FDD

Brigitte Bardow's senseless legal troubles (RWC)

Sad and bizarre end to a story you may have noticed a few weeks ago. 

That beautiful actress from the 1960’s, Brigitte Bardot was convicted this past week of “racial hatred” in a French court.  She is now 73 years old.

The charge:  “insulting Muslims.”

The specifics:  As an animal rights activist she raised hell about some Muslims treatment of animals, called them “dirty” and cruel, and complained publicly in an interview about Islamic immigration into France.  She said she really didn’t like their habit of cutting the throats of sheep during ritual feasts or radical Islam’s cruel treatment of dogs.

Those are her views. Some would agree with them, some would not. That’s what we call Free Speech in America but not in France, where opinions  critical of Islam and other religious groups have been made a crime.

This is the 5th time Ms. Bardot has been charged with speaking her mind after complaints to the French government by organized Muslim groups. She was fined $23,000 and given a suspended prison sentence. The cheese-eating surrender monkeys at the Quai D’Orsay should stick what they know, good wine, fine cooking and a lovely language, and leave the oppressive repression to more experienced Fascists.

Interview on the Right Balance on the "Confrontation" and al Qaeda's defeats

Please find an unterview on the Right Balance radio show on the book The Confrontation and al Qaeda's defeats with Greg Allen.  Download right_balance_june_5_2008.asf

Cyclone Fallout (RWC)

The disastrous cyclone Nargis, and the destruction in Burma, or if you prefer, Myanmar, which I don’t prefer, is setting in motion a crisis reaching far beyond the tens of thousands of people who have died or are missing and the hundreds of thousands more who are homeless or threatened by disease. More than one million people are directly affected by the fallout from the storm.

Food shortages and the rising prices of food suggest chaos and hunger around the world.

Burma was supposed to begin exporting its rice harvest this year, counted on by neighboring countries like Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, who now face an increased shortage and the price of rice is expected to sky rocket. It has just about tripled since the beginning of 2008, smashing the budgets of food-aid programs.

The New Lexicon (RWC)

I had an email the other day from my friend Buck Revel, the former top FBI official. 

Buck spent 30 years in the Bureau.  It was a remarkable career.  Among other things he ran all Criminal Investigations, as well as Counter-Terrorism and Counter-Intelligence.

He was furious about a dumb move by the current administration.  It is this:

The US government is quietly dropping the words “jihad” and any reference to “radical Islam” or the word “Islam” in public statements by its officials when they talk about terrorism.  They also do not want the word “liberty”, referring to a social and political condition, used as something the people of a country can aspire to.  They don’t want to offend Muslims.

This Orwellian news originally came from Steve Emerson at the Investigative Project who has backed it up with documents from Homeland Security, the State Department and the National Counterterrorism Center. He sent them to Buck Revel and me and many others.

One of the documents is titled “Words that Work and Words that Don’t –a Guide for Counterterrorism Communication.

Another of the documents, slugged For Official Use Only, is titled “Terminology to Define the Terrorists: Recommendations from American Muslims.”

The Department of Homeland Security refuses to identify the "influential Muslims” and "leading U.S.-based scholars and commentators on Islam" who met with Secretary Michael Chertoff and influenced this new, politically correct and flaccid approach to terrorists and what drives them.

I can tell you what drives the radical Islamists.  It’s no secret. In fact. The terrorists will tell you themselves since now the US government can’t: religion and ideology, although the new official American policy is to pretend otherwise.

So America, says Steve Emerson, after serving for more than two centuries as the sanctuary for huddled masses yearning to breathe free, is being asked to be verbally respectful to fanatics bent on a global religious state.

The memos –a particularly loony one come from Homeland Security’s “Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties,” don’t offer examples to show where Islam and secular democracy have reinforced each other, or explain how Sharia law, the imposition of religion into state affairs, is "fully compatible" with secular democracy, but that is the line they are pushing with the US government. Ridiculous and stupid.

Walid Phares: “The West needs to isolate Jihadism by defining it”

At the Launch of his new book The Confrontation at the European Parliament

Brussels, European Parliament, EFD-FDD, March 12, 2008

At the invitation of European MP Jana Hybaskova, a launching event was organized at the European Parliament for Dr Walid Phares’s new book, The Confrontation: Winning the War against Future Jihad. The breakfast lecture was attended by a number of legislators, including MEP Paulo Casaca, experts at the European institutions, US and Arab diplomats, NGOs representatives and the staff of the European Foundation for Democracy (EFD). Phares, is the Director of the Future Terrorism Project at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington and a visiting scholar with EFD. 

A Reaganite’s Support for Incentivizing Fuel Compeition (CM)

Robert McFarlane, who served as President Reagan’s national security advisor supports the case that Robert Zubrin, Anne Korin, James Woolsey, I and others have been making:

We spend $500 billion each year on our military forces. One of their most vital missions is to protect the flow of Persian Gulf oil which fuels the global economy. The disruption of those oil flows -- such as by terrorists disabling a major Saudi processing terminal -- would bring down economies throughout the industrialized world.

Here again, one can conceive a strategy for neutralizing this threat. It involves moving urgently to introduce a profoundly different national energy policy designed to do the following:

• Provide market-based incentives to justify the essential re-tooling of our  automobile industry to enable it to produce flexible-fuel, plug-in hybrid electric cars and trucks, using carbon composite materials (as Boeing is doing in the new 787 airliner);
• Accelerate the commercial production of cellulosic ethanol, butanol and other bio-fuels; and
• License new nuclear power plants.

He makes many other solid points in this WSJ op-ed.

The Vietnam Syndrome (CM)

Bret Stephens writes:

This is another Vietnam legacy. Beyond the purely pragmatic argument that the war in Southeast Asia was unwinnable, there was also a sense among opponents of the war that defeat would, in some deep way, be balm for America's soul. "For all the anguish felt over the loss of American lives, can we acknowledge there is something proper in the way that hubristic American power has been thwarted?" asked antiwar writer James Carroll in 2006, explicitly making the connection between the wars in Vietnam and Iraq.

Read more.

The Making of a Militant (CM)

Tawfik Hamid writes:

Salafi indoctrination operates through written words and careful coaching. It is enormously seductive. It rapidly changed me into a jihadi. Salafi sacred texts exert a powerful influence on millions of Muslim followers throughout the world, and terrorism is only one symptom of the Salafi disease. Salafi doctrine, which is at the root of the West's confrontation with Islamism, poses an existential threat to us all - including Muslims.

Indeed, Salafism robs young Muslims of their soul, it turns Western communities against them, and it can end in civil war as Muslims attempt to     implement shari'a in their host countries. A peaceful interpretation of Islam is possible, but the Salafi establishment is currently blocking moderate theological reform. The civilized world ought to recognize the immense danger that Salafi Islam poses; it must become informed, courageous and united if it is to protect both a generation of young Muslims and the rest of humanity from the disastrous consequences of this militant ideology.

More here.

Fighting for Human Rights – Against the Human Rights Commissars (CM)

Ezra Levant told the so-called "Human Rights Commission" of Alberta:

When the Western Standard magazine printed the Danish cartoons of Mohammed two years ago, I was the publisher. It was the proudest moment of my public life. I would do it again today. In fact, I did do it again today. …

I am here at this government interrogation under protest. It is my position that the government has no legal or moral authority to interrogate me or anyone else for publishing these words and pictures. That is a violation of my ancient and inalienable freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and in this case, religious freedom and the separation of mosque and state. It is especially perverted that a bureaucracy calling itself the Alberta human rights commission would be the government agency violating my human rights. …

I believe that this commission has no proper authority over me. The commission was meant as a low-level, quasi-judicial body to arbitrate squabbles about housing, employment and other matters, where a complainant felt that their race or sex was the reason they were discriminated against. The commission was meant to deal with deeds, not words or ideas. Now the commission, which is funded by a secular government, from the pockets of taxpayers of all backgrounds, is taking it upon itself to be an enforcer of the views of radical Islam. So much for the separation of mosque and state.

More here.

The Life of Benazir Bhutto (RWC)

Speaking of corruption, as you know, the recently dead Benazir Bhutto, in effect, willed Pakistan to her 19 year old son, or at least she designated him as the leader of her political party, The Pakistan People’s Party. The boy’s name is Bilawal Bhutto Zardari.  A corrupt Pakistani businessman, Asif Ali Zardari, is his father.  I’m surprised he hasn’t yet dropped the Zardari name in favor of Bhutto.  Give the boy time. 

Bilawal held a news conference in London last week. He is a college student there. He defended his mother’s handing her political party to a teenager who hasn’t been in Pakistan since he was a little boy.   

He said, in a moment of deep candor “I admit my experience to date is limited!” Well, Jeez, who would have known?   

The death of Benzir Bhutto brought back a strong memory for me.  I was in Pakistan a few weeks after the al-Qaeda attacks of 9/11.  The U.S. retaliatory ground war against the Taliban - the search for Osama Laden and his running dogs, and then the bombings of the Taliban from the air, began on October 10, 2001. One night I had dinner at the home of a wealthy Pakistani couple, both of whom had held very high posts in their government, in his case one of the very highest,  in the foreign ministry.  I had known them both for years.  The wife was a smart and likeable woman who was a close friend of Benazir Bhutto and had played an important official role in Benazir's Pakistani administration. We talked that night about, among other things, the subjugated role of women in Muslim countries like Pakistan, where religious extremism and politics are intertwined and Muslim fanaticism runs very deep. Our hostess was an outspoken feminist like her friend Benazir Bhutto.   

In that context, I said, I had heard a reliable report that Benazir's husband Asif frequently beat Benazir, punching and kicking her. Do you know about this, I asked, is it true?  And if it is true how can Benazir, an icon to US liberals and feminists, reconcile her husbands behavior and her acceptance of it with her public postures. The diplomat's wife looked pained.