinements in a process referred to by Lee Harris in his 2004 book Civilization and Its Enemies as “de-civilization” as distinguished from barbarism:
…I propose the word de-civilization, defined as…: “the effort, conscious or unconscious, to become less civilized than you are, either in general or in some special way, and, so far as in you lies, to promote a similar change in others.”

In terms of fantasy ideology, the function of de-civilization is not merely to promote ideas opposed to civilization, but to make men and women into human beings with a totally different set of visceral and emotional responses to atrociousness.

…[W]hile savagery and de-civilization can both produce atrocities, they do so in entirely different ways.

De-civilization is therefore a deliberate process undertaken to serve the purpose of ISIS’s Islamic supremacist ideology. Those who engage in it have systematically and purposefully cast off any reservations about mayhem. They do so in part as a bow to what they see as their glorious, sterner history and laws, and for the purpose of engaging in exactly that behavior which they believe will be most frightening to the west.
But de-civilization needn’t always end in the mass-bloodshed of jihad, of course. Sometimes its impact appears in much more “subtle” forms:

Here, @CeeLoGreen puts the onus on rape victims to prove they were raped, describes women as objects, like a house. pic.twitter.com/IIf8A4vr3C

— Grumpy & Lumpy (@omgLSP) August 31, 2014

I remember the first time I heard Green’s 2010 song “F*** You” (on Electra Records, until recently another fine quality division of Time-Warner-CNN-HBO) and thought, musically, this is the best Motown song I’ve heard in three decades. But lyrically, it’s a reminder of everything that went wrong with pop culture in the last three decades. It reminded me of something I wrote about in 2007 about — stick with me here — the George Clooney / Steven Soderbergh film The Good German: 

The funny thing is, I would bet serious money that the average Hollywood mogul probably has TCM tuned into his rear-projection HDTV screen pretty often. But when he does, he’ll focus on the tiny details, and lose sight of the big picture. He’ll get hooked on Orson Welles’ deep-focus photography, and not his character studies. Or Hitchcock’s rhythmic editing, and not how deftly he handles a story. 

From its poster to its cinematography, what was Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German if not an attempt to mate the brilliant craftsmanship of old Hollywood with the dark cynicism of its current form? As The Good German’s trivia page on the IMDB states, “The film was shot as if it had been made in 1945…The only allowance was the inclusion of nudity, violence and cursing which would have been forbidden by the Production Code”. And yet it’s that Production Code that virtually created classic Hollywood, by giving it rules to operate under–and yes, push against. But pushing against isn’t quite the same as breaking; that would come much later, much to the box office’s chagrin.

Green’s recent admission — or as he attempted to backpedal from it yesterday, “the comments attributed to me on Twitter” — places “F*** You” into sharp perspective.

In his recent review of the James Brown biopic Get On Up, Steve Sailer wrote, “When rehearsing 1967’s repetitious ‘Cold Sweat,’ he tells his crack band to forget all they’ve learned about music: ‘Every instrument a drum.’” Sailer goes on to note, “In the long run, Brown’s narrowing the parameters of black American music has been a cultural disaster: every instrument is not really a drum…By 2014, ‘Happy’ by Pharrell Williams, which would have made a worthy Curtis Mayfield B-side, seems like a monumental accomplishment.” 

Yes, it was quite a shock to hear a song on the radio in 2014 with an actual catchy, singable melody, and one whose chorus wasn’t built around the F-word. 

In 1967, when Brown was at the apex of his experiments with harmonic minimalism and syncopated repetition, his output served as a dramatic contrast to the other pop music of the time. Duke Ellington was still alive. Miles Davis hadn’t yet started his drive down the dead-end cul-de-sac of jazz-rock fusion. Frank Sinatra was still a best-selling artist. Motown was still making complex and sophisticated pop music such as Jimmy Ruffin’s 1966 song “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted.” The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper, with its groundbreaking production and arrangements. All of these examples — Brown’s band, Motown, and The Beatles — relied upon musicians being in a room together and able to play (QED), unlike the music stitched together in the 21st century on a computer, via drum machines, loops, samples, and auto-tuning applications. 

Of course, how much do you need auto-tune, when you’ve jettisoned melody in the first place? 

But it isn’t just pop music that’s been narrowed down to meaninglessness. In his 2008 article on film critic Pauline Kael, who celebrated violence and shlock over the earnest craftsmanship of the last days of Hollywood’s studio system, Robert Fulford of Canada’s National Post wrote: 

It was only in the late stages of her New Yorker career (from which she retired in 1991) that some of her admirers began saying she had sold her point of view too effectively. A year after her death (in 2001) one formerly enthusiastic reader, Paul Schrader, a screenwriter of films such as Raging Bull and Taxi Driver, wrote: “Cultural history has not been kind to Pauline.” 

Kael assumed she was safe to defend the choices of mass audiences because the old standards of taste would always be there. They were, after all, built into the culture. But those standards were swiftly eroding. Schrader argued that she and her admirers won the battle but lost the war. Acceptable taste became mass-audience taste, box-office receipts the ultimate measure of a film’s worth, sometimes the only measure. Traditional, well-written movies without violence or special effects were pushed to the margins. “It was fun watching the applecart being upset,” Schrader said, “but now where do we go for apples?” 

Which is a question that applies to an increasingly freeze-dried popular culture far beyond the movie industry. 

Thirty-five years ago in the The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom described the postwar American absorption of Weimar culture as a “peculiarly American way digesting Continental despair. It is nihilism with a happy ending.” But it is nihilism. No wonder many seek to find some way to make sense of it all. 

Which brings us back to where we started; Michael Ledeen asks the question on everyone’s mind these days, “Why Do They Join the Jihad?” But unlike those in old media, Michael has an answer: “Because it gives meaning to life, that’s why:” 

It’s a commonplace to anyone who’s studied the rise of fascism, of which Islamofascism is the most recent variety.  The main problem with democratic capitalism is that it’s so successful, and therefore very boring.  A generation or two of European intellectuals bemoaned the great triumph of science and industry, which they portrayed as relentlessly stifling the human soul, burying us under a hill of material things. 

The Germans produced the most moving such literature — think Nietzsche, think Hesse, not accidentally the cult hero of the American revolt against materialism in the 1960s — and, seeking for paths to spiritual fulfillment they often wandered off into Eastern mysticism.  (Californians dd, too, and sometimes still do, but that’s not fascism.  It’s Hollywood spirituality). 

No wonder, when Suge Night and other “gangsta” [sic] rappers want to live out the gun battles of The Godfather and other Hollywood gangster movies in real life, Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary chose to join ISIS — if you’re going to exit civilization and play act at being a gangsta rapper in the first place — why not play for real stakes?

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